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.