Reverence
Silent worship, about which I wrote last month is a special form of reverence, which perhaps needs a bit more attention because to-day’s culture seems to have just about lost the idea completely. The American constitution has a preamble stating that it is self-evident that all men are born equal in the sight of God. (No reference here to women!). I suspect this has led to the modern attitude that everyone is as good, important, wise and honourable or dishonourable as everybody else.
This leads to the idea that deference is something to be abhorred and reverence becomes meaningless unless it be towards inanimate objects such as fine art or the wonders of nature. The Christian teaching about equality is not quite what Jefferson wrote for the US constitution. It is that all people are equally loved by God, who cares for the just and the unjust but does not say there is no difference between them.
The lack of deference leads to chaos in schools, which have to insist on it, sometimes sadly against the wishes of parents who occasionally labour under the delusion that their own offspring are somehow always better than their teachers. Such a lack of respect would of course be ruin for the armed forces or the police. My own view is that the practice of deference is intrinsically valuable. This is the main reason why I’m an ardent supporter of the monarchy, which helps us to remember that we are not all equal and that it is not for nothing that Christians of all kinds speak of Jesus as their Lord. In the presence of my superiors I do well to hold my tongue for much of the time. This is especially the case when my superior is my Lord and God.
A wise old owl lived in an oak.
The more he heard, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why don’t we copy that wise old bird?
–Peter Graham
