The lilies say: Behold how we preach without words of purity. –Christina Rosetti

I just like to say it: Behold! This is a word that commands attention, calls us to reverence. It’s a word of sacred proportions, a soul-shivering word. Behold is a word that should be in everyone’s vocabuary, and it should be used more frequently.

The Lakota Sioux people understood the power of the word behold. Lakota medicine man, Black Elk, writes: The song and the drumming were like this: Behold a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling. Another Lakota, Chief Sitting Bull, writes: Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Both men use the word as a kind of invitation. Father Richard Rohr, Franciscan spiritual guide and writer, shares his insight into this invitation. He recounts how he borrowed a strategy from wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, who suggested that we draw a symbolic line in the sand and expect things on the other side to show themselves as special, invitational, or even a kind of manifestation (Rohr, Just This, 2017). The Lakota clearly expected their world to be special, expected that the sacred would be manifested in the physical. They expected to hear a sacred voice and to see the results of the earth’s and sun’s love. Black Elk’s and Sitting Bull’s words testify to how these expectations were met, time and time again.

Behold is also a word that many associate with the Bible. In the original King James version of the Bible, behold appears a whopping 1,298 times. In today’s King James Bible, however, the word appears only 586 times; in the New Revised Standard version, it’s used 27 times, and not at all in The Message. When the angel appears to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’s birth, the proclamation Fear not! For behold, I bring you news of great joy seems so much more befitting this miracle than Don’t be afraid! I bring you good news. Some contemporary translations just don’t seem to offer the same expectation to imagine and revere. They don’t seem to have much use for beholding.

I fear that many of us may be losing–or have lost–these expectations. I suspect that we don’t wake enough to the day’s invitation to behold. Too often, our expectations are low, very low. We don’t draw a symbolic line in the sand because we can’t imagine that what’s on the other side is any different or more special than the same-old stuff that weights our days. We plow through our lives like work horses, one steady foot in front of the other. I suspect that the invitation to behold may have been drummed out of us.

I can recall working with several groups of elementary students in a creative writing workshop. We often opened our sessions with language warm-ups, and one day, I asked the students to fill-in this blank: Too many _____________ are dancing on the ______________. One of the fifth-graders responded quickly: Too many dancers are dancing on the stage. She looked up at me quickly, hoping for affirmation that she’d gotten the right answer. Contrast this response with one I received from a first grader later in the morning: Too many moons are dancing on the water. This first-grade boy was already an expert at beholding. He talked openly about how he saw this when his family was camping, how the moon just wriggled across the lake. I remember lamenting the fact that by fifth grade, the power of beholding had largely been drummed out of many students. By age 11, they were all about filling in blanks with correct answers.

I admit that I’m a much better beholder now that I’m retired. I have eyes to behold because I have time. A coneflower that’s naturalized along the edge of the timber can make my day. More days than not, I step out of bed and cross the symbolic line in the sand, expecting something special, expecting that what I experience will, as poet Christina Rosetti claims, preach without words of purity. A lone coneflower, a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, a single word from my grandson as it floats across the yard–all are worthy of beholding. Father Rohr suggests that [b]eholding happens when we stop trying to “hold” and allow ourselves to “be held.” I like this a lot. We can–if we will allow it–be held by moments, by sounds and words, by places and things, by the manifestation of the sacred into the profane, the extraordinary into the ordinary.

In “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tinturn Abbey,” poet William Wordsworth writes that [a]ll which we behold is full of blessings. See how the trees frame a perfect opening in my daughter’s magnificent photograph above, how this leafy aperature reveals river and hills. Behold the greens, the golds and distant blues! Behold the vista beyond! In the end, to behold is to be blessed. We would do well to draw our symbolic lines in the sand and expect to be blessed.