VIRIDITAS: SOUL GREENING
A retreat master once said that if you come to the point someday where you are so busy that you need to make a choice between saying the Divine Office and making adoration, choose adoration. Others will uphold you as they say the prayer of the church. But in adoration, you are taking time for God. I have never been in a ministry where there was not enough time; that it was impossible to have time for God.
Pope Benedict, in his teachings on the liturgy, makes the point that the Eucharist is an act of adoration. Sometimes we forget this. We may think that the Mass is about us and the priest’s personality or his homily. The liturgy however, is an act of worship where we are to be present and totally focused on God. If I lose that perspective, I lose the sense of God-centeredness.
What do I do during adoration? When I was a philosophy student in the seminary one of the priests told me “When you go to adoration, take with you the Eucharistic prayers from the Mass and use them for your adoration.” That really helped. The Eucharist as the great adoration is encapsulated in the closing words of the Eucharistic Prayer, “Through him and with him and in him, O God almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours forever and ever.” We praise our loving Father through Jesus, with Jesus, and in Jesus. We are able to do that because the Holy Spirit is within us.
Adoration outside of the Mass is a continuation of this praise and worship. As a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, adoration is not only a contemplative form of prayer, it is part of our mission. It is a part of our apostolate to pray for the world, in reparation for sinners and our own sins. To adore Jesus is to tell him of our love and to give thanks for the many blessings both big and small that we receive each day.
Aside from being involved in the blessed life of the parish here in Wahiawa, I have had the grace to give retreats to sisters, especially to contemplative sisters. They have taught me a lot about the simplicity and the otherness of God. Through the beautiful writings of the letters of St. Clare to Agnes of Prague, to the “nada” — let nothing disturb you — of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, they taught me that you can’t figure God out.
One of the books that I sometimes use for prayer was given to me years ago. It is filled with photos of the universe taken from the Hubble spacecraft. It starts with pictures of the earth and the atmosphere of the earth, and then goes out to the Milky Way and the solar system. There are also photos of the supernovas, etc. What you see is how the universe is expanding all the time. God is greater than that. So is worship and adoration.
Father Richard McNally, a priest in the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, is pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Wahiawa. He has been a member of the congregation since 1967.