Among the books I read that belonged to my maternal grandparents growing up was a book on one of the New England lines of our family, not one that is particularly closely related, but one which has lines going back to the colonial period, to the decade after the Mayflower, and to the area of East Anglia in the sixteenth century. According to an untrue family legend, this particular ancestor had crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower, although more accurately he appears to have done so in 1629 in a less famous but still very old voyage. This would not have been more than one more of many dodgy and dubious family legends except that I watched an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? with Ashley Judd, I think, a few years ago, and she happened to comment on the exact same legend with the exact same person. This struck me as very intriguing, pointing to the fact that family legends are fairly persistent even where documentation can be a challenge, and that fairly early there was strong motivation on the part of people to talk up their own particular history or family history so as to make themselves appear to be more notable than they really were. Even if this is a bad tendency, it is certainly an easy one to understand.

As it happens, in the book that discusses that particular part of my family background there is some information about the coat of arms the family possesses and its obligatory Latin motto: semper vigilante. The Latin is fairly easy to translate, it means “always vigilant.” But understanding the translation is only the first stage in a larger mystery. We cannot forget the matter of context here. Eternal vigilance, as a quality, is not one of unmixed happiness. For example, I have spoken of my own eternal vigilance as being one of the symptoms listed for PTSD, namely hypervigilance, visible and consistent demonstration of a lack of safety, along with behaviors such as monitoring others, elevated heartbeat, and visible and persistent distress in ordinary circumstances. In my own life, eternal vigilance has certainly been present in disastrous ways, ways that have brought more trouble and difficulty into life as a result of my own distress than would already be present, not least because my own vigilance has tended to provoke others into being vigilant regarding me, which has only tended to make situations that were already stressful into ones that were even more stressful.

In fact, as I write this, I need not look back any further than today, as I write this, to be reminded of the difficulties of eternal vigilance. Services today for the Last Day of Unleavened Bread were held in an unfamiliar hall that was, for me, uncomfortably small. Other people considered the room to be intimate, but that is small comfort [1]. For me, at least, I found the place extremely stressful personally, whether it meant feeling circled or whether it meant having other people more closely around me than usual, if not interacting more often, or whether it meant having to guard my viola from the depredations of girls suddenly fascinated by the carvings and pegs and strings and bow of my musical instrument when they do not have the self-restraint to keep themselves from doing harm to the property of others. To be sure, sometimes it is necessary to be very vigilant, but it is seldom very much fun, even where it is necessary. Such a habit is learned through the hard school of necessity, and no doubt vigilance has often been necessary in the face of persistent threats, but such vigilance is wearing and tiring, and saps a great deal of the fun and enjoyment out of life. Fortresses and walls are the signs of those who are consistently under the threat of attack, and are the sign of the need for self-defense.

This is an important point to consider that is not often considered. When the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall, it did so out of a sense of insecurity in the fact that East Berliners were leaving the glories of the workers’ paradise of East Germany for the freedoms of the West. The Chinese built the Great Wall because of the depredations of Huns, and later the Turks, Mongols, and other nomadic peoples. The Israelis, for example, are building a giant wall to defend themselves from attack from Palestinians. And so it goes–walls and towers are built by people who fear the assaults of others, and who wish to defend their own a particular piece of territory, be it the metaphorical territory of their own psyches or geographical terrain. Knowing that walls are tactically defensive, even if strategically offensive, helps us to better recognize the fact that people who are vigilant in their self-defense do so because of the concern of protecting themselves from attack. To be vigilant, therefore, is to see oneself as subject to predation and attack from others. Rather than being the behavior of predators and bullies, it is the behavior of people who are concerned about attack.

What was it that led my ancestors to enshrine as their motto a clear and obvious reference to such prey behavior? What was it that they were so vigilant about? What situations and experiences led them to be vigilant and watchful of threats? They were town-dwellers, little people in a world of thuggish robber barons and exploitative monarchs, and as dissidents in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, they were clearly against the cultural spirit of their time and subject to official disapproval and difficulty. Their experience of exile in the New World was certainly successful, but the choice of dishonesty in order to burnish the family reputation meant that eternal vigilance, at least on the part of those who were dishonest, was in the service of a falsely gained reputation for a more permanent and earlier status. It is hard to know when the saying first became enshrined in family memory, or what layers of insecurity and defensiveness led my ancestors to appropriate that motto for themselves, but there are many possible reasons why it was done, and why it remains a valid way to describe how my family operates. At some point, vigilance may not even be as necessary as it once was but is kept up out of compulsion, as a habit that has overgrown its proper boundaries and has simply become a neurosis, one among many among people of anxiety who feel themselves living continually under threat, generation after generation.

