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SURELY
the 'marvellous intercourse'
of spirit
with Spirit which is the essence of a life of
prayer, can only begin and be maintained in
adoration. The first real response of the awakened
creature to the overshadowing and awakening
Power, must be a lifting up of mind and heart to
God in Himself; the humble, undemanding love of
adorer for Adored. Indeed, this awe-struck love
must penetrate and sanctify all prayer. Everything
is safe which can live within its aura: all is suspect
which slurs the deep sense of God's priority and
absolute demand. 'Let my prayer be set forth in
Thy sight as the incense', says the Psalmist, watching
the quiet smoke of that unearthly offering. Its
very heart shall be a costly act of purest worship;
ascending from visible to Invisible, from changeful
man to the Abiding God. It shall not be self-regarding,
anxious, utilitarian. It shall be fragrant
with adoring love. Then, perhaps, the lifting up of
my restless hands towards the Eternal may become
as the evening sacrifice; that meal-offering which
hallowed and dedicated the homely stuff of everyday
life.
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Unless this inarticulate spirit of adoration, the
primitive fundamental response of our spirits to
God's Spirit, however imperfectly conceived, colours
our whole intercourse with Him, we shall not get our
proportions right. Without that humble upward
look and upward aspiration of the little creature to
the Infinite, the life of prayer quickly becomes
shallow, cramped, utilitarian; or even cheaply
familiar. For the true situation of the soul entering
prayer, is that of the young Isaiah when the glory of
the Lord filled the Temple, and he found himself in
the presence of a Reality at which even the seraphs
dared not look. To forget this, and with it the
lessons of the incense and the box of precious ointment,
is to cut off our prayer from that which is
the very source of its deepest inspiration and power;
the awed yet loving sense of God's absolute primacy,
the drawing nigh to Him because He alone matters,
and His creatures only matter because of Him.
'If, says Huvelin,
'a soul said to me,
"To-day
I saw God," I should ask
"How do you feel in
yourself, now that God is so near to you, has entered
into you?"
If she were indeed penetrated by
Him whom she had received she would reply
"I
find myself very small—I have fallen very low."
Confusion of face is the inevitable reaction, the
essential impression, of the soul who has seen God
pass by in His greatness.' That note of wonder and
abasement, the deep feeling of the utter difference
in kind between the Eternal God and that creation
which He is making for Himself—and yet the
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marvellous fact, that He desires and incites each
'created spirit to draw near to Him, and seeks with
a greater thirst than He is ever sought: this is
never absent from the deepest and most prevailing
prayers of the saints.
In Isaiah's vision, those spirits of pure love who
stood nearest to the Glory asked for nothing. In
deepest reverence, they delighted in God ; content
to see nothing and do nothing, so long as they were
maintained before His face.
' Each one had six
wings ; with twain he covered his face, and with
twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.
And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy,
holy, is the Lord of hosts : the whole earth is full
of his glory.' We, drawing near, must at least make
an effort to share this point of view. For only that
disinterested temper which is lost in the great tide
of worshipping love can save our small prayer from
sentimentality, self-occupation, the vices of the
devotee; and defeat the ignoble tendency to make
God useful to man, instead of man useful to God.
So the awe-struck yet confident drawing nigh of
the praying soul to the mystery over against it, the
lifting up of the eyes of the little creature to that
Holy Reality in humble worship—not because it
wants something, but because it feels His compelling
attraction, the strange magnetism of the Divine—this dim and yet delighted wonder must be the
soul's first instinctive response to God's self-revelation.
It is a response which seems to arise spontaneously
in the very deeps of the natural life, and bind
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all creation, conscious and unconscious, into one
single act of worship; praising and magnifying that Absolute Beauty and Truth for and by whom all
things are made. There is a story by Osbert Sitwell,
which tells how a traveller in the equatorial forests,
hearing strange sounds at night, looked out from
his window ; and saw in the courtyard, where it
was imprisoned, a great anthropoid ape—one of
those tragic creatures just verging on the human—bowing in solemn adoration before the splendour of
the rising moon. The traveller gazed at this
spectacle with awe. 'I had seen', he said,
' the
birth of religion.' Innocent nature emerging from
its sleep, and already finding in that first vague
moment of consciousness something beyond itself
which it must adore; the first and simplest of the
self-disclosures of God, pouring out His strange
beauty upon the natural scene, and inviting His
creatures' recognition along the channels of sense.
