Adoration: Interior Communion

This article is adapted from a talk given by local young adult Aileen Hurd at Ablaze's weekly Discipleship Group gathering at St. Thérèse, Little Flower Parish. Learn more about this group and other Ablaze groups here.

Just from knowing a lot of the people in the room, I know Adoration has been a part of our prayer lives for a while, so my hope is to be specific in what I share. I do believe Adoration is the core of our life of prayer. It is the essence of our communion with God. 

A Holy Hour is, in a way, this external practice or engagement of something that's interiorly accessible to us at all times. A Holy Hour is the time we set aside to be alone with Him in the Eucharist. 

But there's also that interior communion of the soul with God that is us alone with Him through his Spirit. So for the purposes of this, when I talk about Adoration, I'm talking about that interior communion just as much as I'm talking about a Holy Hour. 

The Wedding Feast

I want to talk about Adoration in the context of the wedding feast of the King. I read the writing of, I think, a saint, years ago. I can't find it anywhere, but they were talking about the four groups of people at the wedding feast. The first group is the servants. The servants don't necessarily live in the palace of the king, but they're honored to work for Him and they receive the benefit of his provision and his protection at all times. 

The next group is the friends. The friends live elsewhere but are welcomed into the presence of the King as his peers because they're the ones He's chosen to share his life and his heart with. 

Next are the children. The children live always in the palace of the King and their life is play and rest; and their work is only to receive and to grow. 

And then last is the bride, the bride herself. And just a note on that—all this can apply just as much to men as it can to us women. The Church has continually affirmed that the human soul is always feminine before God. 

So we have: the servants, the friends, the children, and the bride. This is the journey of letting ourselves be loved, from servants to bride. It's not linear like that. It's not like we ever stop growing in fidelity as his servants or ever stop growing in friendship with Him. And there'll be seasons where we absolutely resonate with one over the other. But it is this progressive journey of being loved into closer and closer intimacy. I think it's also the journey of humility. We wouldn't necessarily think it, but the bride is more humble than the servants. 

Humility is about wonder. St. James tells us to humble ourselves before God, and there are so many ways we can do that, right? But it's never about pushing away experiences of chosen-ness and beloved-ness, no matter how strong or deep they are. So often humility is actually about letting those experiences happen to us and letting wonder well up inside of us. 

A Personal Moment of Wonder 

One time I was having prayer time and I was imagining Jesus and I in the ruins of this castle fortress place. And He's on the inside, I'm on the outside. There's this wall in between us, and every day we would meet at this spot in the wall where there was an opening. And this day I was particularly upset about the wall, and I was crying about it and asking Him about it… 

Eventually, He took my hands and placed them on his face. Then He made sure my elbows were resting on the wall between us. And then He took his hands and held my face and then lowered his forehead to touch mine. So we're just there holding each other's faces in that shape. And [then I receive this word], lunette. 

Lunette is a French word for the little holder of a consecrated host in a monstrance. The shape Jesus and I were making, if you saw it from the front, was the shape of a monstrance. 

This is the life of the bride: the holding of each other's faces. 

Our individual unions with Him are what expose Him and show Him to the world. People come to us to our individual unions with Him to encounter Him there. And I can go to Sarah's union with Him. I do go to Sarah's union with Him to encounter Him and adore Him there in that monstrance.

When we are learning from the saints, we approach Him there and adore Him there in that monstrance.

Union and the Natural Version of Things

So, the bride. Union. 

If you've ever read The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis, you'll recall the time when the children come back to Narnia for the last time, and it's the end time, so they never have to leave again. In this new kingdom of Aslan, everything is the real version of things. So they come to this pear tree, it's full of the most magnificent pears they've ever seen, and they're all like, "Do you think these are for us? Can we eat them?" And they do, and they're infinitely better than any pears they've ever tasted before, and they realize, these must be really good. 

I think that actually might be true for a lot of things, like comfort. The physical comfort a mother gives her child when they're hurt or they're scared: there's a comfort that's so much more real than that. I wonder about it for a lot of things; but we know it's true of union, right? Theology of the Body tells us that the physical intimacy and union that a husband and wife share, there's a union that's so much more real even than that. 

It seems like the physical, natural versions of things, they happen to the body and affect the heart. But the things that are even more real, they happen to the heart and affect the body. 

The School of Love

Do you know the etymology of the word “adoration”? It comes from the Latin words “ad” and “orare.” Ad meaning “toward” and orare meaning “to speak or to pray.” Bishop Barron, though, says orare actually comes from the Latin word for “mouth.” So toward the mouth, toward the mouth of God. What is it to adore Him, to go toward Him like that? And since a kiss is a reciprocal thing, what is it to let ourselves be adored? To let Him come toward us? 

