I never planned to give anyone advice on how to live. That way lies hubris, and I am conscious enough of failures in my life to know better than to tell others how to conduct theirs. But since writing about reverence I have been asked again and again what people could do if they wish to take reverence more seriously. Conversations with Dr. Harry Wilmer, of Salado, Texas, helped me form my ideas on this. I dedicate this epilogue to his memory.
Reverence is easily lost; it seeps away from me like water from a lightly cracked bowl, a bowl so beautiful that I am blind to its cracks.
Every success, every victory, is an opportunity for overconfidence. The victory of the United States in the Cold War contributed to our entering wars in a Muslim world that we did not understand, after 2001, with absurd hopes. Success in the Cold War also led to our unblinking trust in unregulated capitalism, and this overconfidence led to the financial collapse of 2007–08. That is why a reverent mind is suspicious of victory. Only a spoilsport would look around every silver lining to catch sight of a dark cloud. But if I wish to be reverent, I should always guard myself against the thought that one success promises another.
Even my efforts to maintain reverence weaken it. Suppose we set up rituals to build reverence into our lives and make them our routine. Then the routines can lose meaning and become chores, and chores are not conducive to reverence. Routines can also give us the confidence that we are among the reverent people on earth, and such confidence leads to hubris. Reverent people like me (I might think to myself) can do no wrong. Routines are not enough. As we are always leaking reverence, so we must always look for new ways to replenish it. I cannot rest on my reverence. Reverence begets reverence. But believing too much in my own reverence will slay whatever reverence I have ever had.
I offer three ideas for renewing reverence: pay attention, speak the languages of reverence, and ask the right question. I end with a reminder of why this is so important: reverence saves lives.
I write to you from a place of extraordinary beauty. Anyone could feel awe here. The bay and the sky are speaking blue to each other. A gull with a glistening white head alights on water that is barely ruffled by a southerly breeze. Now she rises and perches on the stem of my dinghy. In the distance, to the northeast, a rise of small mountains shows a deeper blue against the sky, which will soon take on light pink as the sun descends to the west. The islands around the harbor, where I am alone with my brother, have knees of white and pink granite. Above the tide line is a tangle of spruce, opened occasionally by the windfall of great storms. Tall grass grows green in the openings. Under the spruce boughs, broad cushions of moss sponge dew from the sea air, and fallen branches are bearded with lichen.
This is an easy place to flex the emotional muscles I use for reverence. Awe comes easily in the presence of beauty that anyone could see. But only a reverent eye sees every opportunity. The reverent writer Barry Lopez, walking in the Arctic, found himself bowing to a horned lark he saw staring back at him. Not everyone would have seen the bird’s stare as connecting to him. Lopez has a well-developed capacity for awe.
I do not have to travel far to see wonders. Stepping by accident into a polluted mud puddle, I may see an iridescent rainbow. Looking up when I hear an infant screaming, I may recognize the tenderness of a mother’s face hovering over the child. Or as a mosquito prepares to draw blood from my forearm I may be struck by the delicacy of design in a creature so light and powerful. When the moon sets long before morning on a clear night, I may rejoice in the wonder of a dome of stars arched over by the cream of the Milky Way.
I need time and patience to see things in this way. The mud puddle seeped into my shoes, chilling my feet, the crying child interrupted a conversation I wanted urgently to finish, and the mosquito threatened me with a tropical disease. The setting of the moon could be the signal for an enemy attack, hidden by darkness, on our compound (this before infrared goggles had been invented for troops). I can’t always pay attention to beauty. Still, I pay attention when I can, at whatever opportunities my life gives me to exercise my sense of awe.
Paying attention is something I can do alone, though it goes better with a loving partner, as I have had the good fortune to learn—whether the partner loves me or the things I care about. I see only where my eyes are pointing, but you, looking another way, can call my attention to something I should see. Bird watchers are not solitary. Many eyes see more, if they communicate.
“Paying attention” is a way of referring to mindfulness, which is at the core of ethics in every ancient tradition. I have much to be mindful of, besides all that is awe-inspiring around me. I need to pay attention to other people, for example—to their needs and feelings. I need to pay attention to myself as well—to what I am actually doing (which may not be what I think I am doing), and to my feelings and needs. This is obvious enough.
I feel reverence through awe, but I never find words to express what awe feels like, so my language of reverence cannot be a mere offering of words that you would understand. Nor could it be a set of sounds that only I can understand. A language is not a language unless it is shared. If we can grow a language of reverence, it will bring us together.
