Rediscovering reverence as a form of peace-making...

Our two dogs - one old, one new - are outside my study window this morning as I prepare for tonight's class on rediscovering reverence.  They are a study in contrasts.  Casey, 15+ years, is a mellow, cranky and well-behaved old friend.  He has a routine - and likes it. He is also just a bit peeved that life has been turned upside-down by the new pup.  Lucie is just 10 weeks old - a critical time in her young life for socialization and learning order - so she is funny, bratty, playful and filled with more energy than any of us imagined.  Thanks be to God, after a week, both dogs are making room for one another is small but significant ways.

Author, James Taylor (not of sweet baby fame), writes in The Spirituality of Pets:  "Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase: nature red in tooth and claw.... But, in fact, it isn't.  Nature has evolved an astonishingly sophisticated system of cooperation and, yes, even trust."  Without sentimentality or schlock, he goes on to note:

On a safari in Africa, I was amazed to see cheetahs and gazelles drinking from the same water hole. Or lions sunning themselves on a rocky outcrop while wildebeest grazed nearby. The prey animals are wary, but they co-exist with their predators.  With rare exceptions, wild predators do not kill for the sake of killing. As long as there's an abundance of food available, they're prepared to live and let live.  It makes me wonder, sometimes, if the Hebrew prophet Isaiah had seen something similar, when he wrote about lions and lambs feeding together without fear.

Without overstating the case, I can't help but notice that when life is in balance - when God's abundance within and beyond is respected and nourished - there is space for everyone at the table:  friends and strangers, old dogs and new, predators and prey.  And this balance is so easily interrupted by not paying attention.  Last night, after dinner, we were watching an old Poirot mystery about the venerable detective's vacation on the island of Rhodes.  With great appreciation for history and detail, the show offers us a glimpse of the extreme arrogance of the English at the height of their empire - and the disdain and imbalance it created among the indigenous people.  Dianne said, "No wonder that young man screamed at you in disgust when we were in Turkey; he thought you were English and they have been such total shits to so many people - using them and discarding them - without any apparent remorse."

Or appreciation for reverence, yes?  Reverence takes time - and commitment - and a willingness to learn from even the least among us.  It demands that we get out into the wild and listen and learn.  It asks that we nourish a sense of awe for even the smallest blessings in life. Ralph Heintzman writes:

The more we pay attention to this inner feeling or spirit of reverence, the more we notice the sense of rightness or fulfillment that comes with it, and the way in which it seems to respond to some of our deepest needs. Paradoxically, we find we are most at home with ourselves when we are able, with dignity and conviction, to acknowledge our place in some kind of larger order we did not create and do not control.

This morning's NYTimes carried an article by Bill Keller about how he experienced this connection with the mystery bigger than the self through the good death of a Anthony Gilbey. (check it out @ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/opinion/keller-how-to-die.html?ref=opinion) He closes his reflection like this:

During Anthony Gilbey’s six days of dying he floated in and out of awareness on a cloud of morphine. Unfettered by tubes and unpestered by hovering medics, he reminisced and made some amends, exchanged jokes and assurances of love with his family, received Catholic rites and managed to swallow a communion host that was probably his last meal. Then he fell into a coma. He died gently, loved and knowing it, dignified and ready. 
      

“I have fought death for so long,” he told my wife near the end. “It is such a relief to give up.” 

      

We should all die so well.

 

He was connected to a love greater than himself.  He was in touch with reverence. And he was in balance with the sacred rhythm of life, death and life beyond death. 

 

Rediscovering reverence, nourishing the habits of awe in a community of faith, slowing down and unplugging from the madness of our culture, finding time to play with (and train) our two dogs, listening quietly to a person in pain and loving my family have gradually become my deepest commitments.  They are, in fact, the way I live into peace-making (along with music) these days.  There is a time and place for protests.  There is a need for influencing public policy, too.  But today I sense this must be grounded in the rhythm of reverence rather than obsession or fear. 

 

One evangelical blogger, Donald Miller, wrote last week of "the deception of urgency."

 

If you’d have asked me when I left Portland whether I was stressed, I’d have told you I wasn’t. But the island revealed my stress level was at an all-time high. I only knew that when I began to calm down. There’s something soothing about the ocean and the forest. It’s as though God reminds us through creation all things live, all things die, and He is in control...Don’t let urgency keep you from your spouse, your kids, creation or the God who made them all. You may find, like me, you get more done when your soul is fed first.

 

St. Paul put it like this 2000 years ago:

 

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.