Fr Alain-Marie de Lassus, of the Community of St John, has provided a wide-ranging study of adoration from a biblical, philosophical and theological point of view. His slim book, the newly reprinted Adoration in Spirit and Truth (Newman House Press, 128pp, £7.50/$10), is packed with scholarship and a prayerful understanding of man’s true relationship to God.
It also offers a useful perspective for those who assume that “adoration” implies Eucharistic Adoration in front of the tabernacle in a church. The author reminds readers that it is natural for human beings to adore their Creator and that in all periods of history “man appears as a religious being”. It is largely in the late 19th and 20th century that his gaze has moved from God to alternative, false foci for worship: man himself, political ideologies, the Earth and so on – the age of Marx, Darwin and Freud.