Music can be a language of reverence. We have many traditions of music, and many ways of being reverent and expressing reverence through music. Here’s mine. Often when I try to play a Bach sonata on my cello I am aware of nothing but my personal struggle to sound each note before the next one demands its turn. But every now and then I slow down, time seems to hold its count, and I feel as if my intercourse with Bach and the cello has been an act of worship.
To give sound to music as a language of reverence, I have to play with reverence, patiently, and with a focus on the beauty Bach has captured, with no thought of myself or my clumsy left fingers or my awkward bow hand. This I can do alone. But forgetting myself in music is easier when I am with others; for example, when joining them to bring out the music in a Hayden quartet—something none of us can do alone, since the individual parts are not the music Hayden wrote.
Poetry can be a language of reverence. I may be gathered with like-minded lovers of poetry, forgetting myself, setting aside for the moment the temptation to prove that I know more about Keats or John Clare than you do—reading, listening, sharing poetry. To appreciate poetry, we let our minds play freely together, beyond the plain meaning of words. Settling reverently into poetry, we are speaking a language of reverence.
The traditional language of reverence is ceremony. Simple gestures of greeting and recognition are tokens of respect. They can be more than that. If uttered with reverent feelings, these gestures belong to a language of reverence. A sincere good morning, a warm handshake, the appropriate use of the eyes (different in different cultures)—these say, “Here we are together, where there is something more important than either of us, which we care about, and which we try to point to by means of these courtesies.” Confucius insisted that it is never enough to perform the rituals without feeling, and that the rituals need not be letter perfect. But they do need to be expressed with reverence.
Sacraments (as Christians have insisted since the early Church) can be effective whether or not they are carried out with the right feelings or beliefs. But sacraments serve only to make things sacred, and sacred things do not deserve reverence (see chapter ten). Sacraments do not help us renew reverence in our hearts unless we perform them in a reverent way.
Liturgy—the formal practice of worship—may be a language of reverence, but I am afraid that formal practices of worship often undermine reverence, especially if they reassure the worshippers of their elite status, or if the forms themselves become objects of worship. We fall so easily into idolatry of ourselves or of the things we do.
The reverent soul does more good by asking questions than by answering them—questions for myself, questions for others.
A good question for myself is this: Can I do this thing I am planning to do in a reverent spirit, reverently? I call this the adverb question. See how different it is from the noun question: What action does reverence tell me to do now? The noun question has no answer. Reverence generally does not tell me what to do; it tells me how to do the things I choose to do. But if I can’t see how to do that thing reverently, I should not do it at all.
Over forty years ago, as a young army lieutenant, I had this choice: Continue active duty in a war I thought wrong, become a deserter, or seek conscientious objector status. A reverent soul could have made any one of those choices and carried it out reverently, and many chose each of these three courses. But I could not. As it happened, I would have had to lie to be accepted as a conscientious objector, and I do not believe that I could have lied in a reverent spirit. Nor did I think I could reverently have broken my pledge by deserting. I chose to serve, and most of the time I think I did so reverently, but I had underestimated the character-destroying effects of warfare. Before serving, I had believed that I could change the army more than it would change me. That was hubris, and I was wrong. I finished my tour with the guilty knowledge that I was not as good a human being as I had thought. That was, at least, a lesson in reverence. I should also have asked the next two questions:
The second question for myself: Am I fooling myself? Do I really know what I think I know? Am I forgetting my ignorance, overlooking how prone I am to error? This is Socrates’ question for himself, and it is crucial to his lifetime project of avoiding the hubris of claiming knowledge he does not have. The reverent soul probes itself.
And the third: Am I actually doing the things I think I am doing? And not doing the things I think I am not doing? For example, in the classroom am I leading my students toward learning or am I showing off? A mindful teacher would know the difference. The reverent soul knows what it is about.
Questions for others. These may help others see the way to reverence. I assume (as Chinese classical ethics assumes) that human beings have the sprouts of all the virtues in them by nature. A sprout may be hidden, deeply buried, or even starved to death, but even the nastiest tyrant started with a sprout for reverence. The right line of questioning, in the right circumstances, could lead anyone to be aware of this treasure deep inside.
Here is a dialogue I remember from over ten years ago, before the United States attempted to remake the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq—a time when many of us were trumpeting the importance of projecting the power of the United States around the world. I was in an airplane next to a young man who had just graduated from a military academy. Of course I had certain advantages—he had nowhere to go to escape me, and I was older than his father. We talked a bit about his education, and I asked him about his ethics courses—knowing that all the military academies try to teach ethics, but seem to fail.
PAUL: Were your ethics courses effective?
