By Martin L. Smith
What is your very earliest memory? How far back can you push the frontier of remembrance until it will go no further? I thought of this during a brief halt in my dusting last week after I had rubbed the frame of an old photograph of my Ukrainian grandmother. I had a flashback to a moment of terror I had before I was 3, when a sparrow flew into the bathroom, scaring me to death. I staggered onto the landing with my pants entangling my ankles, wailing. Relief came with the sight of my grandmother hauling herself up the stairs to rescue me, murmuring soothing words in a muddle of Russian and English and waving a Mars bar.
What is your earliest spiritual experience? How far back do you go to reach the first time you had some intimation of the Holy One? I must have been 4. My mother had to take me to the office one day, where she worked as the secretary of a formidable stock-broker, Miss Moscrop-Robinson. I was forced to come to terms with her hideous, snuffling pug-dog as I whiled away the hours, listening to the tap of the typewriter and the clanging of the clock. But I must have been good, because my mother gave in to my insistence that we visit a peculiar building across the road before going home. I could tell this made her uncomfortable but I was intrigued by the pointed black chimney that towered over the entrance, and I could see that people were coming in and out. I was astonished by what we found inside. Men and women were scattered around sitting very still. Some were kneeling. Others were lighting candles. Beautiful colored windows glowed. The walls were the hue of a thrush’s egg. I could tell that something quite wonderful was going on, even though nothing appeared to be happening. There was a look on people’s upturned faces I had never seen before. They were paying attention to something I couldn’t see that made them serious and calm. I was thrilled. I was told this was a church.
No one in my family practiced religion, but I must have pumped my mother later for further explanations, and she must have drawn on her experience at a convent grammar school to do her best to satisfy my questions. What were those people doing? “Adoration.” Somehow I got it, and to everyone’s bafflement by my 5th birthday I was announcing my intention of becoming a priest.
Sometimes first impressions give us a spool of thread to be unwound as we negotiate the labyrinth of life, the thread we can use for getting home again wherever the twists and turns have taken us. There’s something in me that is going to light up when we start singing again soon, “O come, let us adore him.” Adoration. I can’t help thinking that this belongs to the core of religion for all, and if it is relegated to the attic or pushed offstage then that seems to me a church’s worst betrayal. When I was very small I could tell that perfectly ordinary people going about their daily work (not some special niche group interested in spirituality, as we so often imagine today) had been initiated into a practice, an activity, a way that they wanted to return to again and again, in which they let themselves experience a kind of rapture. There in the midst of ordinary activities in this dirty industrial town, they could let themselves go and bask for while in the sheer reality of a loving God. Those who ached from life’s demands could soak in God like a hot bath. Those who felt cold and wet could simply “dry off in the sunshine of his love,” as Therese of Lisieux would say. Or they could simply look at God, “looking at them lovingly and humbly,” as her namesake Teresa of Avila put it, and it wasn’t a big deal, something they were in the habit of doing before they caught the bus home.
I can’t accept that adoration is some kind of special faculty for a few. The folks I saw praying in St Marie’s would have been deeply perplexed by the notion that it was for contemplatives. Wasn’t this simply the core of religion? I saw it, I felt it and I suppose I was unselfconsciously coached in it by working people with no sophistication. My earliest spiritual director was Nora, our Irish cleaning lady. She adored Christ, and actually adoring was for her as concrete and real as swimming. It wasn’t an idea. It was something she knew how to do and she assumed that it was what we were born for, and that the feel for it was latent in everyone. She was poor, but she felt rich, and it saddened her whenever she found that someone had not discovered that God is wonderful.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, in Washington, D.C.