I wonder do many people, in their later years, stand back a little from their lives, from the way they lived, and they values and beliefs they espoused, and take a more objective look at them than they have done previously. In the traditional religious training that I got in my youth it would be seen as ‘losing your faith’, or so we were told. But then we were told a lot of strange and even daft things.
This morning I attended Mass down in the pews with the people, as I usually do on a Sunday. (Sometimes during the week I say Mass if I have one or two people to join me; I like it that way, though I don’t think Cardinal Sarah would approve of our liturgical style!)
At this stage I am used of not joining in sections of the Creed, but this morning the Gloria reduced me to silence at an early stage:
“We praise you;
We bless you;
We adore you;
We glorify you;
We give you thanks for your great glory”.
I took up the recitation after that, and my thoughts moved on with the readings and the homily.
But then later in the Mass the cantor lead us in a hymn by St. Alphonsus:
“O Bread of Heaven beneath this veil,
Thou thust my very God conceal.
My Jesus, dearest treasure, hail.
I love thee, and adoring kneel”.
So I was back again to where I started, to this question of adoration. Does God want us to adore him/her/whatever? Not to mention telling God what great glory God is. I know that this type of language has come from an earlier time, when societies were governed by kings or chieftains, and it was important for the ordinary ‘Joe Soap’ to be diffident towards their rulers; a bit of adoration and glorification would not go amiss.
But to God? I don’t think so. In fact, if God was the sort that looked for this type of submissiveness and palaver from us, that God would hardly be worth bothering about.
I thought of the famous sentence from St. Irenaeus: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive”.
In so far as I have any understanding of God at this stage of my life, God is someone who would want us to “stand erect and hold our heads high”. I believe that, in some real and mysterious way, God is in us and we are part of God, and our destiny is to enter into the fullness of the Divine Presence. We are not worthless, submissive subjects, who need to ‘butter up’ this heavenly being in order to keep him on our side.
So that is another part of the prayer of the Church that I won’t participate in any more. No more adoration or glorification. It is not worthy of me; and, much more important, it is not worthy of God.