YOUNG OFFICER: No. Waste of time. The people who teach ethics do not understand that ethics has no place in military life. Our job is to project our nation’s power into the world, and that has nothing to do with right and wrong. Ethics is a waste of time. What we do is all about power.
He went on to say that he had read a little Thucydides at his academy. He believed the Greek historian corroborated his view that power is all that matters to people. He made the point emphatically. When people talk about ethics, he thought, they are just blowing smoke—as Thucydides says. Thucydides does say that, I knew, but he also shows how failures in ethics lead to catastrophe. So I tried another line of questions:
PAUL: By the way, did you have leadership training at the academy?
YOUNG OFFICER: Yes, we sure did.
PAUL: So I guess you plan to be good at being a leader.
YOUNG OFFICER: I do. I hope I have what it takes.
PAUL: How can you tell whether you’re a good leader?
YOUNG OFFICER: That’s easy. People follow you willingly.
PAUL: Willingly? Why do they do that?
YOUNG OFFICER: You have to know what you’re doing, be an expert. They won’t follow you if you’re an idiot.
PAUL: That’s all it takes to be a leader? Be an expert?
YOUNG OFFICER: No. They have to trust you, too. They have to see that you are an expert.
PAUL: Does that mean you have to trust them as well? In the army they taught me that trust was mutual, that it goes both ways. The troops won’t trust you if you never trust them.
YOUNG OFFICER: Yes, of course.
PAUL: So if you trust them, then you pay attention to them, listen to them when they have something to tell you.
YOUNG OFFICER: Of course.
PAUL: So you don’t assume that you have all the knowledge. You are not the only expert.
YOUNG OFFICER: No way. A leader leads a team. That’s why you have a team. Some of them will know things I don’t. Be able to do things I can’t do.
PAUL: I am sure that’s right. Does a leader treat the team fairly?
YOUNG OFFICER: Yes, of course.
PAUL: I noticed there’s one word you have not used so far—“power.” As a leader do you use your power to make people do what you want?
YOUNG OFFICER: Yeah, an officer has power all right. I will have a lot of power over them.
PAUL: But then, if you depend on your power over them, are they following you willingly? Does power make you a leader? You said a little while ago that nothing matters to people but power. Do you still believe that? Is power all that matters between you and the troops you lead?
At that point the pilot interrupted us, announcing our landing, and after that the young officer changed the subject. I suppose he could have drawn a distinction between the ethical way he wanted to work with his own troops and the non-ethical way he wanted to treat others. Then I could have asked him whether he could divide himself in that way, and whether that division would leave him with a satisfactory sense of who he is. But that would have been too much for a short plane ride.
I will never know whether he remembered the conversation. I will never know whether it made any difference to him in the long run. But I gave him a chance, at any rate, to think more deeply about his values, and although I never used the word “reverence,” I was creeping up on the idea, and surely I had found in him some sprouts that could grow into reverence. I hope so, because he will have power as he gains in rank, and the more power he has, the more he will need reverence.
Reverence is the virtue that protects the helpless. That means it is also the virtue that protects me, when I am powerful, from abusing those who are helpless.
The company commander. A friend commands a company in a sweep of the Vietnamese countryside, and they have detained two women, one with a little girl, in black pajamas. The women have been carrying ammunition, supplies, and messages to the enemy. Through his interpreter, my friend has extracted what information he could in the circumstances. He calls for a helicopter to take the prisoners to the interrogation center, but the operations officer tells him over the radio that no choppers are available. “But I have to move out and I can’t take them with me,” he says, in effect. “And I can’t leave them here. They’ll tell everyone where we are. Request disposition instructions.”
“Destroy the contraband supplies,” says the officer. “And if your prisoners happen to die of malaria or some other disease by morning, we will understand.” He is using a familiar code to give my friend an order to shoot the prisoners, even though they are unarmed civilians pressed into service by the enemy. The “we” implies that the battalion commander approved the order. My friend turns to his executive officer, “I want you as a witness to what I am doing. I have just been given either tacit permission or an implied order to kill these two women. I am not going to do it.”
Luckily for all concerned, my friend has a rock-solid character. The captives do not die of malaria or any other disease that night. The company commander scares them and releases them. In doing so he is not adding to the danger his troops are in; the local Vietnamese people already know where his troops are, how many and how armed. My friend had the power to commit a crime and get away with it. Only his character—his well-developed reverence—stood in his way. I hope it would be the same for me.
That night, after releasing the two women and the child, he marches his company ten hours over difficult terrain; at dawn he surprises an enemy headquarters and captures a North Vietnamese officer. On the officer’s map he finds his position from the previous evening, accurately marked. The enemy knows where he has been, and the information probably did not reach them by way of the women he released. There would not have been time.
