A lost virtue

Christian Century, April 24, 2002 by Barbara Brown Taylor

The principle object of reverence, he says, "is Something that reminds us of human limitations," so that a scientist may be as reverent toward the truth as a believer is toward God, and a person's reverence in nature as virtuous as reverence in church, Indeed, Woodruff's book is filled with stories from every arena of lived experience, as he tracks reverence through classrooms, voting booths, redwood forests and string quartets. By his last page, he has bridged not only religions and cultures but also academic disciplines and time. To read this small book is like sitting in on a master class taught by someone who is as at home on the planet as he is in Plato's mind.

But Woodruff's chief concern is neither to educate nor to entertain. Rather, he seeks to raise up a forgotten virtue that holds promise for the future of human life on earth. Without reverence, he says, things fall apart. Families suffer. Governments suffer. Creation suffers. Furthermore, there is no going back to a time--even an illusory time--when one religion's rules were enough to save the world.

"Members of a modern society do not all worship together," Woodruff observes, "and some do not worship at all, so we need to look for reverence in surprising places. Otherwise we may truly lose the ability to bind ourselves together as a society through common virtues." Learning to share bare reverence with people who do not share our faith may turn out to be the most important thing any of us can do, both for ourselves and for all that we revere.

Reviewed by Barbara Brown Taylor, who teaches at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia.

Icon and Evidence.

By Margaret Gibson. Louisiana State University Press, 107 pp., $18.95 paperback.

EACH AND EVERY method of prayer has but one objective; to find the heart and alert it." This observation from the contemporary Cistercian monk Andre Louf might apply also to poetry, as both prayer and poetry ask of us a certain vigilance, and a willingness to pay attention to what really matters. Both are intent on penetrating our usual distracted state and bringing us back to the wellsprings of existence, the great "I am" that simply and profoundly is. The poems in Icon and Evidence are exceptionally vigilant, and also prayerful; in the opening lines of her first poem, "Comet," Margaret Gibson touches on themes of reflection and reverence that inform the entire book: "I wait until last light opens/into an obedient listening, / a reverie that includes the rapt attention / of the moon ..."

Though Gibson's prayers are not traditional, in essence, Icon and Evidence is a collection of psalms, meditations and collects. It's four sections, titled "Canticle," "Complaint," "Confession" and "Compline," also contain three epistles, two to poets who clearly and felicitously serve as Gibson's literary mentors--Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robinson Jeffers--and the third to a field in rural Pennsylvania: "We met in the blackberry blood on my tongue, / in the burning brand of the sun on my back, in the shadows of high rolling clouds nomadic, / your body and mine wild lace silver rod, heal-all and everlasting ..."