THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE

Webster defines reverence as “an attitude of deep respect,” and it is this quality of goodness that concerns me in this essay, for I am disturbed these days over the gross disrespect shown both men and institutions. It seems that we are reaping the consequence of not training our children to respect law and order, womanhood, truth, work, age, lessons of history, and all that makes civilization meaningful, not to mention God and his community on earth. I say we have failed in training our children in reverence, as distinguished from mere teaching, for in training a child we are showing him by our own life and example as well as by words.

Our words often get far ahead of our practice. A dear sister in the lord revealed to me recently, with tear-dimmed eyes, that her son had married a Negro. “We tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen,” she said pathetically. She told of how she and her husband, both dedicated disciples of Jesus, had taught their children not to be prejudiced. Now that one of them has married a black person, she wonders if she overdid it. The truth is that most of us teach truths about justice and equality that we have not put into practice in our own private lives. “We must not be prejudiced,” we tell our family, then offer our protests at the thought of minorities moving into our community. “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one,” is a common judgment of un-prejudiced people.

It does not occur to us that this is one of the grossest forms of disrespect, to draw the line on a person because of the color of his skin, regardless of the reason. My reply to the sister who faces the prospect of having a black grandchild (horrors!) was this: “Accept that black girl with open arms and love her to death for Jesus’ sake. Think of how she feels, isolated and rejected. This is your chance to be like Jesus. After all, your son chose her to be his wife. This you must respect.” She will make it all right, for she loves Jesus, once she adjusts herself to a black grandchild. Ah, how prejudice has blinded us, victimizing even those of us who think we are free of it.

If I truly reverence a man, I do so because he is a person for whom Christ died. Color is beside the point, and it must remain beside the point at every level of human experience. The important thing about every man is that he is made in God’s image. This is the basis of reverence for human personality, that it is the creation of divine personality and has the mark of divinity upon it. This is the key that unlocks the box to all other values that we should respect. Property is to be respected since it is the fruit of man’s labor and the means of his livelihood and happiness. Education, freedom, money, civil rights, occupation, a man’s home, a man’s privacy, books, and time are all to be reverenced because they have to do with the dignity of manhood.

In living in a black world as I have the past three years as a professor in a Negro college, I have been impressed with the way the black person responds to being accepted in those little, less important ways. It is one thing to let his kids go to school with yours and to allow him to wait on you at Sears, but it is something else to accept him as a person in all those little ways that make life sweet. I enjoy complimenting black parents (white ones too of course) on the beauty and good behavior of their children, which I do sometimes in public places to total strangers. What a response I get, saying something nice about their children as they patiently await their food in a restaurant!

I notice that my colleagues at Bishop College respond to being confided in. Here is the real person-to-person relationship, when the weals and woes of life are shared together. You are at one with a black man when you can gossip in such a way, about both blacks and whites, that it is obvious that there are no racial overtones. I noticed this recently when a black teacher was complaining to me about another black teacher, really giving him hell about something. This was a man-to-man encounter in which there was no awareness of race. One man was mad at another man and he was telling a third man about it. Our laughter and tears together will transcend all differences in color once God has his way with us.

And I have learned the power of “the minor morals” in a black world, those courtesies that speak volumes --- thank you, please, and good morning, professor. And I have learned to say Sir and Mister so that it sounds the same way to blacks as to whites. I have a brother in the flesh, a business man, who has not reached the place where he can say “Yes, sir” to a Negro or even to address him as Mister. He tries to be courteous, but manages to avoid these terms that suggest an acceptance he is not yet ready for. I understand, bless his heart, for I know his background. But this should be no surprise to those who live far beyond the southland when the Gospel Guardian, from deep in the heart of Texas, runs an article by a prominent minister who admits to believing in white supremacy and insists that the Negro is inferior to him socially, even conceding that he is a racist. I appreciate the honesty but I am appalled by the irreverence, especially when he suggests that this is a Christian view.

If this minister could have some of my recent experiences at Bishop College, he would see things differently. I am not referring simply to the intellectual grace which I have witnessed in many Negroes, which the brother seems to be unaware of, but to the tender stories of person-to-person contact that can be just as real between blacks and whites as anyone else. There is one incident especially that I wish to share with you, for I shall always remember it as one of the sweetest things that ever happened to me anywhere.

It has to do with the fact that due to the financial plight of the college some of us newer professors, including many whites, may have to be dropped from the faculty. When the word got around that I would probably have to leave in order to make room for the black professors who have been on the faculty longer than I, a black professor, and a woman at that, offered to surrender her seniority and resign if it would mean that I could be kept on the faculty. “I believe his contribution to the college is so great that I want to do this,” she explained. You can imagine how such graciousness touched my old heart. It wasn’t that she supposed I would be unable to find work elsewhere, but she wanted me to stay at her own black college, and she was willing to give up her position to make it possible. I told my dear Ouida that in all my years of teaching that is surely the sweetest and tenderest thing that has ever happened to me, and it comes from a black woman. Colleges do not do business that way, of course, and I wouldn’t hear to it if they did, but the incident certainly says something about the meaning of black and white together. And it speaks to what I mean by the spirit of reverence.

I like to tell my children about the incident in Friendly Persuasion where the Quaker father of a family threatened by an invasion of Rebel forces from the south finally decides that, despite his pacifism, he will take gun in hand and fight. As he mounts his horse, ready to take off for the war, his young son says to him, “Daddy, shoot me a Rebel.” The father dismounts, draws his son close to him and says tenderly, “Son, don’t ever speak of a man that way.” It is the lesson I want my sons to learn: to treat every person with reverence, including the way they are referred to when they are absent.

A recent visitor in our home was talking about disposing of some of his property. “If nobody wants to buy it, I suppose I can give it to some Nigger,” he said. No doubt he considered himself charitable in the matter, but had my children heard it, I could well have said, as did the Quaker, “Son, don’t ever speak of a man like that.” It is to treat a man as something less than one for whom Christ died.

Goethe saw reverence as the heart and soul of the Christian religion, and we need to examine our ways to see if much of what we do is not a denial of this great principle. If we allow “the system” to stifle individuality and discourage personal growth, we behave irreverently. When we sacrifice truth for party loyalty and freedom for brotherhood acceptance, we show disrespect for our greatest heritage. Esau is not the only one in history guilty of selling his blessing for a mess of pottage. Heb. 12:15 describes Esau’s act as “forfeiting the grace of God,” which is another good definition of irreverence. Many a congregation of our people lose sight of its mission as a witnessing, redeeming, confessing community and concerns itself far too much with its own image and its own comforts. We often leave adequate buildings in communities where we ought to be in order to build something more pretentious. We have learned from our religious neighbors to think big and build big, and like our neighbors we spend most of what we have on ourselves. It may well. be Esau’s kind of irreverence.

Lest we forget that Isaiah’s cry to Israel about their irreverence can apply to us as well in these prosperous and perilous times:

“I was there to be sought by a people who did not ask, to be found by men who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here am I, here am I’, to a nation that did not invoke me by name.

I spread out my hands all day appealing to an unruly people who went their evil way, following their own devices.” (Isa. 65 ) — the Editor