THINKING IT THROUGH (2): ADORATION

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.

THE PRAYER OF ADORATION

"Ecce Panis Angelorum" (Behold the Bread of Angels), engraving by F.M.S. (probably Swiss) 1887.

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 yesterday’s 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 forgives 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’a 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 making 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. It ends in Joy.

Hat Tip: Ian Jackson reminds me that F.M.S. was the usual signature of the Marist Fathers: Fratres Maristae a Scholis. And this engraving, like others in the same style that can be found on the Web, came (I believe) from a Swiss Marist Missal. 

COMPLETING THE TRIANGLE

Caspar David Friedrich, "Angels in Adoration"

In my two posts on prayer I wrote about the prayer of petition and the prayer of thanksgiving. The triangle, or trinity, of prayer now needs to be completed by paying attention to what is, in the tradition of the Church, considered the highest and most celestial form of prayer, the prayer of adoration.

In petition, we ask, we beg, we beseech; and we need to learn what to ask for, how to ask for it, and how to deal with the result. In thanksgiving, we say Thank you; and we need to learn about illogicality an d discretion. What is the prayer of adoration?

Latin ad-oro originally means “to speak to”, then becomes “to address a request or prayer to” and eventually takes on the meaning of “to worship, to venerate”. In Greek there are the verbs sebomai and proskunein, the latter implying a physical movement such as kneeling or prostration. Whereas the English word “worship” is originally a noun meaning something like “value-ness”, greatness, honourableness, and later becomes a verb meaning to honour, to venerate.

Somehow, the prayer of adoration is well beyond that. Why? Because it is disinterested, unlike petition and thanksgiving. It is the pure, natural condition for a created being: turning to the light and warmth of its Creator as the sunflower turns to the sun. In part it is simply basking; but there is in adoration a return movement of joy, of pleasure, of active giving. What do we give when we adore? As the Psalm says, “of thine own do we give thee” – there is nothing we can give God that did not come from Him, that is not always already His. And yet there is joy in giving back that borrowed joy.

The prayer of adoration is also contemplation. As the sunflower contemplates the sun, the human soul contemplates the living God. Often, His light is too bright for us to regard directly; so we contemplate Him in His creation. Thomas Traherne, whom I have had occasion to quote before, did so and managed to express it gloriously in human words. Others have contemplated God’s glory and have fallen silent before it. Still others have lost themselves, lost their selves, in becoming one with it, as a comet might fall into the sun.

The prayer of adoration is the prayer of the angels. It is the prayer of all those seen by St John in his vision of Revelation, those who surround the throne of the Almighty, those whose joy is eternal in their unceasing song. Nevertheless, this prayer of adoration has roots. It grows out of the prayer of thanksgiving: part of the joy of contemplating God is the immense gratitude for receiving all that we now give back in praise; for His creation, its beauty, its emotion, all that we see and love in life. And the prayer of thanksgiving, in turn, has its roots in the prayer of petition; for we are given what we first asked, or we are given what it did not even occur to us toask, or what we dared not ask. And so the trinity of prayer is complete; and the immeasurable, unspeakable, huge silent light of God is all in all.

Image courtesy of Abuto George Evangelical Ministry