Adoration is the school of love. It's the place where we learn how to give, how to receive, and maybe especially how to just be with. And there are no templates, no formulas, no how-to books. It is different every time. It's different from one season to the next and from one person to the other because we're all so different and we're so different with Him. 

It's about vulnerability and intimacy and fluidity. That's why it's so important to be able to be connected to ourselves, to our hearts and our bodies. Union doesn't happen in the mind, not directly. It happens in our hearts and our bodies. It's not so much about words as it is about movements and shifts and letting things ebb and flow and swell and recede. It's about sensations almost on the inside of us. 

So often we want to know how to bring about a certain level of closeness or how to bring about a certain result or even just, Jesus, how do I love you best or what would you like the most? It's good to ask these questions and sometimes He'll answer them directly. But so often it's like what He said to me one day. He said, "I want your impulses." The more we grow in trust and integration and maturity, the less we look to be directed or prompted, and the easier it is to just give the gift of ourselves in the present moment. 

The best gift we can give is always ourselves, exactly the way we are. Love doesn't have an agenda. It never has an agenda.

You are not to be directed, you are to be loved. He wants to be with us as we are, from moment to moment. In dryness, when we're like, “There is nothing happening here, and there hasn't been for months.” In intensity, when emotions are overwhelming. In deep suffering, where Archbishop Fulton Sheen was right: The cross really is the marriage bed, and all we can do is to let everything hurt in darkness. When it's been so long since we've even been able to sense his presence.

In those seasons, and everything in between, all He wants is to receive our natural responses and to respond with the movements of his own heart.

The experience does heal us, and it does call us into who we are, but his intent is never an outcome. His intent is to be with. 

Longing

One note on longing. One time, Jesus woke me up in the middle of the night, and I knew it was Him because his presence was so strong and so close that I was almost scared. And what I was aware of was that even though there was so much power and so much wanting, there wasn't a trace of desperation in it. And right before He left, He said, “Desperation's not the only kind of intensity.” And that rang in my heart for days, because I didn't realize that was something that I even believed, and I didn't know that there could be longing and desire without desperation. 

Another time, I was asking Him to increase my hunger, and He interrupted me and said, “Aileen, I'm not here to teach you hunger. I'm here to teach you satiety.”

Often, especially if we've got anxious attachment, we don't know what it's like for longing and desire to come from a place of rest. Longing and desire get linked to distress, but both can be peaceful experiences. They can feel like stretching or like tension. They can be uncomfortable, but they don't have to be painful. Longing and desire are necessary to create capacity for us to receive, yes. But desperation is not necessary. One of the things trauma can do to our spiritual development is it can make us think that it's holy to be in distress. It's not. 

Saving for the Party

I'm going to close with a story that came to my heart from the beginning of a homily Father Logan [Parrish] gave once:

Imagine you've got new neighbors that have moved in: a husband, a wife, and their child. And they are lovely people. 

The more you get to know them, though, the more you notice that they're living way below their means. The husband is the owner of many successful businesses. The mother is this renowned physician. And they live in the simplest house. They get their clothes from Walmart. They take forever to repair their car when it is broken down. And as you become closer friends, you start asking about it. And they say, oh, we set aside all our money for the Christmas party. 

Christmas party? 

Oh, you've never been to the Christmas party? You've got to come this year. But really, you really should start saving up now. 

OK. 

The more you start sharing life with them, the more they start reminding you, like, “Hey, the Christmas party, it's going to come really fast. Like, you really might want to start saving.”

And then you meet their relatives, and their relatives clearly live below their means, too. And they're all like, “Hey, you're coming to the Christmas party, right?” 

Eventually, Christmas comes around, and you go with them to the Christmas party, and they're right. It's like nothing you could have ever imagined before. But you notice that people are experiencing the party differently. 

So many people are clearly having a wonderful time enjoying the cheesecake, and the company, and the Christmas caroling, and the nativity play. But there are some people who hear one verse of a Christmas hymn and start weeping in joy, or who can't stop watching the shepherds’ rendition of their role in the nativity play over and over and over and over again. 

And you realize that the people that are having the deepest experiences are the people who saved up the most for the party. 

The stronger and deeper our unions with Him on earth, the more we have access to in Heaven and on earth. The more we invest in letting ourselves be loved, the more it changes the way we experience everything. And there's no limit. 

There's no limit.