I have used this example in ethics classes, telling the story up to the coded order, then asking the students what they would do. One ROTC cadet, destined for a nursing career, proposed to cut out the tongues of the women, so they could not give our position away. Others thought they would shoot the captives, but one clever lad, who balked at killing them directly, said he would tie the women to trees and call in artillery after our unit moved out—hoping thereby to escape responsibility for their deaths. In that particular ROTC class, not one student chose my friend’s solution—which I believe is the right answer. That appalls me. These young people were being prepared to hold positions of power—not only to command others, but to call up awesome levels of destruction.
Too often I find that young people are trained to hold power by teachers who forget how great is the moral danger that comes with power. Perhaps the old Greeks were not much better, but they at least were exposed to Sophocles and Aeschylus, and they had seen on the tragic stage how power leads to hubris, hubris to blindness, and blindness to glaring failures of humanity. They also sealed the lesson by training young men as a chorus to perform hymns to reverence in the plays.
Because war gives some commanders extraordinary powers, warfare demands an especially vigilant reverence. But quite ordinary people in peacetime often find themselves with the power that must be tempered by reverence.
The teacher. Teachers, especially of young children, have enormous powers that can be used for abuse. Sometimes the abuse is subtle. Sometimes not.
Suppose I have in my classroom the seven-year-old brother of a boy I taught a few years ago, who was one of my stars. This one learns slowly by comparison. He frustrates me, and so I make the comparison almost every day: “Your brother could add and subtract at your age, why can’t you? Why aren’t you as smart as he is?” I am teaching him that he is stupid and reinforcing the lesson ceaselessly. Sad to say, he will learn this—though it is not the case. A more reverent teacher would find this boy’s brilliant core (it truly is there) and teach to that. But I would have to take time to listen to the boy, to pay attention to him, to find out what he does well and build on that. But I might say to myself: “Why bother, when I already know how to teach? I succeeded with the boy’s brother, so I must be a fine teacher, and the fault must be the boy’s.” This would be a false conceit of knowledge. In this way, hubris, even in a small matter, could have a devastating effect on a life. But there is worse, as we all know.
Suppose I am a teacher or a preacher alone with a very attractive teenager who has no family looking out for his or her interests. The teenager has enormous respect for me and will do what I say and keep quiet about it. And besides, a youngster without a healthy family life is desperate to be loved by someone. I could do what I want and (at least for a time) expect to get away with it. Let’s hope I want nothing harmful. Such young people are helpless and I am powerful. Only my character protects them. And me.
The nursing home aide. Suppose I am an aide in a nursing home. We have a lot of demanding old people here. Often I am alone with one of them. She has lost most of her mind. I could do anything I want to her, and no one would ever know. Let’s hope I do not want to do anything bad to her. She is so helpless and I have so much power in her world. Many of us will have power at one time or another, but all of us were helpless babies, and most of us will be helpless in illness or old age. Then we will have lost the beauty of infants, along with their promise of growth and change for the better. As we advance into old age—which has a beauty of its own that few can recognize—we will depend more than ever on the reverence of others.
The last word on reverence? Not here, and the last question isn’t here either. Not on any reverent page. Yes, our best hope when we are weak is that our rulers are reverent. And our best hope when we rule others is that reverence will keep us safe from abusing the weak. But isn’t that a frail and distant hope? How can we, when we glory in success or power, remember reverence?
Even if this book lay by the bed of every potentate or military commander, every senator or member of a national legislature, what good would that do? Reading never put reverence in a soul, not reading by itself. Would a national conversation help? Perhaps, if it brought good examples to light—lives lived in reverence, attractive, beckoning for us all to follow.
And you, reverent reader, do you dare to set an example? You would have to live your life in a certain way, making choice after choice with a view to reverence. If you could lead such a life, could you do so in a way that might start a chain reaction? You would have to touch other lives as you strive for reverence. You would have to live in such a way that those you touch would feel, as you do, that the ceremonies of reverence are necessary—in spite of the urgencies of work and war and poverty. And when people take you for an example, could you remember how far you are from achieving reverence?
You would have to take risks gladly. Could you embrace the risk of loss that follows on compassion? Could you shrug off the worry that others will take advantage of your compassion? When we are at war, and our enemies threaten terror, could you see more hope than danger in compassion, even then? Could you honestly look these dangers in the face and still have the confidence to lead others toward compassion?
The seeds of reverence may sprout in any soul, but they are easily trampled or starved. When you set this book down, what will you do to guard and nourish the tender gardens of reverence?