Look closely at the god you rejected. The tyrant accountant in the sky; the tribal chieftain who prefers your nation’s army; the magician who could have stopped the cancer and chose not to, for reasons his spokesmen call mysterious. You weighed that god against the world’s evidence and against your own conscience, and you refused him.

So did every mystic on record. Your atheism and their God-madness begin with the same refusal. The difference is only that they kept digging under the rubble of the idol, and you were told — often by the idol’s own priests — that the rubble was all there ever was. And perhaps it is. Nothing in this chapter can prove otherwise; there is no proof in this country, only looking, and the only laboratory was ever the one behind your eyes. I can tell you just two things with the full weight of the archive: the diggers who kept digging did not find another idol. And the honest atheist is often nearer to them than the comfortable believer: he, at least, is not certain he has God in his pocket.

Because here is the thing about belief, wherever it appears in the record: belief is the relation you have with absent things. You believe in what you cannot check. No one believes in the sun; you stand in it. No one believes in water while swimming. Belief in God always carries that faint scent of its own doubt, the way only a man unsure of his footing keeps stamping the ground. The mystics were not believers. They were swimmers. When the authorities demanded their creed, they said impossible things instead — the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me, said one, and barely escaped; I am the Truth, said another — the same one who forgave the crowd as the stones came — impossible things, because they were not reciting the absent; they were reporting the present.

And what they reported, every one of them, was not far. That was the shock they could never get over: nearer than the jugular vein, says the desert scripture. Closer to me than I am to myself, said the African bishop who had spent half his life running from it. The kingdom is within you and all around you, spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. In you. Nearer than you. Go back to what you found when you looked for what looks — no age, no edge, no feature, never absent, not yours, not many. You stood at the burning bush two chapters ago and heard the only name it gives — I AM — and perhaps you did not notice where you were standing.

God is not watching you. God is the watching.