Thank You

It was inevitable, I suppose, that in the garden I should begin, at long last, to ask myself what lay behind all this beauty. When guests were gone and I had the flowers to myself, I was so happy that I wondered why at the same time I was haunted by a sense of emptiness. It was as though I wanted to thank somebody, but had nobody to thank; which is another way of saying that I felt the need for worship. That is, perhaps, the kindliest way in which a man may come to his God. There is an interminable literature on the origins of the religious impulse, but to me it is simpler than that. It is summed up in the image of a man at sundown, watching the crimson flowering of the sky and saying - to somebody - "Thank you".

- Beverly Nichols