"O inestimable charity! Even as You, true God and true Man, gave Yourself entirely to us, so also You left Yourself entirely for us, to be our food, so that during our earthly pilgrimage we would not faint with weariness, but would be strengthened by You, our celestial Bread. O man, what has your God left you? He has left you Himself, wholly God and wholly Man, concealed under the whiteness of bread. O fire of love! Was it not enough for You to have created us to Your image and likeness, and to have recreated us in grace through the Blood of Your Son, without giving Yourself wholly to us as our Food, O God, Divine Essence? What impelled You to do this? Your charity alone. It was not enough for You to send Your Word to us for our redemption; neither were You content to give Him us as our Food, but in the excess of Your love for Your creature, You gave to man the whole divine essence..." - St. Catherine of Siena
I was priveleged, this evening, to spend an hour with both my fiancée and Christ, in Eucharistic adoration. Her parish has a perpetual adoration chapel, and so there was no separate liturgy for the adoration... we were left alone with Christ and whatever means of prayer we might muster.
Adoration is a new practice for me, having grown up Protestant, and I found that I desired to stay very close to the theme of "adoration" in my prayers and mindset. This was difficult to do for an hour. I prayed the liturgy of adoration to myself, but found myself mostly silently singing songs of praise - every Eucharistic hymn in my book of Christian Prayer, and then every chorus of adoration I could think of - and that seemed to satisfy my conscious desire to devote this time to "adoration."
I'm incredibly new to this form of worship and spiritual devotion, so I'm asking the handful of you that might read this... how do you adore our Lord?
n00b ;)
ReplyDeleteJust playing :) At Adoration last night, I was reading some private revelation (Light of Love by Patricia Devlin), and there was much in the book that led me to awe. When thinking more about what it means to adore, I realize I think of standing in awe of something to be a form of adoration. So when I'm reading something about God that just blows my mind, it follows that I adore God.
Perhaps a good way to adore God would be to explore what inspires in you awe of Him. For me, it's private revelation and the saints. For you, it may be the Church fathers and academic writings. Maybe, due to your Protestant formation, you're thinking, "I do that outside of Adoration, though." But we adore God outside of Adoration, too; Adoration just gives us a chance to do so in His presence. I don't want to promote heresy, but personally, I wouldn't claim that prayers and adoration heard in Eucharist Adoration get heard any more clearly than prayers said outside of Eucharistic Adoration, but the Eucharistic Adoration is there to assist us--to focus us, to inspire us, that sort of thing. Jesus is going to be chilling either way, we just display Him for our own sake.
However, if anything I said is not in line with what the Magisterium teaches, please tell me, and disregard what I said :)