Reverence

Our story tells us of the sacredness of life, of the astonishing complexity of cells and organisms, of the vast lengths of time it took to generate their splendid diversity, of the enormous improbability that any of it happened at all. Reverence is the religious emotion elicited when we perceive the sacred. We are called to revere the whole enterprise of planetary existence, the whole and all of its myriad parts as they catalyze and secrete and replicate and mutate and evolve. Ralph Waldo Emerson invites us to express our reverence in the form of a prayer. "Prayer," he writes, "is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul."

Earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Regardless of the name a person uses for the Infinite Force that holds us together, it is the source of our miraculous, unpredictable creativity and our dignity.

Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art....It is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.

Reverence for all creations.

Religion, according to Alfred North Whitehead, is a phenomenon that begins in wonder and ends in wonder. Feelings of awe, reverence, and gratitude are primary, and these can never be learned from books. We gain them from sitting high on a cliff side, gazing at the sea, lost in reverie and listening to the laughter of children.

Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence, in order to raise it to its true value.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

Let the beauty we love be what we do; there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to 'mould' the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. . . . All this gives him a longing to help the child in its own battle; he would equip and strengthen it, not for some outside end proposed by the State or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child's own spirit is obscurely seeking. The man who feels this can wield the authority of an educator without infringing the principle of liberty.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.