OUR INABILITY TO ADORE
A person today has become greatly stunted in discovering God. It’s not that he’s atheist. It’s that he has become «incapable of God». When a man or woman only seeks or knows love under decadent forms, when their life is exclusively moved by selfish interests of welfare or gain, something is dried up in their heart.
Many today live a way of life that bores and impoverishes them. Prematurely aged, hardened inside, unable to open themselves to God for any possibility of existence, they walk through life without the inner company of anyone.
The theologian Alfred Delp, killed by the Nazis, saw in the «inner hardness» the greatest danger for modern humans: «Thus the person stops reaching the hands of his being to the stars. The incapability of a person today to adore, love and venerate has its cause in his excessive ambition and in the hardening of his existence».
This inability to adore God has also taken hold of many believers, who only seek a «useful God». They’re only interested in a God who serves their individualistic project. God thus remains converted into «something to be consumed», at the disposal of our own convenience and interest. But God is something else. God is infinite Love, incarnate in our own existence. And in the face of that God, what’s first is adoration, rejoicing, thanksgiving.
When this is forgotten, Christianity runs the risk of becoming a gigantic effort of humanization, and the Church into an institution that is always tense, always overwhelmed, always with the sensation of not attaining the moral success for which she struggles and strives.
However Christian faith is, above all, discovery of God’s goodness, thankful experience that only God saves: the gesture of the Magi before the Child of Bethlehem expresses the primary attitude of every believer before God made human.
God exists. God’s there in the depth of our life. We are welcomed by God. We aren’t lost in the middle of the universe. We can live with confidence. In the face of a God whom we know only as Love, nothing fits except joy, adoration and thanksgiving. That’s why «when a Christian thinks that she isn’t capable of praying at all, she ought to at least have joy» (Ladislao Boros).
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
