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For reasons that are clear, and others that aren't, life makes us want to empty ourselves and be filled up with something we cannot see.

We're sophisticated and busy. We make movies, fly in airplanes, build microscopes. We work, invent, play, mingle, become inspired; we have love affairs, heartbreaks, families and friends. Yet, we suffer from the lurking sensation that something is missing. Americans labor hard and long to fulfill dreams of acquisition, comfort, material success, and then, once a week or more, a full 44 percent of us turn away from all we've amassed and toward something whose existence we take on faith alone.

Americans are religious people. According to U.S. News & World Report, 96 percent of us believe in God. Fifty-four percent attend church at least once a week -- more than in any other industrialized country. And though common wisdom holds that poor nations tend to be more God-fearing than rich ones, the correlation between wealth and religion does not hold true in the U.S.: College-educated Americans are as likely to participate in organized religion as those without a high school diploma; and there's only a one percentage point variation between those who earn less than $10,000 a year and those whose salaries exceed $60,000. American churches may be segregated, their dogmas incompatible, but Americans' eagerness to take a leap of faith is something the vast majority have in common.

And so we keep hearing about religion. This month's presidential election, like nearly every one in recent decades, brought us two candidates determined to win our faithful hearts, and in the process, our votes. Tiptoeing across America's love/hate relationship with the intersection of religion and politics, George W. Bush and Al Gore struggled to paint themselves as among the faithful, without having to offer too many details about what, exactly, that means. And, for the most part, no one asked.

Apparently, abstraction works -- the less precise candidates are about the nature of their faith, the easier it is for us to count them among our own. According to a 1996 Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans think that, despite their religious differences, Jews and Christians share the same basic moral values. So what's the other part that makes up religion? Why do so few people talk about it, and how much does it matter to us?

If religion is the pursuit of God or of some greater meaning beyond our everyday selves, do we ever find what we're looking for?

All over the world, people continue to seek this higher understanding -- God, enlightenment -- through diverse means, including the oldest route to transcendence, monasticism. Christianity -- the faith claimed by 85 percent of Americans -- has its own surviving austerities. Carmelite nuns take vows of prayer, penance, abstinence and seclusion. They renounce ownership, as well as contact with the outside world, and divide their day between prayer and manual labor. Discomfort, the theory goes, forces us to look beyond ourselves and rewards some with enlightenment.

But monastic traditions have long been on the decline. According to a 1997 Los Angeles Times survey, only 3 percent of American nuns are less than 40 years old, and enrollment in seminaries dropped from 45,000 in 1965 to 7,000 in 1990. In some places, Eastern religious traditions -- Buddhism, in particular -- have provided contemplative order for those who might have sought cloistered lives in Catholic institutions 40 years ago, but overall, Americans are turning down whatever offers exist to give up worldly concerns in search of direct experience of their faith.

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