Adoring God

by Douglas Steere

Von Hügel once declared, "Any religion that ignores the adoration of God is like a triangle with one side left out." It would be hard to come to any other conclusion about a form of prayer that left out the whole dimension of gratitude and veneration.

There is a spot some two thousand feet above Darjeeling, India, where a visit before daybreak, if the weather is favorable, may bring you the slow emergence of the whole Himalaya range from Kanchenjunga to Mt. Everest. To look at that immaculate, glittering sweep of white radiance is to have something happen in you. You do not want to climb the range, to photograph it, to paint it, to survey it, to quarry it, to mine it, to own it. Your one longing is to be left in quiet before it to marvel that anything on this earth could be so wonderful. Adoration is something like that.

Adoration is not reverence for something that ought to be respected, but a firsthand feeling of being moved to the core.

 


Excerpted from Pages 10-11, September/October ’98 Union Life