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Tuesday, 03 May 2011 |
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 Shortly after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, Bill Moyers interviewed the author and professor, Paul Woodruff to talk about his recent book: Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. The interview began like this:
BILL MOYERS: How do you define reverence?
PAUL WOODRUFF: I think reverence is the capacity for awe in the face of the transcendent.
BILL MOYERS: The transcendent being--
PAUL WOODRUFF: It's whatever we human beings did not create: God, justice, the truth...
BILL MOYERS: Beauty.
PAUL WOODRUFF: Nature, beauty.
BILL MOYERS: Death?
PAUL WOODRUFF: Death is one of the most awe-inspiring facts of our lives.
The full interview is worth a read, and I commend it to you at www.pbs.org. The book itself was transformative for me and I have re-read it a number of times. What sticks is the sense that there are two basic ways for us to respond to the vast distance between our ideals (what we hope for) and our reality (what we can reasonably achieve.) We can look to the heavens and ache for the blessing of transcendence, or we can, in reverence for the divine, do all in our power to bring a touch more of the transcendent to the aches of our world.
Woodruff claims that reverence is the ‘forgotten’ virtue that keeps humans from trying to act like gods. Reverence keeps us from scaling the unformidable cliffs of Mount Olympus. It keeps us from shaming one population to elevate our own. It keeps us from using our power to denigrate life in any form. Reverence reminds us that while our ideals soar to exalt the divine, our place is among the family of things, and we must do all that is in our power to bring a bit of heaven here.
Join us in May as our worship services return again and again to this theme of reverence. We will speak of awe and mystery. We will even touch on death and how the humanness of death can imbue our lives with meaning. As the spring buds open to renew our world with a forgotten brilliance, let us renew our lives with a forgotten virtue and remember the place of reverence in our lives.
- In Faith,
Rev. Anya
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 18 October 2011 )
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