
For my first attempt at Eucharistic adoration, I was late.
I had signed up online for adoration at our church’s chapel. I chose a slot at 2 p.m. on a Friday. That morning, I saw a reminder on my paper desk calendar, and then promptly forgot about it. Until about 5:45. Oops. I went online and a 6 p.m. slot was still open. I raced over to church, and got there at 6:10. As I hurried across the parking lot, I realized that even though I had been a parishioner for about eight years, I had never actually been in the chapel. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure where it was. But I guessed right, and walked into the small, simple room to find several other people sitting or kneeling before the host encased in a gold monstrance on the little altar. It was a reminder that I didn’t have to be totally certain about something to be right about it in the end. It was also reassuring to know that even if I lag behind, there are other pilgrims with me on the journey.
For I was late to adoration in another sense. I had spent my first forty-some years in traditions where the Real Presence was never a major topic. The most helpful insight I heard then was that the Eucharist is a holy mystery. And this is true as far as it goes. However, about three decades ago, I entered the Catholic Church, and I began to see that we benefit from trying to understand holy mysteries, even if our progress is slow. For instance, this winter my wife and I read Bishop Robert Barron’s booklet on the Eucharist, “This Is My Body,” aloud to each other, and we learned a lot. Still, this mystery is deep enough that more than reading is required. I thought enduring an hour of adoration might help.
I dreaded it, however, because I thought sitting in silence would drive me nuts. The first thing I learned in the chapel, though, was that the silence was comfortable. I didn’t feel the need to do anything. I had brought a spiritual book to turn to if overcome by tedium, but I didn’t look at it. I felt in tune with just … being there. I suspect that, as an occasional writer, I felt relieved from the tumult of “words, words, words.”
The monstrance was lovely, yet at the same time it highlighted the host’s plainness, and thus its power. Yes, the wafer is the most ordinary thing in the world; that is precisely why it is so extraordinary. That the Almighty becomes the substance of the wafer is the pledge that he is part of everything, in some way, even if we don’t see or understand how.
It began to dawn on me that the truly simple is also the truly rich. The very simplicity of adoration forces us to confront the mystery it presents to us. God is in this tasteless bread, just as he came into this twisted, desperate world. Adoration doesn’t solve the mystery; it allows us to enter more fully into it. The very depth of this mystery forces us to surrender to our awareness of the divine.
As I sat in the chapel, I came to appreciate what French thinker Simone Weil meant by “attention.” As her biographer Robert Zaretsky wrote, this kind of attention, “means not to seek, but to wait; not to concentrate, but instead to dilate our minds. We do not gain insights, Weil claims, by going in search of them, but instead by waiting for them.” That hour in the little chapel forced me to sit, to listen, to wait.
At the same time, Weil’s life showed attention is far from mere passivity. She worked at an auto factory during the Depression, trained to be a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and was active in the French Resistance in World War II. I saw that adoration is a species of action. In the chapel I was at attention, like a soldier on guard duty. I had to be calm and patient, yet alert and ready. If adoration seems to be still and quiet, it is also one stage of obeying the commands of the divine.
Since this first experience, I did another stint of adoration, and I have signed up for one more. I do not know how much these few hours affect me, though I am encouraged by how quietly, subtly, and silently the things of the spirit work. I hope I am heeding the Eucharist more deeply than before. I might be more aware of hints at the divine in my conscience and the world. And I am, I pray, on guard and at attention, more alert than ever for any orders I might be given.