Some years ago, a parishioner gently offered his pastor a piece of criticism. It had to do with the way one of the rubrics in the weekly bulletin had for decades been phrased: an asterisk in the margin indicated those times when "the congregation reverently kneels."

"You can command people to kneel," said this lay theologian, "but you can't command that they be reverent about it."

Interesting observation. On the one hand he had a point: some people kneel humbly and reverently; others kneel haughtily (because kneeling is "liturgically correct"); some kneel tentatively and others unthinkingly; some reflectively and some reflexively. Directing them all to be reverent in their kneeling in no way assures that they will or are even capable of doing so. Reverence is not something you can simply conjure up in yourself at will, your will or that of another. And as anyone who has ever parented a child or adolescent knows, you can make and enforce rules about behavior and actions; attitude is another matter entirely.