Besides God and our Lady, two things that I love are the spirituality of our Church and being Catholic.

I am a Chaldean Catholic priest, and my Church is one branch of an ancient tradition: the Church of the East, planted in the Persian Empire by the saints Thomas, Addai, and Mari. That one ancient Church has several descendants today — the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Syro-Malabar Church. Some of us are in communion with Rome and some are not. But the tradition we inherited is the same tradition, and we still pray the same prayers, including the ancient anaphora of Addai and Mari, although in different ways.

Our tradition beautifully tells us how to stand in the presence of the Holy Mysteries. On the feasts of our Lord the celebrant sings: “Awesome are You, Most High God, in Your holy sanctuary forever and ever! Blessed be the glory of the Lord, from His holy dwelling place!” And the people answer: “The Coal which the prophet saw, the angel held with tongs. But now in the sanctuary, the priests bear it in their hands! Come, let us draw near to Him with holiness in body and soul. This is indeed the Mystery which was hidden and is given for our sake for the remission of sins.”¹ In the Mass itself, just before he breaks the Body, the priest lifts the host and kisses it, taking care that his lips do not touch it — honoring the Lord before he receives Him.² Centuries before anyone among us had seen a monstrance, our liturgy was teaching our people where to look, and how to reverentially and piously tremble before our loving God.

One of the most life-transforming and real gifts of my life as a Catholic is Eucharistic adoration. To sit in front of the Lord face to face and converse with Him, as Moses did on Sinai, and to let my soul be made radiant by the glory of God — something words cannot describe. When Moses came down from that mountain his face was shining and he did not even know it. That is what adoration has done in me. Adoration is the place where I found healing for wounds I carried for years, and where I came to know myself. Which is why it thrills me that so many of our churches in our diocese now have adoration chapels, and that our people can have that experience too. The spreading of adoration chapels is the reason that I chose to write this article. I hear it often: we should not have Eucharistic adoration, because it is not part of the spirituality and history of our Church. This statement hurts me — and I should be honest that I am not a neutral party here. I have received too much from this practice to pretend I am weighing it coldly, and you should read what follows knowing that. But being pained by a question is not the same as answering it. So it does leave me wondering: are they right?

As far as I can see, there are only three possible answers. One: adoration is irreconcilable with our tradition, and we should do away with it. Two: it is not part of our tradition but is reconcilable, and so we keep it anyway and give credit where it is due — this is something borrowed from a sister Church, received with gratitude and named for what it is. Churches have always learned from one another, and there is no shame in admitting where something came from. Three: Eucharistic adoration is not only reconcilable with the history and spirituality of the Church of the East — not something foreign that we tolerate — but something our own tradition can account for, and can shape. I want to argue for the third.

To be honest, the first option is the hardest for me to consider fairly. I have watched people walk into that chapel carrying things they had carried for years, and walk out having set them down. That is not proof. A practice can bear fruit and still not belong to us, and I know it. But this is why I will not reach for the first option. Plus, setting a devotion aside because it came to us late is a much harder reach. Everything in every tradition was once new — the Hudra was new once, the churches we pray in were new at some point, and even the prayer Qadisha Alaha, “Holy God,” was most likely added from the Greek tradition by Mar Aba.³ Lateness makes a thing young; it does not make it foreign. So the first option needs a stronger claim than the one usually made for it: not that adoration is unlike our tradition, but that it works against it. That is the claim I want to test.

