Revere Reverence

You may feel reverence in a dream when you experience the presence of a great and  holy being, or when entering a church or celebrating mass. If so it suggests you are ready to feeling yourself open to the great mystery Life presents us with. For reverence shows an open hearted relationship that allows you to receive something of what you felt reverence for – greatness, holiness or a sense of God.

But reverence can be called from within us when we see the enormity of the universe, the stars, or when we witness some of life great events, like the birth and growth of a child, a foal. We can feel reverence when we experience the mystery of ourselves.

Example: It was a documentary called ‘Passport to the Universe,’ about a journey to the cosmos with Tom Hank’s voice narrating.  I remember that I was rather lonely and sad for no particular reason and I was going on a date with myself to the planetarium.  In the dark planetarium, the stellar night sky covered the dome like a real night sky.  There was a grand zooming out process.  Starting with a person in a house to his city, to his country, continent, the earth, the solar system, our Milky Way galaxy, and to Local Group (the cluster10), to supercluster and at last to the observable universe.  Watching the earth and our galaxy disappearing into a point as the zoom gets larger into the cosmos, I was overcome with a surging emotion in my chest.  Instead of deepening my despair, a grand sense of relief overwhelmed me, a sense of gratitude, a sense of the Holy.  It is hard to describe or explain.  Opening the knots in my heart, tears surged up because…  it was so beautiful.  I was infinitely alone yet infinitely not.  Coming out to the streets of NYC, everything and everyone was a wonder.  We are utterly insignificant in the scheme of things.  And I was elevated.  The Earth is so beautiful and our lives are so precious in its fragility. The journey offered me an insight to how to live.  To live fully the precious life while it is gifted to me.  It might all be a chance of chaos and atomic collocations but what a chance that we are! — By Grace Park her Honors Seminar Spring 2003

The wonder we feel when we are not trapped by speculations uttered by theorists about the meaningless of life give rose to the feeling of reverence. Reverence opens a door walking through which me become acquainted with a greater wisdom than we are usually allowed.

Barbara Sproul, in Primal Myth, claims that the truth of myth is experiential.  If it is not applied to life, the myth is pointless and meaningless.  If you don’t know how to swim at a sinking ship, all knowledge of science is meaningless. “While the worldly is meaningless, our experiences of the world are full of meaning.  People, their cultures, and nature itself are all revelations of the Holy, occasions in which the transcendent absolute is immanently manifest.”  We have examined that science offers no factual ground of being.  Then it must be found in the spiritual realm, the inexplicable domain.  The upper hand of myth is that it offers the ground of being.  It shows ‘how life is a symbol to be lived’ in Sproul’s words.

One may therefore feel a person is holy or revered in dreams as we live our symbols in dreams. Cuna Indians of Panama, where a young girl’s first period is the occasion for a joyous four-day celebration by all the people of her island and the nearby islands. They revere the Earth Mother and believe she came to create humans and all of the land and sea animals through the power of her menstrual functioning.

Many cultures revere their departed ancestors, so much so in some societies that they are regarded as quasi deities. As beings who now reside with the gods, they are thought to have access to powers and information unavailable to ordinary mortals. Hence, they are invoked to protect and guide the living. The photo shows food left for ancestors in Japan.

Many societies respect and revere birds and animals for their fine qualities such as strength, courage, cunning, keenness of vision, speed, and accuracy; yet the so-called “civilised” societies tend to look down on the animal kingdom as something to be exploited for food, fur; tusks, or whatever. Perhaps because they lack vital senses. We are told we have only five senses – sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. We point these out because they have physical organs to deal with each sense. But they never mention the sense of balance which has a physical organ in the ear. But we have finer senses, the mind which is a super sense, and we have many other senses which are projected from the well developed and mature mind, and the sense of reverence is one.