I am going to be graceless. To even a lazy reader, much less an agnostic one, these three questions seem so received as to be meaningless. Why should a magazine devoted to books in Canada farm out its space to the sort of speculation better left to Pamela Wallin Live, broadsheets devoted to the astrological handicapping of greyhound races, or Maclean's? I suppose books on religion are appearing at a clip sufficient to encourage an attempt to understand the new millennium in the jaded terms of spiritual revival. I just don't get the connection.

Revival? Good night, when was the dormant phase? Religion has always surrounded us like climate. "Will the twenty-first century be an age of climatic cycles?" Yes. "What form will these cycles take?" Cold, hot. "Will these cycles be a good thing or not?" Possibly not, if you are a woman in Isfahan. I don't see how an endless cycle of religious revivals can be avoided-any more than it could be avoided in this century and in the century before that, and so on back to the first candle in the wind.

My son has just come downstairs and asked me to check some answers he has written to questions for his Grade 8 Social Studies. He is asked to circle statements that describe a factor that contributed to "the rise of Christianity" and then briefly to elaborate. One he has circled reads: "The old religions of the Roman Empire had lost much of their vitality." His gloss on this? "Some of the different religions disappeared." He must mean those of the pagans, over considerable periods of time. I think Books in Canada has been just as casual in its perspective of religious history.

On to Diana, therefore. No amount of talking about religion or the weather is going to make either go away. Di and Mother T. have already joined Saints Evita and Elvis in the cirrus, the course of religious re-invention continuing undiminished, notwithstanding the gossip of whether a friendship ring from the Pope was actually pinched off Mother Teresa's finger by her slightly pickled ambulance driver. (I read where he later bore it gingerly to temple to plant on Devi's nipple, in hope of some cross-religious support in finding the fees to pay his son's way through photography school.) The Hindu pantheon is nothing if not vast and hospitable to turning bad things into good ones.

If gossip is the defining substance of any religion-not least in the wonderful cadences of the King James Version of What Really Happeneth-we happen to believe it's also a pretty reliable guide to What Shall Happeneth tomorrow. That "a number of outstanding Canadians" will bother to answer the questions asked of them here only serves to show how addicted we all are to succour afforded by gossip of prophetic bent. Whether of generational greed, global shrinkage, or religious revival, commentary often serves as a petition of integrity from temporarily dispirited writers (and editors), grave in their faith that thinking they know what has passed permits them to envision what's to come.

What is religion but organized yearning for the communal comforts of prediction? We have a similar yearning for weather forecasts. Religions and their inevitable cycles are abiding. They are the shadow climates of the world. We put up with them. We tolerate their gods. They are part of nature. They are whimsical and eternal, relentless and fitful. Whether they are beneficial or not depends on where you live, whether you suffer famine or take your honey from blossoms, whether they bring devastation or good crops, bounty or bullets.

Keath Fraser, who lives in Vancouver, is the author of a recent book of short stories, Telling My Love Lies, which we reviewed last September. He won the Chapters/ Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1995, for Popular Anatomy (Porcupine's Quill).