Reverence is not a performance. It is not a style. It is not something we add to worship like a garnish. It is the condition in which worship becomes possible. Without it, there is still music, still movement, still activity, but the heart is closed.
I have been a priest for over twenty years. I have prayed in cathedrals and in ruined chapels. I have offered Mass with a choir and with none. I have seen reverence arise in unexpected places. And I have also seen it vanish where it once seemed indestructible.
Reverence is not a mood. It is the soul’s recognition of presence, holy presence. It begins with the eyes lowered, the breath slowed, the hands stilled. It is the body’s consent to the mystery before it. It is not taught by instruction but by exposure. One learns reverence by being near it.
We are no longer near it. At least not often. I do not say this with bitterness, only with grief. Reverence is no longer the atmosphere of most worship. We have become unguarded, casual, efficient. The liturgy has become a project. The sanctuary has become a platform. Silence has become an interruption. What was once set apart has become merely available.
This is not the fault of any one priest or any one generation. It is a cultural loss. Reverence is not needed to grow a parish. It does not appear in committee minutes. It cannot be measured or packaged. And so it has quietly departed, like incense in a draft.
I remember when I was a boy and entered a chapel for the first time. The stone was cold. The windows were dark. The air did not move. There was no music, no ceremony. But I felt something. I did not know the word, but now I know it: it was reverence. Not imposed. Not instructed. Simply there.
We try to replace reverence with other things. We replace it with enthusiasm, with welcome, with relevance. But these are not equivalents. They are not even approximations. They do not open the soul. They entertain, they gather, they fill the silence, but they do not open. Reverence opens.
The cost of its collapse is not stylistic. It is spiritual. When we lose reverence, we lose the sense of God’s otherness. We lose the sense that we are not the measure of what is true. We lose the instinct to kneel. We forget what it feels like to bow the head and let the eyes fall, not out of shame, but in recognition of what is holy.
There are still places where reverence lingers. I have seen it in elderly hands tracing the sign of the cross slowly and deliberately. I have seen it in children who fall silent without being asked. I have seen it in churches where nothing is said because everything has already been spoken by the walls, the candles, the wood.
We do not need to innovate our way back to reverence. We need to remember. We need to choose silence over commentary, gesture over explanation, stillness over speed. Reverence is not a statement. It is a room left open for God.
I do not hope for a return to the past. I hope we will return to the presence of God.
And no one returns to God standing tall. Reverence bends us low, not because we are worthless, but because He is holy. That is not a doctrine. It is a truth the soul knows in its bones.