The following essay is from the January 1934 issue of the Hungarian Catholic periodical “Örökimádás” (“Eternal Adoration”) and was written by Dr. Antal Schütz. “Örökimádás” ran from 1900 until 1944, and the issues can be downloaded in PDF format from the page of the Péter Pázmány Electronic Library.
1. Adoration. “You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve him” (Dt 6:13), is God’s first commandment, and man’s first truly human act. For what is worship? […]
What, then, is worship? It is man’s most human manifestation and attitude. For it takes a man to make the flower of adoration blossom on this earth; a man who carries within himself a world of consciousness and commitment to the ideal, and at the same time the tragedy of helplessness and failure; a man who realizes that the source and destiny of his existence and of all existence around him is a universal Power, invisible to his eyes, incomprehensible to his mind, inaccessible to his heart, invincible to his strength, and therefore there is no place for any other attitude towards Him than humble reverence and holy trembling – the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom! But this mysterious majestic Power that smites into the dust and intimidates, yet to the reason-seeking, understanding mind He is the great light; to the heart, in spite of its inaccessibility, He is the rock of mercy and trust; to the aspiring, it is help and support, judge and rewarder. This is worship: the spirit, permeated with visions, understandings, senses, tensions, in which the creature prostrates himself before his Creator with humble and confident self-surrender – Adoramus te Christe et benedicimus tibi! – In worship, earth and heaven, time and eternity, present and the world to come come together; God’s creature-loving, helping grace by which He lowers Himself down to them and man’s profound creaturely devotion and reliance on God.
2. Eternal adoration. Adoration in its deepest essence is eo ipso eternal adoration. The mother tongue of prayer is that which Teresa of Ávila already repeated in her childhood: Para siempre, para siempre; forever, forever!
Since man first appeared on earth, the fires of prayerful sacrifice have never been quenched. The first self-consciousness of the first man, and the first echo of the first great impressions that reverberate, is the submission to God the Creator; and since that time there has been no stage or turn of human life in which the incense of prayer had not been rising towards heaven. This is the “continual burnt offering” which was to burn in the sanctuary of Israel (Dn 12:11); only the priest of it is all mankind, and its altar is the entire earth. He who could take wings and fly through history and the present, and could penetrate hearts and walls, looking into souls, would be astonished to find that there is no inhabited place on earth, and no age of history, no season of day and night, when there is not somewhere a place where individuals and communities worship God with complete devotion, when prayers or chants of praise seek the ways of God.
Mankind is overwhelmed by the idea that “God is great and a king over all gods”. And it is not only the grim reality of death that provokes this confession (see Psalm 96, the “Circumdederunt”); but every dawn and every dusk, every noon and every midnight, of the great world around him and of the little world that is contained in it, makes him kneel before this great King; and if he himself does not have enough solemnity, concentration and delicacy, he organizes a royal delegation, selects the most illustrious representatives of his noblest aspirations, and sends them to worthy worship: He sends his saints and his priests. And in the saints it becomes a consciousness, an individual duty and an art, what was the average devotion of the average person. Of St Francis of Assisi, his biographer Thomas of Celano says: Totus non tam orans, quam oratio factus; that is to say, he didn’t pray, he was completely prayer. And is not this the way to describe the prayerful life of all the great saints? The holy hermits of old, who populated the deserts of Scythia, Nitria, and Chalcis, and developed into almost a technique the art of praying constantly even while at work, and even of praying instead of sleeping. And those great medieval women, the doves of God, the Gertrudes and Mechtilds, the Hildegards and Brigittas, the Catherine and the Angelas, were able to interpret the Saviour’s word with the passion and ingenuity of their sex: Oportet. semper orare et nunquam deficere, “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Lk 18:1).
There are fires which, once kindled in the soul, cannot and will not be quenched; there are feelings which cause one to regard as stutter and profane any other language than that which the Church gives to the lips of the betrothed: For ever, until death; there are awakenings which protest against a new sleep – as we read in Prohászka’s diary that on the day of his ordination he refused to go to sleep lest the flow of his holy joy and thanksgiving should be interrupted. Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat; “I slept, but my heart was awake”, says the betrothed in the Song of Songs (5:2); and the holy ingenuity of fiery loving souls found a way how this noblest flame of the human heart could be most worthily translated into the language of God, and – it organized Eucharistic eternal adoration.
3. Eternal Adoration. Eucharistic adoration is the most expressive form of adoration, and Eucharistic eternal adoration is nothing other than the liturgical organization of the uninterruptedness rooted in the nature of adoration.
Christ, who, under the apperance of bread and wine, is truly among us in divinity and humanity, is the center of faithful reflection, Christian piety and art. This great truth is expressed with unparalleled artistic effectiveness in Raphael’s famous painting on the wall of the Vatican’s Stanza della segnatura, what is known as Disputa. At the center of the painting is the monstrance from which the Blessed Sacrament sends out secret rays of light in all directions. Beneath it are famous theologians and holy fathers, popes and monks, and above it the glorified saints, patriarchs and prophets, evangelists, apostles and martyrs; and all the movements, all the amazements and gestures, all the devotions and deeds of the blessed in heaven and of the people struggling on earth, draw their power and direction from that one mysterious center. And the artist has not failed to show, with sure genius, the meaning and source of this universal and inexhaustible centrality: in the vertical center of the picture the Trinity reigns supreme; the center is occupied by the Son, who radiates his redemptive power, the blessings of his endless love (John 13:1), upon the Sacrament, the Holy Spirit, the great personal divine emissary and mediator of the human descent of the Trinity, hovering above the Sacrament.
