A reflection from A Month of Sundays.
Is there a watching in the world—a wakefulness—attentive to our thoughts and deeds? All of us, at one time or another, have intuited such intent to some vague presence outside ourselves. The feeling can be provoked—quite readily, in fact—by a landscape (a sylvan setting might provide it, or any spring or fall of water), for there are places that seem alive with apprehensions, as if things gone are still waiting there. Often we can sense such strange advertence to our being in the suspended animation of a fully-moonlit night, or in the eerie surround of profound quiet. Silence can seem so alert. We could assign our sensitivity to mere anxiety, but there are times, I’m certain, when our anxiety is summoned by an unseen audience. In the shadow of its vigilance (whatever its meaning, intention, or intelligence), the very idea of the holy takes root, as the world urges us to repay its watchfulness in kind.