Learning REVERENCE from the Psalms
August 2, 2010
How
great is your name, O Lord our God, through all the earth!
Psalm 8 is a prayer-poem with which most of us can readily
identify. It is a psalm of praise and a profound recognition of
the Sovereignty of God, based on a mode of presence that the
greatness of creation, including the Psalmist’s own being,
evokes. Its theme is grounded in the truth of who God is and
who we. The experience of that relationship gives rise to the
primordial human disposition of awe and the reverence which
accompanies it. According to Fr. Adrian van Kaam:
Reverence is the flower of spiritualization. Its source is the
sacred fascination people experience in the presence of what
transcends them. Everything worthy of a person’s dedication
receives meaning from its relatedness to that mystery which
overwhelms well-disposed people in moments of silent
contemplation and pure receptivity. Unrelated to this mystery,
experiences lose their radiance and fail to evoke reverence. (Fundamental
Formation, pp. 159-60)
One cannot experience the poetry of the Psalms, even in
translation, without being struck by its vibrancy and
immediateness. This is due, at least in part, to the authors’
“sacred fascination”, that for them everything in nature and in
the human world is related to and participates in Divine life.
Pondering, in wonder, the heavens, the moon and the stars, we
also are moved to see them all as the work of the Creator’s
hands. It is the most natural thing in the world for children,
who are filled with wonder, to see personal life everywhere and
in everything. Even for us as adults, the entire cosmos becomes
personal for us when we awaken to the wonder that is evoked by
the Mysterious source of all that is.
Human beings tend see the world in light
of gathered experience, bright and happy when we are happy, dark
and sad when we are sad. We identify our inner and outer
worlds. The world of the Psalms, however, reminds us that this
sense of identification with and participation in the world
outside of us may arise from a deeper truth. Perhaps our
pre-reflective projection of feelings and experiences onto the
external world reflects the recognition that our life is a
participation in a life that is shared by all creation.
We must live our lives in openness to
mystery or risk a reductive and banal existence. Van Kaam
observes that everything worthy of a person’s dedication
receives its meaning from its relationship to that mystery which
always tends to overwhelm us: “Facing the unknown, a person may
feel fear. In spiritual presence, however, this fear is refined
into awe by loving acceptance of a higher reality that embraces
one as a mystery of love and generosity.” (p. 160) The mystery
of creation is too much for us at the pretranscendent levels of
our vital and functional lives. But at the level of spirit, “in
spiritual presence” as van Kaam puts it, fear becomes awe. As
we read in Psalm 111, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom.” In this Psalm we see another central theme of the Book
of Psalms, which is that all of history is the work of God’s
hand and that God is trustworthy. This is not to say that the
trustworthiness of God will always be apparent to us, as the
Book of Job makes evident. Yet, because the mystery that
threatens to overwhelm us is, indeed, personally related to us,
our fear can eventually become refined into awe.
Van Kaam continues: “Reverence is fear
that has become awe under the mitigating and elevating influence of
loving surrender to a mystery that attracts people by its goodness
while keeping them at a humble distance by its majesty.” This
reflects Rudolph Otto’s understanding in The Idea of the Holy
of mystery as tremendum et fascinans, that which at
once attracts and frightens us. It is the persistent practice of
abandonment to the Mystery, a Mystery we slowly grow to trust
despite its fearfulness, that gives rise to the disposition of
reverence. It is the role of faith and wisdom traditions to serve
our ongoing formation in trust and openness to Mystery. They do
this, as in the Psalms, through words that express the experience of
others through the millennia who have learned to live in full
spiritual presence to creation and its mysterious source in
increasing trust and love.
Reverence then is fear become awe. As
suggested, one contributing factor to this transformation is
participation in faith and form traditions that offer assurance
of the goodness of the Mystery, an assurance that can sustain us
when our experience and feeling suggest otherwise. This is what
we call “faith,” an ongoing growth in trust of the Mystery based
on our trust in the others who communicate our faith tradition
to us but also ratified by our own experience.
Our most immediate experience of
creation and of mystery is, of course, our own person, our very
self. What van Kaam calls the “exquisite mode of spiritual
presence” that is reverence and the mode presence to self,
world, and others that reverence gives rise to (what we call
respect) are only possible when fear becomes refined into awe in
our own regard. It is quite one thing for us to experience awe
as we take in the night sky or sit at the seashore. It is quite
another to recognize the awesomeness of our own life. This is
the experience expressed in Psalm 139: 14. “I thank you for the
wonder of my being, for the wonders of all your creation.”
