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January 7, 2018“When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him.” (Mt. 2.11)
To fall down and worship, to bow down before someone, this is a perfect gesture of adoration, of losing sight of oneself before the mystery of God. By this gesture the body proclaims wordlessly that God is God.
How is adoration related to the greatest commandment, that is, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”? Elizabeth of the Trinity says it perfectly, “Adoration is love bowing down.” Thomas Merton also says it perfectly when describing our vocation: “They (monks) have only one destiny: to bear the same kind of witness to God that is borne by martyrs: to praise Him at no less cost than that of the wild, perfect, supreme love that transcends every other love, every other work, every other desire, to lose itself entirely from the eyes of men in that profound abyss which is known as adoration.” The Catholic Catechism says it this way when speaking of the prayer of praise or adoration: “Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS. It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing him in glory.” Each speaks of adoration as springing from the heart’s love for God.
You might recall St. Francis of Assisi’s thoughts on adoration. After his experience of intense darkness over the fate of his Order and his own uncertain position in it, he was set free interiorly by God to the point of total self-forgetfulness. Rufino, who told him how he feared the difficult struggle against the desire for power and prestige, received this teaching from Francis: “It is not in struggling you succeed, but in adoring. The person who adores God knows that there is only one All-Powerful One. Such a person acknowledges it and accepts it deeply, heartily, and rejoices that God is God. God is. That is enough and that makes a person free…If we knew how to adore, then nothing could truly disturb our peace. We would travel through the world with the tranquility of the great rivers.”
We should search in ourselves for these movements and moments of adoration, the bowing down of love, the interior recognition that God is worth any sacrifice, any loss. We should search because, if we do, we will find and will enter again into moments that are eternal moments, moments in which God made himself known to us and lifted us into his eternity, moments of truth that cannot pass away because the truth of God endures forever. For me my first experience of God was not in intimacy or affection but in adoration. When I was twelve my teacher, a Dominican sister, suggested daily Mass for Advent, but on the day after Christmas adoration swept through my soul. I knew at that moment that God was worthy of my participation in Mass every day of my life, that he was worthy of everything. I experienced that God was God, that God IS, apart from any consciousness of myself or of what he does for me.
St. Benedict set up a program to develop and sustain such consciousness. He asked that we pray Psalm 95 at the beginning of each day because it so clearly reminds us of what we are to strive for each and every day. Explicitly he mentions the importance of the verse “Oh that today you would listen to his voice” as a guide to what monastic living day by day requires: learning to listen to the voice of the Spirit speaking to us in different ways throughout the day. Implicitly he reminds us that we are called to come before the Lord in adoration, to bow and bend low, to kneel before the God who made us seven times a day with hearts full of praise and adoration. This school of continual praise will little by little form us in continual mindfulness of God, Memoria Dei.
May the spirit of the Magi be ours. May we be quick to believe, to love and to bow down in our hearts and in our bodies in adoration before the Lord Jesus. Our anxieties, preoccupations, faults and sins will not really be obstacles if we are quick to get up and fix our eyes once again on him who prepares in our hearts a hiding place full of peace and prayer, full of the love that bows down, full of the wild, perfect, supreme love that seeks to lose itself in that profound abyss which is known as adoration.
Image: Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi