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I’m not sure when it began, but I most often trace the conviction that I was constantly being watched to my very early Sunday school classes. After mass, I would follow the sweeping black robe of the nun along with a troupe of boys into a bare room of the Catholic school adjoining the church. All these rooms were colorless and without any ornament, except for crosses and images of Christ in agony, all the more vivid and startling against those drab walls. The small wooden desks had their metal legs bolted to the floor and chairs were attached in rigid position. The lean, dry nun, a few strands of gray hair sticking out from under her bonnet, commanded us into silence (not that we dared disturb the wooden emptiness of that place). She did this without words but with a metal-edged ruler that came down hard on the table beside her. Its flat-side smack seemed to echo in my six-year-old head. We were all afraid of the ruler, and we watched it, usually gripped in a fist behind the nun’s back as she paced up and down the aisles. Silently she tipped the ruler from side to side across her back with the regularity of a metronome. Without warning, she would swing it around like lightening to strike young knuckles. Infractions could be any deviation from the silent focus on the catechism text that Sister demanded.

So I read that text carefully, never lifting my eyes except to show that I was listening to her explanations or eager to answer a question – though, of course, not too eager. One day I was staring at the catechism page and trying to understand a sentence I had been trained to repeat. We were being prepared for First Communion and to achieve that sacrament would have to answer questions put to us by the Monsignor himself. That was a nerve-racking prospect not so much because of the Monsignor – he was, after all, a benign and garrulous man who was especially gentle with us, the youngest students of his flock. No, it was Sister we feared because she demanded that we answer every question with strict accuracy, promptly, without the slightest hesitation or uncertainty because we were speaking the truths of the Church Eternal to the highest ranking father we would ever meet – until, that is, the bishop would tap our cheeks from his altar throne some years later during the Confirmation ceremony. One of those truths we had to master was contained in the sentence I puzzled over.

“God is everywhere.”

Everywhere? How could that be? I tried hard to imagine this. It was hard because we were also told that the eyes of God were upon us. If He had eyes, He must have some sort of body, even if it was an invisible one. So he couldn’t be like the air – which was the only thing I could think of that was everywhere. Even though the Spirit was said to be like the air, I had the problem of the eyes.

Then suddenly the image came to me. We used to have heavy paperweights consisting of a transparent glass globe on a wooden base. The globe was filled with water and on the bottom there was a layer of white flakes. When the globe was shaken, the flakes would fill the water and move in patterns like the falling snow. You couldn’t take your eyes off the swirling snow, and that was the image I needed. Instead of snow, however, I substituted little Christ-like figurines, like the plaster statuettes of Jesus that were so common. So I envisioned all these diminutive Christs constantly on the move in mysterious patterns. Of course, in reality they must be invisible, but they all had eyes and could thus constantly keep watch on everything, but more particularly on me.

This made complete sense in a six-year-old way. I finally understood how it was that I could be constantly under the eyes of God. Those little pairs of eyes were everywhere, recording my every action and my every sinful thought. God kept careful accounts of my behavior, and every impure thought was noted for the gravity of the sin it represented. It was especially important, then, that I confess these thoughts every week to the priest in the dark confessional and complete my penance carefully, every word of every prayer, and do so with complete sincerity – for those penitential acts were also being noted down. For every sincere repentance, a mark against me in the eternal accounts would be erased, and I would have another chance.

I believe this was the first time I could conceptualize being watched in every moment of my life, though I had long assumed this was the case. Now I knew that it was true because it had all the holiness of Church doctrine behind it. This was simply the condition of life.

Against all reason, I have never lost the conviction that I was being watched, stared at, judged, even when alone in my room writing, as I am now. There is always the extra tension of feeling the presence on me of the eyes of – whoever – neighbors, passersby, audiences refusing to applaud – whoever the moment requires the watchers to be. It is no longer God but people. And I am always playing to these invisible people. It is, of course, that much worse when I am among real folks who are actually looking at me. I always feel their heavy judgment, and I always know that I do not measure up to the expectations I am certain they have.

These days I have much more grown-up explanations for this conviction that I did at the age of six. Now I can say that depression is projecting my sense of worthlessness out into the world and having all those people who look my way confirm the crushing judgment that I can do no right, that I can never measure up. How conveniently the mind works, nimbly playing all the characters on stage at once.

And I have other explanations as well, equally grown-up ones. I’ve written about the eye of the camera focused on me by my mother. That’s powerful watching for a young boy, looking to find his mom’s loving eyes but staring instead into a finely curved lens. I wanted her to see me but not simply to press a mechanical button and then move on to another interesting shot. A boy wonders and knows without thinking – Is Mom watching me now? Will she see a cute or a poignant picture to capture or will she see me? And how will I know what she sees when I look into that ungiving, uninformative face. Clearly, I am not the one her eyes want to see. Even when a young boy, I developed the habit of posing to capture attention, but it was always the camera I got or a cool appraising look.

