Reverence towards God and Others

We’ve been exploring three attitudes that St. Ignatius of Loyola suggests as ways of entering into life with a sense of purpose and direction. In the previous post we talked about the attitude of Praise towards God. Feel free to go back and read those two posts. Here we will talk about the attitude of Reverence towards God and others. 

Towards God is the recognition of God being totally other, even while we know he is close to us and cares about us. We cannot control God, we cannot fully grasp God. God is greater than my problems and greater than my ideas of what God should do. 

The attitude of Reverence towards our brothers and sisters has to do with the idea that I never will fully understand another person: their thoughts, their story, their inner life, what God is doing with them. So, I will not try to pretend I do. This is the basis of respect in our differences. I will not try to change you or force you to be more like I think you should be. This attitude can be difficult to practice especially towards the people we are closest to because we assume we do know them, and we might know them well, but it’s worth remembering that I will never fully know another person, and I will never fully understand what God is doing with them.

Fr. Pepe Ruiz, SJ