The Language of Reverence
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
November 2, 2003

	Last January, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published a news story that set many UU teeth on edge:  – it claimed that UUA President William Sinkford had called for the inclusion of the word God in our Principles and Purposes.  The UUA retorted that Sinkford had been misquoted, and published the full text of his sermon.  In the sermon, he does not call for God to be inserted in the Principles and Purposes, but he does call for a return to a “language of reverence.”  
	He says that the Principles and Purposes are fine as a statement of covenant, that is, as an articulation of what binds us together as UUs.  But they lack religious depth.  Sinkford points out that Walter Royal Jones, who headed the committee largely responsible for their current wording, wondered aloud how likely it is that many of us would, on our death bed, ask to have the Purposes and Principles read to us for solace and support.  He also quotes former UUA president Gene Pickett, who said the Principles and Purposes “describe a process for approaching the religious depths but they testify to no intimate acquaintance with the depths themselves."
	Now we  UUs are familiar – too familiar, it sometimes seems – with disputes over language.  The old saw goes that the reason UU congregation don’t sing hymns well is that everyone is too busy reading ahead to see if they disagree with any of the lyrics.  In this church, we even see fit to put a disclaimer in our bulletin every Sunday to the effect that the choir doesn’t necessarily endorse the sentiments contained in the anthems they are singing.  This allows us to tear into some of those good old gospel numbers with a clear conscience.
	Now the problems of appropriate language comes up most acutely in the worship service context.  It not only occurs in UU churches, but in interfaith work.  Here in Wakefield, the compromise on worship language which I tried so hard to broker between conservative Christians and Jews has sadly come unraveled, as a result of which the Clergy Association will not be sponsoring an Interfaith Thanksgiving service this year.
	But I don’t want to talk primarily about the worship context this morning.  Rather I want to focus on that word reverence. For we can’t really talk about a language of reverence until we know what reverence is.  I want to talk a little about what reverence is in general and how it arises not only in our worship but in our lived lives, and then get back to how we talk about it.
	On the ferry going over to Star Island this summer, I met a classicist and philosophy professor from the University of Texas named Paul Woodruff.  Paul is a remarkable man.  He plays the viola, has translated Sophocles, and managed to give his lecture on the fifth day of the conference in a beautiful bright starched white shirt when the rest of us were on the fourth recyclings of our t-shirts.  Paul has also received a bit of media attention in the last year for this little book he wrote called, simply “Reverence.”
	Woodruff views reverence as a virtue which has nearly been forgotten in the modern age, but which we would do well to reclaim.  When I say he considers reverence a virtue, that is not a casual term.  One of the present-day currents in philosophy is virtue ethics, which is founded on the proposition that morality is not just a matter of finding and following the correct rules of behavior, but it is also about learning those virtues which will make us feel like doing the right thing.  Some virtues we might name are courage, honesty, integrity, humility, selflessness – and reverence.
	In his book, Woodruff takes us to the Golden Age of ancient Greece and to Confucian China, cultures in which the virtue of reverence was highly regarded.  Often, reverence would be shown by its lack.  For example, in Sophocles’ play Antigone, King Creon decrees that Polynices the traitor is not to be buried, but his sister Antigone defies the order. She is caught, and sentenced by Creon to be buried alive - even though she is betrothed to his son Haemon. After the blind prophet Tiresias proves that the gods are on Antigone's side, Creon changes his mind - but too late. He goes first to bury Polynices, but Antigone has already hanged herself. When Creon arrives at the tomb, Haemon attacks him and then kills himself. When the news of their death is reported, Creon's wife Eurydice takes her own life. Creon is alone.
	Thus Creon, in insisting on his vengeance, is committing irreverence towards the Gods which ultimately leads to these tragic results.  All the Greek viewers of the play wold have understood this.
	Reverence, in Woodruf’s view, is not necessarily tied to any belief in God, any faith or any particular religious practice, though it is often the underpinning of ceremony.  We can have reverence towards the flag, towards the ideal of justice, towards nature, towards death.  Reverence is described most broadly as the capacity for awareness of the presence of something larger and other than ourselves.  
	Let us take death, for example.  We have just had an exercise in reverence towards the death of loved ones. Our reverence stems from our love of them, but more importantly, I think, from the realization that death is a mystery which is larger than ourselves.  We cannot account for what happened to these people who were once such an everyday part of our lives.  We cannot tell where they are now.  
	Prof. Woodruff tells the story of a popular college student who died suddenly.  The family had a funeral in the church where she had grown up.  Many of her college friends attended out of respect, but they were totally grossed out and alienated by the way the ceremony did not seem to be in the least bit about the person they had known. The deceased young woman had been a passionate atheist, and here this Lutheran minister was talking about her walking the streets paved with gold hand in hand with Jesus.