And surely in this primitive, instinctive act of
worship, this profound abasement of the creature
before the unspeakable mystery over against it, we
see something both sacred and fundamental in the
relation of all life to God; the first glimmering consciousness
of Supernature, everywhere present, and
speaking to the supernatural spark that is buried
within us, in a tongue that it can understand. As
the Magi came a long and difficult journey, to find
that the shepherds were before them;
An interesting comment. In Luke, we are told that the shepherds found the infant Christ in a manger in a stable, as there was no room at the inn for the travellers from Nazareth. No wise men feature in Luke's narrative, nor, in fact, do any animals, though these may well have shared the stable. In any case, if present, the animals were not there "first" except by chance.
In Matthew, we are told that the wise men visited Him in his parents' house in Bethlehem. There is no mention of shepherds, or stable, or animals.
DCW |
and even the
hurrying shepherds found the animals already in
place—so it is deep within the natural order that
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the embryonic power of prayer, which is at bottom
a state or condition of soul rather than a distinct
activity, stirs from its sleep.
Adoro te devote, latens Deltas,
Quae sub his figuris vere latitas.
Here adoration begins, in a realistic acknowledgement
of the Transcendent, however imperfectly
understood. For all prayer is first evoked by the
gentle self-revelation of Spirit to spirit; the disclosure
of His glory in a way that our limited minds
can bear, 'coming down like the rain into a fleece
of wool, even as the drops that water the earth'.
In the splendour of tropical moonlight; in those
symbolic acts of the religious cult which lead us
beyond themselves to Him; in the persistent and
secret touches of Spirit in the soul's deeps, or in the
powerful and heart-searching love of some inconspicuous
saint, the only Perfect perpetually invites
our recognition: and here, to recognize is to adore.
Thus adoration is the first and greatest of life's
responses to its spiritual environment; the first and
most fundamental of spirit's movements towards
Spirit, the seed from which all other prayer must
spring. It is among the most powerful of the educative
forces which purify the understanding, form and
develop the spiritual life. As we can never know
the secret of great art or music until we have learned
to look and listen with a self-oblivious reverence,
acknowledging a beauty that is beyond our grasp—so the claim and loveliness of God remain un-
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realized, till we have learned to look, to listen, to
adore. Then only do we go beyond ourselves and
our small vision, pour ourselves out to that which
we know not, and so escape from our own pettiness
and limitations into the universal life.
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit
Quia te contemplans totum deficit.
Adoration can never long remain a private ecstasy.
As sometimes in the vast and solemn life of the
mountains or the forest, or in the small perfection
of a very humble plant, we are suddenly aware of
the breathless worship which creation offers to its
God; so now we enter into a new relation with that
whole created order, and realize our own part in its
response to the Creative Love. 'We scale', says
Nicholas of Cusa,
'that wall of invisible vision
beyond which Infinity is to be found'; join with
those who see more than ourselves, and accept the
fellowship of those who see less. Our small voices,
so feeble in their solitude, augment the one universal
chorus of creation; with angels and archangels and
all the company of heaven lauding and magnifying
one Holy Name.
It is true, that when we come to the practice of
this surrendered adoration, so difficult to the troubled
and arrogant soul of the modern world, we discover
with a certain astonishment that there is much less
difference than we like to suppose between our
methods and possibilities and those of the primitive;
already stirred by a spirit that he knows not to
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abase himself before the mystery of the Unseen.
We bring, as St. Paul would say, our 'carnal'
inheritance with us, and share his childlike status
over against the Reality of God. Thus we worship,
not yet in spirit or in truth, but as best we can.
As the primitive sought to express his deep emotion
in ritual action, his naive and puzzled sense of
the Unseen in myth, we are compelled by our
limitations to the same devices. We are still drawn
to rhythms and gestures which come to us from the
childhood of man; still find significance in practices
of which the lowly origin is hardly concealed.