So – I tell myself without thinking: keep trying to get attention by presenting new faces – just so – look a little more commanding, or a little more humble, look strong, look indifferent in the face of danger, look warm and loving, look happy and content, look wild, look deep. Keep trying a different look, playing a different part . One day all those eyes will open wider and brighten at what they see. One day.

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I’ve found that there is a longing for spiritual closeness just as there is a longing for an emotional bonding to another human being. But it is a form of longing, of human need, that I spent years ignoring. I’ve written here about longings arising from depression and inner devastation, emptiness and loss. Those longings tend to break up relationships, work life, family, but I’ve experienced spiritual longing as a draw toward a sense of closeness to a different dimension of life, a spirituality that is transforming when I can handle it and so remote from credibility when I’m shutting down.

Growing up Catholic, I always had a reverential attitude toward whatever was meant by the holy, the divine. But part of it was too abstract, plunging me into the catechism to learn about what was and what was not true or sinful or permitted. At the other extreme it was too concrete, too wrapped up in the details of ritual, of saints days, of rules, and the comfortable decorativeness of the statuary, stained glass, baroque buildings and beautifully colored vestments. I felt a strange combination of awe at the beauty and intensity of it and annoyance at the authoritarian side that demanded I accept everything without worrying for a moment what it was all about. God was mediated through so many layers that I came to associate the great Being with only two things: the tiny but intense red light in the lantern hanging in the church that symbolized God’s presence and the ever present universal eye that saw all my faults, sins, inadequacies, guilt and shame. That, of course, gave me a rich storehouse of goodies to feed my earliest depression.

After a time, though, my orientation toward things spiritual shifted radically. That happened because of a series of experiences over many years that gave me a greater sense of closeness to the spiritual world than I had imagined possible. There are times when a completely unexpected opening occurs and part of another world slips through, as if we existed side by side with it, ignoring hints of closeness until it reaches out and forces us to see something, really see. Almost always that experience was overwhelming, inexplicable, frightening, thrilling, peaceful – depending on how well prepared I was to deal with it. When I grasped what was going on, set aside fears of going crazy, I was filled with a sense of peace and purpose arising from an awareness that I was part of a vast spiritual reality. Depression, loss, grief – all that disappeared completely. However, as the immediacy of those experiences dimmed in time, I came to experience something new, that longing to be there again, to be reminded that there was a level of life beyond the frustrations and illness I was experiencing. That’s how I came to understand what spiritual longing was all about.

Every religious tradition I’ve tried to understand has defined a life-long discipline about how to approach communion with its spiritual source. Each has also generated amazing descriptions of the ups and downs, the dangers and distortions of attempts to dedicate one’s life to the sacred or enlightenment or vision – however the ultimate experience might be described. These are full of warnings about the potential misuse of seeking a mystical bond for the wrong reasons – to gratify ego, to solve a personal problem, to achieve a kind of “high,” to cultivate magical powers or to fulfill some mundane or even harmful purpose. I know I can’t seek spiritual experience specifically to free myself of depression – it just doesn’t work that way. The practice requires a setting aside of personal issues and a real devotion to seeking God on God’s terms. I have not devoted my life to the disciplined practices that the religious traditions describe.

But everyone prays in one form or another and at some point in life is open to spiritual experience. And that’s what has happened to me. Things happen, as I recently tried to describe, and I find myself in a different world that restores me completely. There is no such thing as depression there, and all the negativity, the mental and physical symptoms disappear for a time after those episodes. But spiritual experience is not so simple as that. Taken seriously, it demands paying close attention to everything that feels intolerable and destructive within, not simply wishing it away or having it taken away in a flash.

One of the remarkable interpreters of spiritual practice from a Catholic perspective is Thomas Merton. I’ve been letting his words about the contemplative life, as he calls it, sink in, become part of who I am. Here is one of his passages getting at the essence of living with a spiritual center to one’s life.

There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the “sacred” attitude and the acceptance of one’s inmost self. The movement of recognition which accepts our own obscure and unknown self produces the sensation of a “numinous” presence within us. This sacred awe is no mere magic illusion, but the real expression of a release of spiritual energy, testifying to our own interior reunion and reconciliation with that which is deepest in us and, through the inner self, with the transcendent and invisible power of God. … The basic and most fundamental problem of the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is within us. We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul. And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control. The sacred attitude is, then, one of reverence, awe, and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of the inmost self. In silence, hope, expectation and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as to an arbitrary and magic power … but as to the stream of reality and of life itself. (The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, pp. 54-55)

Seeking a spiritual path, then, requires acceptance of that “dark self” while sorting out the “good ground of the soul.” That’s not so different from what I feel I’ve been through. In my case, though, I seem to have gotten this backwards. Instead of starting with the goal of seeking God and learning how to deal with inner darkness, I have followed my rigorously secular path of depression until it forced me to confront the larger need for spiritual fulfillment.

Has that happened to you?