Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the presence of divine influence is profound and unmistakable, evoking deep emotions in humans.
Cormac McCarthy's quote speaks to the idea that divine communication is a powerful force that should not be misinterpreted. When individuals truly experience this connection, it leads to an overwhelming feeling of reverence and emotional release, transforming fear into a passionate yearning for spiritual connection.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the nature of divine presence, this quote can be used to evoke the emotional response of a congregation.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Is this a dagger which I see before me, _x000D_ _x000D_ The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. _x000D_ _x000D_ I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. _x000D_ _x000D_ Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible _x000D_ _x000D_ To feeling as to sight? or art thou but _x000D_ _x000D_ A dagger of the mind, a false creation, _x000D_ _x000D_ Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
In this world, there must be a certain degree of honor just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honor, there will always be some others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.
You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us the by senses and experience.
So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
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