Editorials
new church virtues: reverence
Everything worthy of being revered – everything good and true, living and
beautiful; everything that possesses any real substance and value for human
life – comes from God. “God is the All in all things.” (Divine Love and Wisdom
198)
All reverence, therefore, begins with reverence for the Divine, and
reverence for the Divine spills over into a reverent attitude that affects the way
we view all things.
An expanded sense of reverence is one of the special gifts of the New
Church; its doctrine of the Lord deepens and clarifies our vision of God;
and the doctrines of use and correspondence enhance our awareness of the
holiness that pervades all creation.
The degree of actual reverence we feel for places, persons and things
will vary depending upon how much of the Divine presence we perceive in
them, but a reverent attitude to life in general causes us to expect and look for
reflections of the Divine everywhere; and that very expectation keeps us alert
to intimations of the Divine. Just as a skeptical attitude can keep us from seeing
the Divine in creation, so a reverent attitude can remove the scales from our
eyes and reveal it.
Cultivating a reverent attitude goes hand in hand with the cultivation
of the rational, which is one of the requirements for the growth of the New
Church. (Apocalypse Explained 732) Spiritual rationality opens our eyes to see
the presence of the Divine in creation, but it can’t truly be seen unless it is loved
and respected. “Faith is the eye of love.” Rationality, therefore – in the highest
sense – cannot exist apart from reverence.
The Fear Of God
Reverence involves two qualities which are largely missing from modern
thought: humility and the fear of God. There may be plenty of humble
individuals, but the prevailing philosophy in our secular age has elevated “the
laws of nature” (as we perceive them to be) above Divine Law, and human
reason above the truths of revelation and providence.
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