Reverence

"Deepen our sense of reverence" we pray in the mass collect today. Reverence is: awe and wonder before that which is immensely good, worthy, precious, and valuable; surpassing joy mixed with humility; deeply quiet and peaceful receptivity that, expanding the intellect, heart and soul, moves into adoration and self-donation. Reverence is the constitutive posture of a creature before the Creator and His creation. It is the heart of every religion. For a Christian, reverence finds its concrete focus in the person of Jesus, born, active, crucified, risen to glory, and now present to us as Lord and Savior of all of creation. It is also the form or essence of the two commingled dimensions of human life: family and marriage. Primarily, reverence is always filial: awestruck and grateful before mother and father, elders, family, ancestors, authority, tradition and all that is received as gift. All traditional religions are founded upon reverence. In that sense, modernity, understood as autonomous, controlling technocracy has the interior soul or form of anti-reverence. The second domain constituted by reverence is the love between man and woman, within marriage quintessentially and beyond. As a man, I reverence the woman in front of me precisely in her femininity, as different from me: as virginal, bridal, maternal; as lovely, delicate, powerful, wise, delightful, and worthy in a way that fascinates, awes, attracts and humbles me, in my own masculinity, with its own informing strengths and weaknesses. Contemporary feminism, egalitarianism, and sexual liberation all spring from a failure of reverence. Deepen our sense of reverence, O Lord!