But the Blessed Sacrament is not only the constant center and the object of worship, but is itself worship; and it is also worship in the most perfect sense, that of eternal adoration. For in it is present in all its reality Jesus Christ, the great High Priest, [who] “prays much for the people and the holy city” (2 Macc 15:14), who is even now in heaven before the Father, and who continually intercedes for us (Heb 7:25). It is the same heart which throbs in the Blessed Sacrament, which trembled in holy compassion before the distressed multitudes, and which bowed before the Father in obedience to death on the night when He sweated blood and He died; the same soul before which the adoration-worthy majesty of God was revealed in all its grandeur, which embraced all the prayerful exertions of all men of all ages (see Christ 165.); the same Christ who “erat pernoctans in orationes”, who prayed through the whole night (Luke 6, 12). The most hidden mountain chapel and the most simple village church, where the light of the sanctuary lamp merges with the prayerful silence of the night, thus becomes the Bethel of the most complete and uninterrupted worship. The sacramental Christ is by His very being the most perfect eternal adoration.
To give voice to this constant but silent adoration of the Eucharistic Christ in human language, to translate this great prayerful reality into an action: this is the ethos of liturgical eternal adoration, of the 40-hour adoration, of eternal adoration congregations, of nuns, of churches. This sublime “actio catholica” was kindled on the altars of the great medieval Catholic devotion, above all in the fervent prayerful souls that populated the famous Benedictine and Cistercian convents of women, Bingen and Helfta, the Gertruds; Hildegards and Mechtilds felt even with the sure sense and self-sacrificing devotion of holy women in the service of Christ that Christ, praying and loving in the Blessed Sacrament, must not be abandoned. Therefore, their best time and holiest strength were spent in the sanctuary; and when duty or sleep briefly called them away, they and Mechtild asked the stars and the moon, the flower and the dew, to do their worship in their absence to their saving God, who dwells among us without ceasing day and night. This devotion and adoration, which knows neither sleep nor fatigue, and which is always vigilant, soon found its own liturgical form. It took over the ancient Christian liturgical idea of antiphonal prayer, the idea of alternate celebration; and, organized by alternate groups, the externally constant and liturgically uninterrupted eternal adoration began, and today there is no larger province where the great King is not courted by faithful souls in prayer, with regular changing of the guard. Adoration and eternal adoration have found their most worthy and most attractive framework and liturgical form.
4. The school of prayer. And the Eucharistic eternal adoration became, I would say, the people’s university of adoration; a school, a university, where this sacred science can still be learned, even in its highest degree; a people’s school open to all. And there is always teaching going on. Whenever we enter a church, we find there the great praying One, the Lord Jesus Christ; we can go to Him in our helplessness with confidence, as the apostles did: “Lord, teach us to pray!” (Lk 11:1)
First of all, he gives us the basic lesson. For the most necessary thing for a prayerful spirit is the conviction that God, with His holy majesty, is always among us, that He is everywhere and in everything, and that we are therefore called upon to worship in all our life.
An old transdanubian master guild has put on its coat of arms a rotating wheel, with the inscription: est Deus in rota, God is in the wheel, and this is what the sacramental Christ reveals to us with the immediacy of self-giving love and the warmth of life. We are all children of an age whose healthy spirit of worship has been eroded by sick self-reflection, by a frenetic lifestyle, by an externalizing worldliness. Here we find our way back to the quiet, healthy, deep wellspring of life. Says St. Gregory of Nyssa: “When a wanderer comes to a spring in the heat of the noonday sun, whose waters run cool and clear, does he sit down on the edge and begin to philosophize: where and how did this water come from? No, he leaves that. But he bends down to the spring and quenches his thirst, refreshes his parched lips and tongue, rests and gives thanks to Him to whom he owes this grace. Imitate this thirsty wanderer!” (In ordinationem suam.)
And that we may do this more easily, the court of the great King surrounds us, the Master’s assistants and elder disciples, by the great company of praying saints. It is in their communion, in their art, that our rudimentariness and our ineptitude are encouraged and warmed up. Saint Mechtild once asked the Lord: where can she find Him at any time? And the Lord answered, “Look for me on the altar, or in the heart of Gertrude (it is Saint Gertrude the Great” (feast on Nov. 16); for through the hearts of the great adorers of the Blessed Sacrament there is an easy way to the sacramental Christ Himself.
Wherever a church is found, especially a church of eternal adoration, there are not only the Pillars of Hercules found there, – which, according to the belief of the ancients, held up the heavens: for “there is no power greater than prayer, and nothing like it,” says St. John Chrysostom, – but there also rises an exclamation point, which with irresistible force cries out to this generation, which is in a hurry, which sees no heaven because it is focused on earth, which forgets the language of heaven from its many earthly issues, the language of prayer: Hic adora! Stop and remember that your most necessary and most human thing is to worship, and that you must always have time for it, and that you must be ready for it at all times.