	The reaction of the students was to organize their own memorial service for her back on campus.  At the service, the ritual was simple.  Each of them simply got up in turn and talked about the person who had died.  It was not solemn, it was not according to any preordained formula, but it was reverent.
	Reverence recognizes the reality of things larger than ourselves, whether those things are the universe, the society, death, justice or God. And many UUs, clergy and laity, are recognizing that we have a crying need in this movement for language which will express this.  In the reading I did earlier from my colleagues (they gave me permission to quote, by the way), Parisa Parsa says that she started on the path to UU ministry by counseling women contemplating abortion.   For the woman facing this choice, all of the political rhetoric of the right and of the left is largely irrelevant.  It is a religious question, and what Parisa found lacking was religious language with which to explore it with her counselees.
	This is where we need the language of reverence, where, as Parisa puts it, “the rubber of our spiritual wheels meets the road of life in a sometimes painful world.”  We come to crossroads, we come to decision points, we suffer misfortunes, we hide our private griefs.  All of these need somehow to be connected to something larger.
	Bill Sinkford’s thoughts about a language of reverence arose out of his own experience.  As he describes it, he was a died-in-the wool humanist during his earliest years as a UU, and he came to believe in God through the tragedy of sitting in the hospital with his fifteen-year-old son praying for him to survive the drug overdose he had taken.  At first he prayed for forgiveness. 
	“But as the night darkened, I finally found the pure prayer. The prayer that asked only that my son would live. And late in the evening, I felt the hands of a loving universe reaching out to hold. The hands of God, the Spirit of Life. The name was unimportant. I knew that those hands would be there to hold me whatever the morning brought. And I knew, though I cannot tell you how, that those hands were holding my son as well. I knew that I did not have to walk that path alone, that there is a love that has never broken faith with us and never will.”
	Parisa says “It seems to me that building theology from lived experience, shared in community, and articulated as part of a dialogue with religious tradition and what it means at our particular time in history is what we could/should? be about.”  It is this kind of lived experience which we need to be able to share.  When Bill Sinkford shares with us what brought him around to a belief in God, he is reading out of a book which is more authoritative than any Bible, he is reading out of his own life.  
	At bottom, then, reverence calls us to recognition of forces larger than ourselves, forces of mystery.  We get diverted from the heart of the matter when we get hung up on what we call those forces.  “The power which I cannot explain or know or name I call God," UU minister Forrest Church has written. "God is not God's name. God is my name for the mystery that looms within and arches beyond the limits of my being. Life force, spirit of life, ground of being, these too are names for the unnameable which I am now content to call my God."
	The language of reverence among people of diverse beliefs must be diverse.  I have said the Lord’s Prayer in UU churches and at bedsides, I have said the 23rd Palm, I have read St. Paul at wedding alongside Annie Dillard and the Bhagavad Gita.
	Sometimes the most reverent way to convey feeling is silence.  At my regular Monday night Irish music session this week, one fellow had brought an unusual instrument, a hurdy-gurdy, and we were all asking him to do a solo on it.  He finally launched into a song in Irish Gaelic, accompanying himself on the hurdy-gurdy with two drone notes and a melody.  The effect was spell-binding, and a very unusual thing happened in that busy pub: everyone suddenly got quiet. They stayed that way for five or six minutes, until the song ended, and then continued for probably a full minute afterwards, before ending in respectful applause.  I realized then that the reaction was one of reverence, reverence for the tradition that the song had represented, and for the skill of the singer.  You can have reverence in a pub.
	Reverence is a social virtue. Prof. Woodruff says reverence “uses ceremony as a kind of language of behavior, and you cannot use a language all by yourself. ...That is why people who seek reverence don’t merely try to improve themselves - they try to involve family, church or community in a language of reverence – in shared events, in ceremony, even, perhaps in poetry.”  
	In theory this poetry should be as wide as the diversity of our beliefs.  In practice in UU churches, it often ends up being the lowest common denominator.  There are many among us who, for whatever reason in our background, are not fond of the word God.  There are others for whom that word is the most convenient shorthand for their conception of the ultimate mysteries of life.  If the non-theists exercise a complete veto over God-language, our whole discourse will be the poorer for it, for we cut ourselves off from the rich streams of religious contemplation and praise which we have inherited.  
	Well, to this point we’ve been talking about a language of reverence, but I’d like to close by talking in the language of reverence from a few diverse traditions.  
	Let me start with Psalm 100 from the Jewish tradition:
100:1 Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth. 100:2 Worship the LORD with gladness; come into his presence with singing. 100:3 Know that the LORD is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 100:4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name. 100:5 For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. 

