For Marguerite herself — if we take seriously the religious framework within which she lived — faith was not a psychological coping mechanism in the modern therapeutic sense.

It was her understanding of the actual structure of reality.

The God who sustained her, in her world, was as real as the cold and the bears and the gun.

Her relationship to that God was as real as her relationship to the island on which she lived.

The prayers she offered were not exercises in positive thinking but communications with a being who she believed was actively present in her situation.

Understanding this does not require agreeing with her theological framework.