LEARN TO ADORE GOD
Today there’s much talk about a crisis of faith, but we hardly say anything about the crisis of religious sentiment. And yet, as some theologian points out, the drama of the modern age isn’t perhaps our inability to believe, but our difficulty of sensing God as God. Even the very ones who call themselves believers seem to be losing the capacity of living out certain religious attitudes about God.
One clear example is the difficulty to adore God. In times not too far back it seemed easy to feel reverence and adoration in the face of the unimaginable immensity and mystery of God. It’s more difficult today to adore the one we’ve reduced to a strange, uncomfortable and superfluous being.
To adore God it is necessary to feel ourselves as creatures, infinitely small before God, but infinitely loved by God; it is necessary to admire God’s unimaginable greatness and enjoy God’s close and loving presence that encompasses our whole being. Adoration is admiration. It’s love and self-giving. It’s surrendering our being to God and remaining in grateful and joyful silence before God, admiring God’s mystery from our smallness.
Our difficulty in adoring springs from diverse roots. Whoever is going about upset interiorly by all kinds of noise, and shaken up by a thousand passing impressions, without ever stopping before what’s essential, will encounter «the adorable face» of God with difficulty.
On the other hand, in order to adore God it’s necessary to stop ourselves in the face of the world’s mystery and know how to look at it with love. Whoever looks at life lovingly all the way in, will begin to recognize God’s footsteps before you know it. Only God is adorable. Neither the most valued things nor the most loved persons are worthy of being adored as God. That’s why only someone who is free within can truly adore God.
This adoration of God doesn’t distance us from commitment. Whoever adores God fights against all that destroys the human being, who is God’s «sacred image». Whoever adores the Creator respects and defends the creation. Adoration and solidarity, adoration and ecology are intimately united. Thus are understood the words of the great scientist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin: «The more the human being becomes human, the more we will experience the need to adore».
The story of the Magi offers us a model of authentic adoration. These wise men know how to look at the cosmos deeply within, grasp its signs, come close to the Mystery, and offer their humble homage to that God incarnate in our existence.
We believers have very diverse images of God. From childhood we go about making our own idea of God, conditioned above all by what we hear from catechists and preachers, what’s passed on to us at home and at school, or what we live out in celebrations and religious actions.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