Whether it be the survival or deliberate reproduction
of ancient cultus—the Easter taper of tradition, or
the votive electric light of the modern shrine—there
is surely a deep pathos in these childlike motions of
the soul. Again and again men perceive their
inadequacy, and again and again revert to this, the
natural language of symbol and myth. Thus,
ascending to the 'fine point of the spirit' we are
yet treading primaeval strata all the way; and this
is far better, safer and more humbling than trying
to make the journey through the air. The world's
altar-stairs begin in the jungle; and there is a disconcerting
continuity between the first awed and
upward look of pithecanthropus and the dark contemplation
of the saint. We cannot go far in the
life of devotion without being reminded of this
humbling solidarity of the race. For man, whether
'civilized' or 'uncivilized', knows very little about
the Being of God. The great mountain ranges of
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His unsearchable majesty are hidden in the clouds; and the more fully the soul enters the life of prayer,
the more deeply it realizes this. Clouds and darkness
are round about Him. Adoro te devote latens
Deitas is the last word of the worshipping spirit, as
well as the first.
Yet the whole of life in its splendour and contrasts,
seen with the eyes of humble admiration, will give
us hints and intimations of that Reality and that
Presence which transcends and supports it; and
points beyond itself to the Perfection on which it
depends. God, who is there before us, invites our
delighted praise along a thousand paths. Limited
incarnations and disclosures of the Eternal, moulding
the web of things to His revealing purpose, and using
the rich beauty of creation to convey a Beauty
Increate, perpetually stir to life our latent tendency
to awe-struck worship. Love and sacrifice in
humble places guarantee the Love that moves the
stars.
For Christian experience, the life and person of
Christ stand apart as the greatest of these self-revelations; the perfect self-expression of the Holy
in human terms, and the supreme school and focus
of man's adoring prayer. For here the Invisible
God, by the most wonderful of His condescensions,
discloses His beauty and attraction—the brightness
of His glory and the express image of His person—in a way that is mercifully adapted to our limitations,
and meets us on our own ground. Therefore the
events of Christ's life—alike the most strange and
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the most homely—are truly
'mysteries'. They
contain far more than they reveal. They are
charged with Spirit, and convey the supernatural to
those who are content to watch and adore. Because
of this, Christian devotion moves ever to and fro
between adoring and intimate prayer; passing
through the incarnational veil to the Absolute
Beauty, and returning to find the Absolute Beauty
shining through the incarnational veil.
'Let thy
thoughts be always upward to God and direct thy
prayer to Christ continually,' says Thomas a
Kempis. Thus the great horizon gives its meaning
to the welcoming figure; and the welcoming figure
makes the great horizon safe and fair.
And here the soul's actual prayer will be a reflection
of its whole life. The only preparation for such
an adoring approach to Spirit, is a daily response to
circumstance which is coloured by the delighted
reverence that finds the natural scene and all its
contacts and relationships, its sufferings and enjoyments,
sacred for the sake of His indwelling and
overshadowing Life.
'The Holy Spirit', says Grou,
'will either govern all your actions, or cease to
govern your prayer.' It is only when life and prayer
are thus well mixed together, that the atmosphere
has been created in which the work of prayer can
be done. For it is within this penetrating and awestruck
sense of God Present, not as one among other
facts and demands, but as the one real Fact and
Demand ever pressing on His creature, that self-giving
to His purposes emerges and grows. Adora-
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tion, for the soul which has truly learnt it, will, as it
more and more possesses the praying spirit, lead on
to self-offering. Then the deep prayer in which we
pass away from our preoccupations and sink down
into the soul's ground, will tend more and more to
become a very simple act of self-abandoned love.
And as each great phase of the life of prayer ever
tends to pass over into silence, so this. First the
best words and rhythms that men have found, to
stir and maintain the mind and heart in its worship
of Reality: and then the pause and hush of a
delighted homage: and at last something so absolute,
that the creature is lost in an act of praise which
possesses, engulfs, transcends its very life.
