Reverence is deep respect, combined with the feeling of awe. It shows both honour and wonder towards something. I feel reverence most when I’m in nature, others feel it for a god, an idea, an experience or a person. It can be experienced individually, or it can be shared by a group of people as a social experience.
A lot of where reverence seems to come from stems from cues we notice as children. The respect that the adults around us pay to something, or not, and the reverent way with which they speak about them seems to determine our own feelings. As time goes on, we revere less. Water in one culture might be sacred, and in another entirely insignificant. I’m really interested in how we might redesign the culture of groups to revere the right things.
For example, we could decide to revere adaptive skills that benefit the group. We could also choose to revere freedom as an idea more than we do. I’ve written about the nature of honour, competence and respect, but I think reverence is something else entirely. One does not revere your doctor for giving you medicine. But you might revere someone for the effect it has on your life, and what it implies about their skills. You might not even revere the effect, but revere the sacrifices they make.
A theme overall that I notice is that people seem less willing to give each other dignity and respect when they belong to groups outside of their own. Modern life has become more plural, but also more tribal as people try to cope with the complexity. Dignity and respect could be downstream from reverence. We used to revere older people as wise, and now I see nothing like that. Is it because older people are no longer wise, or something else?
When I’m in nature, I can’t help but to revere its sophistication. Animals often carry nothing with them, living only to eat and reproduce. Very often when they have an abundance of resources, they will help their kin rather than hoarding it. Their only choice is to work with their natural surroundings, be perceptive, work to the extent it’s necessary and cooperate or compete as is appropriate to their drives. Plants and animals seem to have living figured out in a way we have forgotten.
It seems like one way to tap into reverence is simplicity. If you only have one cup, man you’re really going to appreciate what it does for you. If you have 100, the loss of one wouldn’t change anything for you practically - you might not even notice. Maybe there’s something about scarcity, when we choose it for ourselves, that would make us more capable of reverence. Maybe we are simply too total in our distractions. That starts to veer into gratitude territory, but reverence is about awe. One can revere the old testament god without feeling gracious.
I can imagine that part of the feedback loop people feel when experiencing depression would be an erosion or total disappearance of reverence. I think it’s essential to our souls to have something that consistently makes us reverent. For me, technology can erode that. While it’s useful and powerful, I never feel reverence for it anymore. Natural is the opposite. As my life goes on I feel more things, more positive things, more powerful and spiritual things when I am in nature. It allows me to consistently tap into reverence in a way I find satisfying.
In Dune there’s many allusions to reverence but a few in particular that come to mind that relate to the Fremen. Fremen are desert nomadic people who have learned to work with the harsh environment of the planet Arrakis. In one scene, a man’s job is to water 100 trees. Paul asks him to stop so the water can be saved for people, and the man says there trees are sacred to the people and they would rather die of thirst than take their water. In another, Stilgar tells Lady Jessica something similar about water reverence, that when someone dies they return their water to the well and no one even dying of thirst would ever drink it.
Fremen are in the books and movie positioned as the overlooked religious minority peasant class with very little resources. A direct allusion is drawn between that barren, monastic, survivalist way of life and their capacity for reverence. It’s clear that those things are not necessarily required to experience reverence, but also that maybe reverence is a form of human enjoyment that can be experienced even in destitution. There isn’t very much that’s good about not having enough of the resources you need, so I find it quite interesting to consider.
I think reverence is something we should focus our awareness on to explore more than we do. In particular, what conditions create the feeling of reverence for us most consistently? What reverence do we experience? How much of it comes from social expectations (e.g. organized religion) and how much comes from individual experience? What can we do to improve our relationship with reverence, and to experience it in more situations? What emotional barriers are there? Some questions I intend to explore.