Culture of adoration

WE need to cultivate this culture. I mean, to cultivate it with a sense of urgency, of having to make up for lost time. We have been remiss of this fundamental aspect of our life, and look at what we are having now. We are increasingly estranged from God.

Adoration is the primal attitude we ought to have, if we want to remain faithful and true to our identity not only as God’s creatures but also as God’s children. This is what our Catechism affirms—

“Adoration is the first attitude of man acknowledging that he is a creature before his Creator. It exalts the greatness of the Lord who made us and the almighty power of the Savior who sets us free from evil.” (CCC 2628)

In short, an abiding attitude of adoration, regardless of what we may doing at a given moment, makes us always united to God and converts all our activities into God’s work and not just our own.

Adoration is our way of entering into a life with God, which is what our life is all about. It’s a shared life, not just our own life. Thus, failing in that duty, we have no other possibility but to miss the boat, regardless of our brilliant performances in our earthly life.

Adoration is never an idle activity, completely useless and irrelevant especially to our very active life now. As the Catechism says, “Human life finds its unity in the adoration of the one God. The commandment to worship the Lord alone integrates man and saves him from an endless disintegration.” (2114)

It sharpens our concern for others, rather than separate us from them. “One cannot adore God without loving all men, his creatures.” (650) More, “the worship of the one God sets man free from turning in on himself, from the slavery of sin and the idolatry of the world.” (2097)

Our predicament is that we have been so wrapped up in ourselves that we have all but forgotten God and the duty we have to develop that relationship. It’s a self-absorption that is continually maintained through our worldly affairs.

Any reference of God likely falls along formalistic lines. There’s hardly any strand of truth to it. It’s just but a show.

This is, of course, unfortunate since without this fundamental attitude in place, our whole life would be handicapped, if not compromised. And the freefall to separation, alienation and then to hostility against God and everything about him, begins.

We need God’s grace for this to happen. But we can always assume that that grace is always given, and in abundance, since God has done everything, all the way to sending his Son who became man and ultimately died on the cross, to redeem us. He is unstinting of his grace.

The problem area is our own correspondence to that grace. For us to reciprocate to this boundless goodness of God, we need to be humble, and that is very difficult to do. Pride is our permanent enemy that we carry within ourselves. So the fight against it in all its forms, especially the subtle ones, should be relentless.

Again, this is what the Catechism says about the need to be humble to be able to adore—“To adore God is to acknowledge, in respect and absolute submission, the nothingness of the creature who would not exist but for God. To adore God is to praise and exalt him and to humble oneself…” (2097)

We need to pause and check ourselves to see if this humility is still functioning in our life. There are indications that it is going extinct, what with all the drive for purely worldly objectives. We have to reverse this rush to madness.

We have to find time to reflect and be recollected, to enter into some indescribable communion with God which is always possible, what with all the sacraments and his word and his Church made available to us.

I suggest that we spend some time, not really a lot, getting into a purely adoration mode, perhaps in front of the Blessed Sacrament in a church or adoration chapel. This can truly recover our true spiritual bearing.

Try meditating beautiful prayers and hymns, like the Adoro te devote of St. Thomas Aquinas, dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament. The lines just spring from a heart full of faith and love—

“Adoro te devote / latens Deitas… Hidden here before me, Lord, I worship you… / Seeing, touching, tasting, these are all deceived / Only through the hearing can it be believed…