In my family background, there is plenty of that continual feeling of being under threat and under attack to go around. My late maternal grandfather, for example, was thought to have been crazy for desiring to leave the Coast Guard after a couple of decades of service after having joined the Worldwide Church of God in the mid 1960’s. He was understandably a bit wary of talking about that feeling of being under such heavy assault. Slightly more than a decade ago I ate dinner with some relatives on my father’s side of the family, and a great aunt of mine still expressed terror in the mistaken belief that our Eastern band Cherokee ancestry meant that the government was likely to take our family property from us and exile us all to Oklahoma. In fact, this was the avowed policy of the U.S. Government towards that part of my ancestry for many decades. The fact that such a policy had been officially overturned a few decades ago did not make my relatives feel any more safe after some of our ancestors had hid out in caves for decades. That sort of panic and trauma stays with people for generations. And since hurt people hurt other people, and people who are terribly afraid tend to build walls and be vigilant and trigger the vigilant of over fearful people, our private disasters spill over all too easily into the lives of those around us, with their own traumas and their own difficulties.

Yet even if being ever vigilant is a matter of great stress, and often the sign of incredible distress, there are times and places for it. Not surprisingly, the Bible has a lot to say about watchmen [2]. At times their knowledge was sound, but their cause doomed, as is the case in 2 Kings 9:20: “So the watchman reported, saying, “He went up to them and is not coming back; and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously!”” Or, take for example, the grim advice given from the watchman to the otherwise obscure Northern Arabian city of Dumah in Isaiah 21:11-12: “The burden against Dumah. He calls to me out of Seir, “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?” The watchman said, “The morning comes, and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire; return! Come back!” Or witness the more general advice given by the psalmist Solomon to those who attempt to guard cities contrary to God’s will in Psalm 127:1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, The watchman stays awake in vain.” What all of these verses have in common is the fact that there are people looking out for danger, but God has appointed their beloved cities for ruin, through no particular fault of the watchmen themselves. Even when God pronounces judgment against a wicked city like Babylon, it is possible to feel some compassion for those who are set to be watchmen over such wicked cities, as it is written in Isaiah 21:6-9: “For thus has the Lord said to me: “Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he sees.” And he saw a chariot with a pair of horsemen, a chariot of donkeys, and a chariot of camels, and he listened earnestly with great care. Then he cried, “A lion, my Lord! I stand continually on the watchtower in the daytime; I have sat at my post every night. And look, here comes a chariot of men with a pair of horsemen!” Then he answered and said, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen! And all the carved images of her gods He has broken to the ground.””

What does this mean? For one, the defensiveness of people who are vigilant means that their own troubled personal history and family background can be turned to service to others in the task of looking out for danger. The knowledge that we live in a world where safety and security are elusive and where vulnerability is a fact of life can lead people to be as safe as possible, and to look out not only for their own security and safety but also for the safety and well-being of those around them. Private neuroses and anxieties can become transmuted into acts of civic or institutional service on behalf of others, so that those who feel unsafe but who desire not only for their own personal safety but the well-being of others can turn their own private sorrows and insecurities into the fuel for loyal sentinel duty. To be sure, it is to be preferred if God has blessed these efforts and encouraged them, but even where people have devoted themselves to look out for wicked cities and corrupt institutions, the example of such people is a worthwhile one. I do not know to what extent my ancestors sought to turn their own hypervigilance into service of other people, but I do know that this has been a powerful motive in my own life, the desire to see the redemption of private quirks and struggles and troubled mental health into encouragement and protection of others. Whether or not this powerful drive has been recognized for what it is, or whether it has been correctly seen as resulting not from the desire to prey on others but from the powerful and traumatic experience of having been preyed upon, the lengthy family proclivity towards hypervigilance and the events and experiences of my own life have combined to bring about a vigilance not only for personal difficulty and danger and concern, but also a desire to look out for others as well. One wonders how common this is.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/sirens-song/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/double-wide-single-minded/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/the-town-watchman/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/watchman-what-of-the-night-the-prophet-as-town-watchman-in-isaiah-2111-12/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/1-chronicles-26-1-19-the-levite-gatekeepers-of-the-sons-of-korah/