Gratitude & Reverence

Gratitude and reverence are related virtues.

Gratitude recognizes that everything is a gift that isn't deserved. Reverence recognizes that everything has a significance that hasn't been grasped.

Attitudes contrary to gratitude are squandering and entitlement. Attitudes contrary to reverence are dismissiveness and contempt.

Just as one who lacks gratitude cannot receive more gifts, one who lacks reverence cannot receive more understanding.

Irreverence is an intellectual vice of an adolescent mind. "I am not young enough to know everything" goes the quip attributed to Oscar Wilde. How often we look at our younger selves, at how sure we were that we had grasped the meaning of things, how impervious we were to evidence of the contrary, how our parents and other adults were idiots if they disagreed with us, how their problems were trivial and could easily be overcome if they were our problems.

Irreverence is blinding. Who cannot see that there is more to be seen cannot see what is more to see.

Attitudes opposed to reverence on the other extreme, opposite of dismissiveness and contempt, are idolatry and superstition. These oppose reverence by assigning false and undue significance to a thing. Dismissiveness and contempt say there is nothing to grasp or nothing worth grasping in a thing; idolatry and superstition grasp or hope to grasp in a thing what is not there. The former lead to lack of understanding; the latter lead to false understanding.