This is something we aren’t used to. Prayer, most of us instinctively believe, is asking for something: either simple petition (for ourselves) or intercession (for someone else). But adoration? It conjures up images of people from another age kneeling for hours before a monstrance, a crucifix, or an icon, with a kind of rapt attention that could not be further from our own tendency to the quick coffee-break tweet or text. There seems to be a huge distance between them and us.
In what way is it accessible to us? If we are contemplative monks or nuns, it is part of our world quite naturally – though it may still be hard to achieve. If we are among the very devout – I know a woman who was a Carmelite novice for 6 years, and even after that went to Mass daily for at least 5 more – the liturgical and devotional rhythm of the Church will at the least suggest it on certain occasions, such as the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and somewhere in our ecclesiastical world there will be introductions to it .
But for the rest of us, devout without always inhaling, stumbling along what is often a rocky path, busy with countless details of what a friend of mine calls the Humdrumlies – what of us? The Prayer of Adoration seems almost like an unattainable luxury. “If we had time….” we murmur. And even those of us who have learnt from time to time to take an hour for Francis de Sales’ meditation find the thought of Adoration as a form of prayer, well, extreme.
Perhaps one way in is the prayer of thanksgiving. This at least releases us from the asking mode, and is still something we intuitively understand. The other day I – well into my seventies, far from willowy and reasonably arthritic – slipped and fell in the shower. As I got up with no more than a slightly bruised feeling, I instinctively said, “Wow, thank you, Lord – this is how many of us wrinklies die.” Whatever we intelligently believe about the way God does or does not micromanage the world, when we have a narrow escape or win the lottery or find that someone we have adored from afar actually returns our feelings, it is a common human reaction to give thanks.
If we think about this, and go beyond the immediate, we feel thankful about so many things; and going to a level deeper than that, we can relate our thanksgiving to the fact that we have faith, that we believe, that we have been baptised, that we feel fulfilled about going to church; and if our discernment is very sharpened, we can give thanks for the gift given to us on the Cross.
Now think of the Eucharist. It moves from penitence (housecleaning, as our priest says: wiping the mud off your shoes as you come in) to glorifying the God that pardons us, to learning Scripture in readings, to being helped to understand what we’ve learnt, in a homily, to summing it up in a Creed. Then it moves on to prayer. First the prayer of intercession, moving us out of ourselves in asking God’s mercy on the world; then the prayer of consecration.
And it is within that – at the moment of consecration, when one can at least imagine (as a Zwinglian might) and at most know (as a Catholic does) that the Son of God (and thus the Trinity) is truly, really and actually present here in front of us – that we can perhaps glimpse the Prayer of Adoration. As the priest lifts up the consecrated Elements, we kneel (or some of us do) and fix them with our gaze, and feel in a new and very specific and present way the Presence of Christ – and thus the here-and-now reality of the gift of God’s love. And so, for a brief moment (because modern Eucharists are much too fast), we sense something beyond thanksgiving: the Prayer of Adoration. Just being there and worshipping that Presence, that cosmic Glory which makes itself small enough to fit into the palm of my crossed hands.
After that, there are further stages, other elements to Adore. If you were brought up Protestant, the Sacred Heart is harder; but when you learn to think in symbols, not to translate them but to let their physicality continue to be even as you understand and feel the inward meaning (which is, after all, what you do with the Eucharist: a sacrament is “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” but the point is, it’s both) – well, then you’ve at least set a wobbly foot on the path of Adoration. A long road, but we know where it ends: read Revelations.
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