Perpetual Adoration: 15 years later

I wrote the article on perpetual adoration fifteen years ago. Since then, there has been a resurgence of interest in, and practice of, perpetual adoration. It is heartening to see a younger generation discovering this prayer. It can be one entryway, and I think a very good one, into the practice of contemplative prayer. What is less encouraging, however, is that the understanding of 'perpetual adoration' today tends toward a literal interpretation: it is conceived of as a kind of 'spiritual relay race', in which adoration is the baton that is handed off from one person to another in unbroken succession. It is understood as consecutive and continuous periods of prayer which thereby constitute 'perpetual adoration'. Thus, if it's not carried on 24/7, then it's not perpetual adoration. At least, not according to this literal criteria. It is this literalism that is problematic.

The focus, and sometimes insistence, on perpetual adoration as a 24/7 practice, reminds me of the biblical injunction 'to pray always'. This brief scriptural phrase, one the early desert monastics honed in on, presented them with a practical problem: How could a person pray 24/7? Believing that this was addressed to each and every individual Christian, the early monastics struggled with how to implement and fulfill it. Their solution was to structure periods of communal prayer throughout the day into the monastic rhythm of the community. Not only did they structure periods of communal prayer, they also structured periods of work, study, and reading. While monastics would be the first to acknowledge that humans do not live by bread alone, monastics, like all human beings, also had to work for their daily bread. Whatever the monastic's work, the monastic sought to take a word or a phrase from the psalms or other scriptures to repeat and ponder throughout the day. Over the course of many days and years, these words and phrases worked their way into ever deeper and deeper levels of the monastic's mind and heart, until the words or phrases took on a life of their own, 'praying' themselves without a monastic's conscious effort or awareness. This occurred ever so slowly, ever so imperceptibly. In this manner, the desire of the monastic to fulfill the injunction to pray always was realized.

What I am attempting to get at here, is that perpetual adoration is not meant to be a spiritual relay race. It's a place to begin, to be sure, but it's not the place to end. Perpetual adoration, as a form of prayer, is meant to enflesh itself into the very heart and mind of a person--to enflesh itself so deeply, that it takes on a life of its own, like the beating of the heart or the drawing of a breath, so that whether one is awake or asleep, one is adoring.

III. Whatever Happened to Perpetual Adoration?

In adoration, I come to know the presence of God that fills and suffuses the universe in all its parts: to know the God who is so intensely and intimately wedded to creation--down to the smallest atom, quark, and neutrino--and who can never be separated from it. It is the vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins: "The earth is ablaze with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shook foil." Adoration is seeing with a single eye, as God sees, and loving with a single heart, as God loves. In adoration I become like one who sees the new heavens and the new earth.

To live in adoration is to adore God anywhere and everywhere, at all times, in all places, in every circumstance and situation. This is perpetual adoration and we are called to become such perpetual adorers. When adoration becomes perpetual, there arises a natural, spontaneous outflow of that life and love that is the pouring forth of the very life of the Trinity. This life pours forth into those who adore and pours through them, flowing forth into the whole of creation only to be caught up again into God. When we live in perpetual adoration, there is nothing insignificant, nothing without meaning. To live in perpetual adoration is to see all as holy, all as Body of Christ.

As a Church and as individual members of it, we have only begun to plumb the depths and the fullness of what perpetual adoration is. The passing away of former practices and understandings--and they are passing away whether we will it or no--opens for us a vast expanse that, at first glance, appears to be emptiness. However, in this emptiness is fullness, the depths of which we must have the courage to plumb. We will never again be able to cast our understandings in stone, bronze, or concrete--nor should we seek to do so. If anything, we must learn to live with the provisional, the temporary, with constantly evolving understandings and expressions. Our lives, our faith, our practices, and our expressions will always be growing, expanding, evolving. These will be in process continually, just as we are in process. It is not easy, nor is it comfortable, to live in the dynamism that is the very heart and life of our Triune God. We are all in the process of becoming perpetual adorers. What we feel so poignantly at this point in our history as a Church is, I believe, the urgency of that calling and that becoming. We must become what all people are called to be: eucharistic people of perpetual adoration.

II. Whatever Happened to Perpetual Adoration?

My understanding was very limited when I was a child. Now that I am an adult, my understanding has grown and expanded with the teachings of the Church and the Second Vatican Council. As my understanding of Eucharist and the presence of Christ has grown and matured, so has my understanding of adoration. I continue to pray in chapel in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, because I am drawn to it, just as I have always been. However, structured times and programs of prayer in chapel in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament are no longer my primary expression or understanding of adoration. As I have lived this prayer, as I have prayed in quiet adoration, I have grown into an entirely new understanding and vision. Adoration is no longer something I do, or a program to be maintained. Adoration has become an integral part of my life and of who I am. I find I am becoming what I am called: a Benedictine Sister of Perpetual Adoration. Today there is no place, no time, that I am not in the presence of our Eucharistic God. All the world has become for me a house of prayer. Every tree, every rock, every bush and flower and blade of grass burn with the presence and glory of God. Every breath I breathe is filled with the presence of God. There is no time, no place, that I cannot adore the living God.

Now when I go to pray in chapel, it is for me a return to the center, to the ground zero, from which all flows, all radiates. It is there that I focus my attention with full intention. There I worship in Spirit and in truth, as I focus and strengthen my inner gaze, placing myself in the full intensity of the beam of God's gaze. I pray in chapel to receive anew the vision of God and of reality, to receive again the gift of that calling which is a drawing into the very heart and life of God, the dance of adoration, of praise and thanksgiving. Adoration has become my life. It is a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of being, and a way of doing. I will continue to pray in chapel, as my inner gaze and my outer gaze increasingly become one, until, seeing only God, I am able to hold the stillness of that gaze in the heart of the movement which is daily life.

I. Whatever Happened to Perpetual Adoration?

This article was first published in the March-April, 1997, issue of Spirit & Life magazine.

If you are old enough, like me, you probably remember the days when we had practices and devotions such as Benediction, the Forty Hour's devotion, and the continuous prayer before the Blessed Sacrament known as perpetual adoration. The parish where I spent my childhood, Blessed Sacrament Church in Kansas City, Kansas, had just such a program of perpetual adoration and it was the pride of the parish. I remember as a child desiring to participate in the way that many of my fellow parishioners did. They committed themselves to half hours of adoration by day and/or an hour by night on a regular, weekly basis. As a child I longed to do that, but my family lived too far from our parish church, so I did what I could: I stopped in the church after school for short periods of prayer whenever possible. Thus, growing up in a parish with a tradition of perpetual adoration, when attendance at daily Mass was as much a part of the curriculum as reading, writing, and arithmetic, it seemed only natural that I would develop a dedication to the Eucharist--a dedication that many people my age and older still share today. It is no doubt why I found myself attracted to the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration and why I became a member. However, over the past ten to fifteen years many changes have occurred in our Church and in our community. These changes have resulted in different ways of living out and expressing dedication and devotion to the Eucharist, which had been expressed in the practice of perpetual adoration as continuous prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

Since the Second Vatican Council, my understanding of Eucharist and the presence of Christ has grown and broadened. While I continue to experience the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, I experience the presence of Christ in the Word of God proclaimed during the liturgy, in the person of every member of the gathered assembly, and in the presider. The radiant and full presence of Christ in the host extends far beyond the limits and boundaries of the host. The presence of Christ, by virtue of the resurrection, fills the universe in all its parts.