Prayer as Adoration

Prayer is primarily something God does in me, it is allowing God to flow through me.  My part is to make myself available for this, to become consciously with, and in, the God who is always with, and in, me.  Consequently, however much I may feel myself to be the initiator I am, in fact, always responding to a pressure, a hint, an invitation from him.  Our ego may desire us to be on equal terms with the Lord, determining the time and place for the meeting, but it is not so.  The dethronement of ego begins with this recognition and continues when we grasp its corollary, that prayer is to make us available to God and not the other way round….  All too often we feel that our prayer is totally for God because we have brought all our troubles to him, acknowledging our need, but then praying from within our distress becomes immersion in it.  We do not leave our problems with him but continue to chase them round in his presence.  Gradually attention has been diverted from God in himself towards our ego, with God as its helper.  Awareness of this tendency leads me to centre all prayer, therefore, in adoration, understood not as one aspect of prayer but as its underpinning and context.  Adoration seems to be a word little used and little understood.  My understanding of praise is that it tends towards God for what he is, and generally, what he is to, and for, us.  Adoration is sheer wonder that God is, and desires simply to let him be….  Adoration, therefore, confirms us in the truth of humility and poverty, opening us to participation in the God who is all, freeing us to delight wholly in him.

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– from The Gift of Self, by Heather Ward (1990)

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