The Attention That Remembers
Reverence, and America's 250th Birthday
“A prospect into futurity in America, is like contemplating the heavens through the telescopes of Herschell. Objects stupendous in their magnitudes and motions strike us from all quarters, and fill us with amazement! When we recollect that the wisdom or the folly, the virtue or the vice, the liberty or servitude, of those millions now beheld by us, only as Columbus saw these times in vision, are certainly to be influenced, perhaps decided, by the manners, examples, principles, and political institutions of the present generation, that mind must be hardened into stone that is not melted into reverence and awe.” - John Adams
Reverence is attentive awe or respect. The giving of oneself to something or someone that is, in one sense, “above” and, in another, “better”. We don’t give ourselves to that kind of attention much anymore. It requires us all to be still, to breathe steadily, and for many, the ability to still our ever-shifting gaze. The word itself carries its own instruction. Revereri—to stand in awe before, to regard again with a certain holy hesitation. The “re-” suggests a second look, a looking that has already been interrupted by the recognition that what is before us exceeds our first, utilitarian glance. In the presence of the holy, this becomes explicit: the seraphim cover their faces not because God is a threat to be managed, but because overwhelming worth (glory) elicits a response that is neither fear nor affection in the ordinary sense. It is the fitting posture of the creature before the Creator. All other reverence is, in one way or another, an echo of that original posture. Reverence, therefore, differs from several near neighbors that often masquerade in its place. It is not sentimentality, which softens the other to make it more palatable to our feelings. It is not nostalgia, which rearranges the past to flatter the present. It is not ideological certainty, which already knows what it will find and therefore never truly stands before anything new. And it is not mere politeness, which can be performed while the heart remains elsewhere. Reverence is costly because it requires us to let the other remain other. It costs us the satisfaction of having explained everything, of having placed everything in its proper category, of having made the world safe for our projects.
For many decades now, I have had the privilege of playing taps at military funerals. My story was published in the New York Times last November, and it details how deeply I am affected by playing a small part in the closing of each hero’s life. The sounding of Taps is an act of honor precisely because it is an act of reverence. It does not try to make sense of death. It simply marks that a particular death, in a particular body, at a particular time, still speaks to the living. The family and friends that surround the casket or urn are saddened or even possibly shocked by the death; however, their collective attention creates a rare and unique space. All I can say after experiencing so many funerals myself is that it becomes a moment in time that feels holy and set apart. It is in those moments that we become fully aware of something bigger, better, and more significant. It is also a moment when we are fully transparent with others and ourselves.
The republic the founders launched 250 years ago presupposed citizens capable of this posture. They spoke of rights “endowed by their Creator” and of a government instituted to secure those rights. That language assumes a world in which some things are not ours to invent or to discard at will. It assumes a people who can still stand before a law they did not write, and before ancestors they did not choose, and say, however imperfectly, “Here you are. We are here before you.”
America’s two hundred and fiftieth year will be filled with speeches, parades, and fireworks. It will be rich in content and shallow in reverence unless we recover the capacity to attend in this older way. The danger is not that we will forget the founding documents. The danger is that we will treat them as material for our present arguments rather than as an inheritance that makes a claim upon us. Reverence does not prevent argument; it prevents the reduction of argument to power. It keeps the conversation alive across generations because it remembers that the dead are not raw material either. Reverence cannot be faked for long because it is not a technique. It is a recognition that the world is not, finally, our project. That recognition is frightening to the part of us that wants to be sovereign. It is also, paradoxically, the beginning of freedom.