Reverence is not faith, because the faithful may hold their faith with arrogance and self-satisfaction, and because the reverent may not know what to believe....
Reverence, as a virtue, is primarily a capacity for having certain feelings at the right time and in the right way....
Ceremony is like a language: You cannot simply invent it and you cannot do it all by yourself; it must be part of the texture of a shared culture. You need not believe in God to be reverent, but to develop an occasion for reverence you must share a culture with others, and this must support a degree of ceremony.
Sex could be an example; reverence ennobles sex, as, I believe, every well-joined couple intuitively knows. The act of sex may reflect a hierarchy and hierarchies may be brutal: there may be one who takes and one who is taken. Even in a bed of love we may feel like animals.
But nothing is brutish in a bed of reverence. There is a sense of awe that follows reverent love, and where awe is felt, the acts of love are human. (46-47, 49, 50)
—Paul Woodruff,
Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue
Review by Philip L. Quinn, University of Notre Dame (5/10/2002) - "According to Paul Woodruff, we have not lost reverence itself, because it cannot disappear altogether from a functioning society. Hence, 'we go on unconsciously doing reverent things, and this is fortunate, because the complete loss of reverence would be too grievous to bear' (36). But we have forgotten what reverence is and why it is important."
Bill Moyers interviews Paul Woodruff on PBS (1/3/2003) - "Three weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a small book appeared that I have now read twice to help me sort out what I think about that massacre and the world that both produced it and has now been shaped by it."
|
