Reverence in the Face of Real Life
You, whoever you are, live your life in partnership with a power beyond us all from which you cannot extricate yourself. You cannot escape it. The deeper truth of everyday life is that you can never get anything to go just the way you want it, although it sometimes just happens that way. There is something greater involved in every significant event of your life and every aspect of the world. There are always the dirty dishes, what you don’t like and can’t get rid of. You cannot help but fashion an attitude towards them.
We influence our lives and aspects of the world. We don’t ever control them. How we live our lives with that awareness is the unique spirituality of each of us. More about that later.
I woke up this morning realizing that for the first time in my authoring of this Substack, I missed my own self-imposed deadline yesterday. I had a dream last night, part of which was that I prided myself on sweeping floors better than anybody else in a company, but gleefully kept trying to clean a large gym floor always contending with small bits of schmutz that persistently remained. It made me question all of the previous Substack’s written here.
For deep integrity, I would need to rewrite them all. They are quite idealistic. There is no person, for example, with clean chastity history, lily-white honesty, flawless humility, and heroic fortitude. There are always the dirty dishes, aches and pains, relationship annoyances and regrets, and failures we can’t stop.
At this stage of evolution, we have to live with not only life’s imperfections, but its radical evil, harsh disappointments, and tragic failures that we cannot overcome or understand, no matter who holds political power and/or lots of money.
When I, as a clinical educator, require a young theology student interning in hospital care of real people, to preach in the chapel, I put them in an existential bind and they almost invariably change on some fundamental level. Their natural inclination is to offer people hope and a positive attitude. But in that chapel, they are facing a small, improvised conglomeration of a congregation who are profoundly sad, hurt, and on some level, angry, about the tragic reasons that bring them to the hospital. Several of them are full of grief and cannot hear the “Good News” ofany religion unless the preacher deeply grasps and represents the “Bad News” of real life as well.
Standing by a person whose life is ending and observing that last bit of life slip away with no human help available at all, may be the surest possible way to learn the hardest lessons of human existence. There is a power beyond us all with which we always, constantly, inescapably partner.
Reverence is the virtue that allows us to do that partnering – sometimes. It lets us do our best with what we can do, and roll with the limitations we cannot change. Reverence is a profound respect, even awe, in the face of the inscrutable power we will never comprehend that is constantly with each of us in the fortunate, the lucky, and the serendipitous, as well as the tragic, the disappointing, and the world’s overwhelming failures. It is an uncontrollable aspect of daily life as well as crisis events.
Reverence is also the seat of our own unique spiritual perspective on human living. Can we revere what we cannot understand, incorporate it into our worldview, and live with it in an eventual appreciation attitude, honoring an imperfect, evolving world.
The entire history and lore of religion of all swipes emerges from that question.
Nobody knows what happens after death. It is what we believe or are convinced about that time of life that makes us relax about our dying, profoundly accepting the limitations of life every day and finally on our last day.
Thomas Aquinas, who spent his life writing and teaching about every aspect of life using his own framework of understanding in a dozen scholarly tomes called the Summa Theologica, is said to have quipped about that work at the end of his life, “It’s all as so much straw!”
So what can we expect of our political leaders? At least a sliver of the characteristics that are crucial for a top leader. We do what we can do in selecting them. Do they show any indication of the virtue of reverence in their demeanor, words, and attitudes? Arrogance precludes humility. Lying in public excludes integrity, prudence, wisdom, and good sense. Inconsiderate criticism and brutal comments evince a major lack of kindness, understanding and benignity. We can take signals like these as serious indicators of lack of the character adequate human beings possess at least in some measure. Events of reverence for the worth of other humans, the goodness of the natural world, the human community as a whole, and the magnificence/tragedy of “The Beyond”, (no matter what you call it), remain pretty good signs that those involved are people of character. Look for those qualities in your candidate, and vote accordingly.
Gordon J Hilsman, retired and now living in the Pacific Northwest, is the author of Assessing the CHARACTER of Candidates for National Political Office: In Search of a Collaborative Spirit. He can be reached at ghilsman@gmail.com, www.spiritualclinician.com, or www.gordonjhilsman.com.
