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| Mystery and Reverence in Family Ritual by Sam Mackintosh from Family Festivals, Vol.2, No.3 (out of print) Whether we are gathered around the altar of a church or our supper table at home, the primary attitude in religious ritual is reverence. Reverence is a sense of the holy, of the sacred, the numinous. It is a feeling for the "beyond" in our midst, for the "more than meets the eye." It is an awareness of the Mystery which always and everywhere confronts us. Some who read these words will wonder what they mean. Reverence, like love, is not something we can understand from a definition. Either we know reverence by experience, or the descriptive terms lack meaning.
If we are concerned, then, for the religious development of our children, we must bring them to the experience of reverence. But again, like love, reverence cannot be taught. It can only be evoked, called forth from the depths of our children's hearts. And to do this we need to keep in mind three things. First, our children are not alien to mystery as something to be reasoned out, a puzzle to be solved like an Agatha Christie "mystery" where we try to figure out logically, based on clues, ""who-done-it." Or in a religious context, we think of mystery as something like the doctrine of the Holy Trinity that we "have to believe even though we can't understand it." (What an injustice that we were taught such a thin, impoverished meaning of the word! Be sure you don't pass on that meaning of "mystery" to your children.) A mystery is something rich and full, inexhaustible in meaning. Mystery is our name for whatever is so filled with significance that we can never get to the bottom of it. It is not "something that we can't understand," but something that we can never stop understanding. For children, life itself-their existence, the world they gradually find themselves a part of, their very bodies and minds-is a mystery. They have no need to be "taught" reverence.
Another thing to keep in mind is that religious ritual, whether in church or home, involves nothing out of the ordinary. Our religious rituals are everyday actions: we hold hands, sing, light candles, bring food to the table, read aloud, tell stories, say words of thanks, share bread and drink and thoughts. Our family rituals then, involve no unusual activities. It is how we do what we do that makes the difference. St. Benedict, in his Holy Rule, tells his monks that the posts and pans of the monastery kitchen must be handled in the same way as the sacred vessels of the altar. The sense of the mystery of the presence of God in our lives is expressed not by what we do but how we do it. Reverence is expressed by doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way: carefully, slowly, attentively, graciously. Not theatrically or artificially, of course, but lovingly, with care. It is as simple as that. How we do what we do makes all the difference. It is itself a great mystery that our children's experience of reverence, the mystery of God's presence in our lives, should be dependent on something as fundamentally human as the loving care and gracious attention with which we do our home rituals, that it comes down to nothing more that our loving attempts to do ordinary things extraordinarily well.  CLF Home Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823 Phone: (617) 948-6166 · Fax: (617) 523-4123 · Email: clf@uua.org Address of this page: http://www.uua.org/clf/connections/Parenting/reverence.html | ||||