Reverence and respect as dispositions of spiritual presence are
based on the lived experienced that one’s own life is a
participation, with all of creation and each human person, in
the life of the Divine Mystery. Robert Alter’s translation of
verse 14 illuminates this: “I acclaim You, for awesomely I am
set apart, wondrous are Your acts, and my being deeply knows
it.” In this translation we hear the Psalmist’s recognition of
his or her originality and uniqueness. It is in one’s very
difference that he or she is awesome. Yet this uniqueness
shares the wonder of all God’s acts of creation. It is in our
very differences that we are most united. Finally, the Psalmist
declares that his/her “being deeply knows it.” Does our being
deeply know the wonder that we uniquely are? Until our fear of
our own unique life becomes refined into awe “by loving
acceptance” of our life and the Mystery who creates it, we
cannot in the deepest sense experience awe and reverence for
creation as a whole.
Rav Abraham Isaac Kook in a commentary on Psalm 5:8 speaks
of how the deepest awe comes about in us out of love. Rav Kook
says that when we come to recognize the chesed, the
loving kindness of God in the world, we then become aware of the
sublime majesty of God, which evokes in us not an awe of God’s
ultimate control and domination but an awe and reverence
“refined by inner wisdom and insight,” an “elevated awe that is
permeated with an inner kernel of love.” Any attempt at
reverence and respect that is not permeated with this “kernel of
love” will inevitably become strained or violent.
Van Kaam further writes: “Reverence,
along with the respect it generates or deepens, is the root of
culture and humanization. Fear not deepened to awe, and the
violence to which such fear gives rise, is the root of
dehumanization.” (p. 161) He continues:
Sometimes, the fear in a religious experience is
not transformed into awe. Sometimes the spirit and its horizons are
refused. This refusal cannot prevent the experience of the whole
and the holy from happening, but in such cases it evokes only fear.
The holy is perceived as a threatening power. Such indeterminate
fear about the great unknown may give rise to reactions that are
unfree, fixated, and often violent. (pp. 161-2)
What Van Kaam describes here is not only a possibility but a
frequent occurrence in the realm of the spirit. The fear of the
Lord which is the beginning of wisdom is fear grounded in
relationship and in awareness of the loving kindness of the
Mystery. Most of all it is a truly experienced awareness of the
loving kindness of God in one’s own being. The cultivation of
fear not grounded in love, an occurrence in much religious
practice, and the moralism and anxiety such fear gives rise to,
will inevitably prove not a source of consonance and love but
rather of violence. This is precisely the reason that there is
so much violence associated with religious experience and why
our strained attempts to be and do good without true spiritual
presence are doomed to frustration and failure.
The distortions that cloud our
presence come from our inability to be present to ourselves in our
own originality. The honesty and directness of the language of the
Psalms serve to remind us that we can only grow toward a life of
greater praise of God from a place of true honesty in ourselves,
what Fr. van Kaam would call our originality. The obstacle many of
us experience from living in this kind of honesty is belief, based
on our early formation, that there are particular experiences and
situations in which God is present and those in which God is not.
We even tend to live with the kind of compartmentalized existence
that refuses and excludes many aspects of our own personal being and
of the world around us. When the in-breaking of the spirit comes in
ways that are strange and fearful to us, we refuse it. We are often
the poorest possible judges of where God is present in our lives and
where the spirit is most appealing to us. It is often in what is
most other that the whole and holy is summoning to us. This is the
reason why hospitality toward the stranger is so central in our
tradition. The stranger, both within and without, is what tends to
be most fearful for us. This is why “the holy is perceived as a
threatening power.” It comes in the guise of the unfamiliar and the
strange. When fear, rather than reverence and respect, dominates
our presence toward the stranger, we tend to react in “unfree,
fixated, and violent” ways. In fear we can only react; it is in
reverent and respectful dwelling that our capacity for free and
creative response is released.
The more we live in reverence of our own
originality, the more we experience that our originality is a
participation “in the original ground in which we all share.”
It is by dwelling in wonder that we become increasingly aware of
the fundamental originality of life. Reaction is a life of
repetition; response is a creative encounter with the original,
the always new. We often hear in the Psalms the call of the
first verse of Psalm 96: “Sing a new song to the
Lord.” For that place in us where we share in the life of the
Origin of all, each moment is new. For that place where we
react out of fear and prejudice, there is nothing but
repetition. Fear can be a powerful motivator in the moment, but
it cannot sustain distinctively human living. Only the wonder
that gives rise to appreciation, gratitude, and reverence can
lead us, in van Kaam’s words, to the deepening awareness of the
whole of life and its meaning.