If we are lovingly devoted to our God, we can be sure that God inclines to us also in love. Reverence is the feeling we develop for whatever we call God out there in the universe. Since the reaction to reverence cannot itself be called reverence, we may not speak of a divine reverence toward humans. What, then, is precisely the opposite of reverence in this context? What is it that flows out to meet reverence when reverence seeks the Divine? It is might, the almighty power of the Divine. Reverence that we learn to feel in youth returns to us as strength for living in old age, and if we turn in reverence to the Divine, our reverence flows back to us as an experience of the Almighty. That is what we feel, whether we look up to the starry heavens in their endless glory and reverence goes out to all that lies around us, beyond our compass, or whether we look up to our invisible God, in whatever form, who pervades and animates the cosmos.
Source: "The Mission of Reverence" — lecture of October 28, 1909; from Love and Its Meaning in the World, p. 57
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