	This is what we conventionally think of as reverence.  Reverence towards God, conceived of as someone larger then ourselves, and to whom we belong as the sheep belong to the shepherd.  God is revered here because “It is he that has made us,” that is, he is the source of our own being.  The reaction of recognizing this source relations with the divinity is to worship, praise and be thankful.  We close by affirming the goodness of God, and thus by extension, the goodness of the things created by God, including ourselves.
	Now consider this poem from Meng Chiao, writing during the T’ang Dynasty in China, which is reprinted by Prof Woodruff in his book:
“Loving him, the mother takes the thread in hand;
Leaving her, he’ll have this coat on his shoulders.
Now that he’s about to go, she mends ith fine, fine stitches;
She knows the fear that he’ll be gone a long, long time.
Who would say the heart of a tiny blade of grass
Could repay the sun for all the warmth of spring?”
	In this poem from Confucian China, reverence is not directed towards the gods so much as towards the parents.  Our parents bear us, they feed us, they protect us, they carry us around.  How can we ever repay that debt?  We can no more repay it than the blade of grass can repay the sun for shining on it. 
	Reverence does not have to be solemn.  In Sufi poetry, reverence towards God is expressed in the most satiric and often erotic fashion.  Listen to this from the Fourteenth Century Persion poet Hafiz, called “Dividing God”
The moon starts singing
When everyone is asleep
And the planets throw a bright robe
Around their shoulders and whirl up
Close to her side.

Once I asked the moon,
“Why do you and your sweet friends
Not perform so romantically like that
To a larger crowd?”

And the whole sky chorus resounded,
“The admission price to hear
The lofty minstrels 
speak of love

Is affordable only to those
Who have not exhausted themselves
Dividing God all day
And thus need rest.

The thrilled Tavern fiddlers
who are perched on the roof

Do not want their notes to intrude
Upon the ears
Where an accountant lives
With a sharp pencil
Keeping score of words
Another
In their great sorrow or anger
May have once said to you.”

Hafiz knows:
The sun will stand as your best man
And whistle

When you have found the courage 
To marry forgiveness,

When you have found the courage
To marry 
Love.
	I think this poet is speaking to us, the people of little understanding who would divide God.    Sometimes I think we UUs are the accountants, keeping score with our sharpened pencils of what we don’t believe of the great religious traditions, what we can’t accept.  We don’t hear the fiddlers playing on the roof, we don’t see the planets dancing with the moon, we aren’t about to marry forgiveness.  
	A life lived with integrity in the recognition of the things that are larger than ourselves ought not get ultimately hung up on the particularities of the language people use to try to understand that which is beyond comprehension.  It is not just a capacity but an imperative of the human intelligence to try to make sense of anything it comes across, and it will express that sense in language.  All of our language of reverence is an attempt to square the circle, and when we realize this, we can be less possessive and exclusive about the particulars of the language you and I use.  Amen.