What is Reverence? | flowering of holy perception to life

1.
Reverence is the flowering
of a surrendered heart
and love its fragrance.

Reverence, is a love affair
with existence,
with life,
with beauty,
the all-pervading Mystery.

Reverence is the presence
of awakened living.

- Reverend Cailean Benjamin

2.
Reverence is engaging in a form and depth of contact with Life that is well beyond the shell of form and into essence. Reverence is contact with the essence of each thing and person ... It is contact with the interior of its beingness.

Even if you cannot sense the interior, it is enough to know that the form, the shell, is merely an outer layer, and that underneath it the true power and essence of who a person is, or what a thing is, is present. That is what honored in reverence.

Reverence is an attitude of honoring life.

Whether a person is reverent depends essentially upon whether he or she accepts the principle of the sacredness of Life, any way that he or she defines sacred. Reverence is also simply the experience of accepting that all Life is, in and of itself of value.

Reverence is not respect. Respect is judgment. It is a response to the perception of qualities that we ourselves admire, or have been taught to admire. Qualities that are admired by the people of one culture may not be admired by the people of another culture, or by the people of subculture or by another generation of the same culture. Therefore, what is respected by some people may not be respected by others. It is possible to respect to one person and not respect another, but it is not possible to revere one person without revering every person.

Reverence is a perception, but it is a holy perception.

Without reverence, Life becomes a very cheap commodity.

If we perceived Life with reverence, and understood our evolutionary process, we would stand in awe at the experience of physical Life and walk the Earth in a very deep sense of gratitude.

Reverence is a perception of the soul. Reverence is a natural aspect of authentic empowerment because the soul reveres all of Life. There, when the personality is aligned with the soul, it cannot perceive Life except with reverence.

The decision to become a reverent person is essentially the decision to become a spiritual person.

- The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav