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.