The Value of Reverence in Writing
“Leadership does not serve small goals any more than reverence stands of awe of small things.” — Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Restoring a Forgotten Virtue (2001)
It was in the context of this quote that I understood that what I needed to do: I needed to lead myself through consciously reverent writing. I needed to write the words that I needed to hear, which are the same as those the world more deserves to hear. This act of finding the Truth and then telling it — that is the symbolic showing through which different cultures can merge, interact, and combine into a greater union. Since I’d long felt reverence toward the written word—but I did not have the words for this virtue either, until I read Woodruff’s Reverence (2001)—at the end of the day I felt like I needed to channel that reverence through the words that I wrote.
Maybe I’m just too dense to do anything other than write in order to understand things, including myself and my metaphysics and virtue ethics. According to David Brooks, “To be healed is to be broken up. The proper course is outward.” I am in veritable love with this idea. Since I feel simply too good about the process of writing (something that most folks normally hate), and I feel at my best when I am able to communicate ideas that relate most directly to the art of leadership.
Thing is, that Matt DiGeronimo quotation is right, and I feel it is self evident: We face an enormous paucity of professional leadership in society. How should we expect people to lead? What are the professional obligations of moral leadership? I believe the roots of these questions have grown week — there has been an evaporation of moral virtue as little more than a squishy term in modern society. This is partially due to our lack of appreciation for the written word, which many of us now find ourselves unable to feel reverence toward. In navigating the Anthropocene, we seem to constantly reformulate the same cultural responses to our fill the gap previously fulfilled by nature’s grace. The feeling is one of gnostic lost-ness — a premordial sense of belonging. But I also believe this sense of place stems from a very deeply rooted (and mostly accurate) perception that many of our own leaders have failed us. We are lied to constantly by false images and ideas, and this diminishes our appreciation of both the written word and the reverence needed to fully appreciate the words that do matter.
When we don’t have reverence for writing, we fail to understand the gravity of truth. We fail to confront the truths about the society we live in. As an unconscious defense mechanism, we have made ourselves immune to terms that convey falsehoods; this can be witnessed in the absence of truth in much modern marketing. If our leaders were comfortable enough to write more publicly and in a more long-form fashion about their thoughts, perspectives and beliefs, we would be able to find them more inspiring and authoritative — but of course most do not do this, because it would entail a degree of self-inspection that many find untenable, because the reflective value of writing has been so far diminished in modern society.
I write these words with such certainty because I’ve experienced this myself. Despite receiving plaudits for my writing, I simply didn’t write for a long time, because I didn’t even think that the written word was the best way to express my ideas. Instead, I needed a praxis through which I could learn about the world, and this took the shape of scholarship and work. These were, I now realize, cop-outs: I didn’t even know what ideas I wanted to express, because I lacked the language to understand myself, because I had not been actively trying to discover them through writing. So instead, I put my head down and worked my ass off.
In light of this realization, the more I began to write about my own experiences, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs, the better equipped I found myself to make examinations about the world. It was through this means that I was able to lead myself, by writing, out of depression.