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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

3A

What do adoration, praise and worship mean to you? Do they form part of your personal prayer?

Do you have any religious images or objects at home? How are they important to you?

Do you like singing? Has Christian music played a part in your prayer and worship?

What other ideas or questions strike you from this part of the film?

 

3B

What is your favourite Christian season: Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter? What is your favourite feast day?

Do you have any experiences of praying with others, in the family or in a group? Do you find it helpful?

What is your experience of praying before the Blessed Sacrament, in the Tabernacle or during Eucharistic Exposition?

What other ideas or questions strike you from this part of the film?

 

KEY IDEAS FROM THE FILM

Adoration, praise and worship are at the heart of Christian prayer. We put the focus on God, on his goodness and beauty. It’s not just about ourselves and our own needs. Or put it another way, one of the deepest human needs is to adore, to turn away from ourselves, and be lost in wonder at the goodness and beauty of God. If we don’t adore God we might find we are turning to other things that are not worthy of our adoration.

So when we adore and praise God we are saying that he is worth more than anything in creation. He alone is worthy of our complete love and gratitude and honour and reverence. He is the source of all goodness, beauty and truth. And he is, in himself, infinite goodness and beauty and truth, in a way we can hardly understand this side of heaven. Psalm 22 says that God is “enthroned on the praises of Israel”.

Praise is an antidote to worry. So much of our prayer time can be focussed on ourselves: saying sorry for our sins, asking for God’s help. Praise and worship puts the spotlight on God. Praise is also an antidote to isolation: we become conscious of the worship of heaven, and we are united with the praise of all the angels and saints.

This is all fine, but how do we actually praise and adore God? How do we bring this into our prayer? Here are some tips.

In your personal prayer, make sure that you give some time to praising and blessing and adoring God. You can do this in your own words, or by saying some of the great prayers of praise from the bible and from the Christian tradition.

You could read some of the psalms from the Old Testament. Psalm 34: “I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise always on my lips”. Psalm 92: “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to give praise to your name, O Most High”. Psalm 149: “Sing a new song to the Lord, his praise in the assembly of the faithful”. There are so many more.

If you are keen to use the psalms and other scripture readings as part of your daily prayer, a beautiful way is to pray some of the Divine Office each day. This is a set of prayers used by consecrated religious and priests and many others, that can easily be used by lay people in their personal prayer. You could pray morning or evening prayer, or night prayer before you go to bed.

Silent prayer can be a form of adoration. This is a big part of the Carmelite tradition. Just kneeling or sitting in prayer, being aware of God’s presence, not saying anything, but wanting to honour him and be open to him.

Music can also help us to praise God, your own singing, or the recorded music of others. It might be Gregorian chant, or renaissance polyphony, or traditional hymns, or contemporary worship music – as long as it is helping you to lift up your heart in worship and keeping you focussed on God.

The Christian calendar can help us to adore God through the year. It reminds us of the great Christian feasts and seasons, so that we can give thanks for God’s many blessings and avoid becoming forgetful or trapped in a secular mindset. Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost – there is always something new to celebrate. And the Feast Days of the Saints give us an extra reason to praise God, for their example and prayers. We are praising God with the saints as well as praising him for the saints. The Christian calendar helps us to sanctify time and stops us being slaves to an alternative commercial calendar.

And above all, we praise and adore God not by ourselves or in small groups, but through the public liturgy and worship of the Church, through the seven sacraments, and especially through the Holy Eucharist. Worship is not what I do alone, it is the prayer of Christ and of the whole Church. I play my part in that, but it is much bigger than me.

The Sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest act of worship and adoration, because it is Christ’s own prayer, his offering. Through the Sacrifice of the Mass we are united to the Sacrifice of Calvary and to Christ’s eternal offering to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, which is made present on our altars.

And even outside the Mass we can continue to meet Jesus and worship him in the Blessed Sacrament, which is reserved in the tabernacle after Holy Communion. What a gift that he stays with us in this way, the Real Presence of Jesus, in his humanity and in his divinity. When the Blessed Sacrament is exposed in Eucharistic Adoration this gives us a chance to unite our personal worship with the worship of the Church; we come before him face to face, heart to heart. The adoration of earth is united to the adoration of heaven.