Description
Adoration
The great commandment is about love: ‘You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ We are invited to give ourselves to the God who gives himself to us. As He loves us, we are invited to love Him... What God asks from us in return for all that He gives us is a response of reciprocal love. It is in loving Him that we discover how He first loved us, and how deep His love is. This is not so much a law but an invitation to us, and a delight. If we cannot enjoy time in His presence we have hardly begun to love. If we do not put ourselves out to share with Him, we can hardly say we love Him. Yet once again, even if we do not love Him, He loves us with an everlasting love. I like the words of Teilhard de Chardin concerning adoration: ‘To adore means to lose oneself in the unfathomable, to plunge into the inexhaustible, to find peace in the incorruptible, to be absorbed in defined immensity, to offer oneself to the fire . . . and to give of one’s deepest to that whose depth has no end.’1 At its simplest and deepest it was expressed by a peasant woman before the altar who said, ‘I look at Him and He looks at me.’..