One thing has to be said before we begin, or the question gets asked unfairly. We tend to measure ourselves against our Latin brothers and sisters, and whatever we have received from them we are quick to call an imposition. But we forget that the Latin Church did not receive its own prayers and practices all at once either. It developed them over time, very often to meet the pastoral needs of its people, and Eucharistic adoration is one of them. Pope Pius XII said so himself: “the cult of adoring the Eucharist was founded and gradually developed as something distinct from the sacrifice of the Mass. The reservation of the sacred species for the sick and those in danger of death introduced the praiseworthy custom of adoring the blessed Sacrament which is reserved in our churches.”⁴ For most of the Church’s history there was no single way of keeping the Sacrament — a room off the sanctuary, the sacristy, a dove hanging above the altar, a cupboard set into the wall, a tower standing beside it, a locked chest resting on the altar itself. A fixed tabernacle at the center of the main altar, which most of us assume is simply what a Catholic church looks like, was made the rule by two Italian bishops in the sixteenth century, and even then it took hold slowly; a German synod in 1688 was still telling its pastors they might put the tabernacle in the wall beside the altar instead.⁵

So to answer the adoration question, we have to look at two things that are related but not the same. The first is what our Church did with the Holy Mysteries once the liturgy was over: whether it kept them at all, and if it did, in what place and under what conditions. The second — and this is the real question — is whether people in our Church who were not receiving the Holy Mysteries ever directed worship toward them. That second question is the heart of adoration. Keeping the Mysteries only makes adoration possible. It is the looking and the honoring that make it adoration.

Let us begin with the first.

Where the Holy Mysteries Were Kept

This is a difficult question to answer, because scholars have not come to a settled conclusion about how far the Church of the East allowed the reservation of the Eucharist, or under what conditions.⁶ But one thing is not in dispute. From the beginning, our Church has believed that the bread and wine are changed, by the invocation of the Holy Spirit, into the Body and Blood of Jesus.⁷ In the fifth century Narsai, the great teacher of the School of Nisibis, put these words in the mouth of Christ Himself: “Body and Blood do I make the bread and wine through the brooding and operation of the Holy Spirit.” And he adds that Christ “did not style them a type or a similitude, but Body in reality and Blood in verity.”⁸ Eight centuries later, ʿAbdishoʿ says the same in his Book of the Pearl:

Through this divine institution the bread is changed into His Holy Body, and the wine into His Precious Blood, and they impart, to all who receive them in faith and without doubting, the forgiveness of sins, purification, enlightenment, pardon, the great hope of the resurrection from the dead, the inheritance of heaven, and the new life. Whenever we approach these Sacraments we meet with Christ Himself, and His very Self we take into our hands and kiss, and thereby we are joined to and with Christ, His holy Body mixing with our bodies, and His pure Blood mingling with our blood, and by faith we know Him that is in heaven and Him that is in the Church, to be but one Body.⁹

We do not, though, have to take only the word of our own Church Fathers for that belief. In the 1840s an Anglican missionary named George Percy Badger lived among our people. He was no friend of Rome: among other things, he meant to show how far those of us who had united with Rome had altered our ancient books. He read our books carefully, and he concluded that we believe our Eucharist to be “a real partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, and not a bare sign of Christian discipleship” — the sign, he wrote, “not of an absent thing, but of the real Presence of the Saviour.”¹⁰ So what did we do with that Body when the liturgy ended? The typical answer is nothing. The priest celebrated, the people received, and what remained was consumed. While in the early Western Church there are attestations to the faithful freely carrying the Sacrament home, that practice is one thing our Church would not allow. Instead our people came to the church. In fact, there is a beautiful story in the Book of Governors about an old solitary who could no longer walk, and who was carried on his disciple’s back so that he could receive the Eucharist.¹¹ That is one of several stories. Another old man managed the journey once a week and no more. A third lived in a cave and came when he could. In a long book full of miracles, no one ever brings the Mysteries out to a monk in his cell. Men who could not walk were carried to where the Body of Christ was. Going to church is an important reality of our tradition, on which more will be said.

Does this mean that the sick and the imprisoned went without the Eucharist, then? No. That was the exception, and our fathers thought about it with great care. If a man was ill or dying, the priest was to take a particle, dip it in the chalice, and carry it to him before dawn while it was still dark — saying psalms in his heart the whole way, and not sitting down once until he had returned to the church and taken up his service again. Other rules add lights and incense, and readers walking in front, and forbid anyone carrying or attending the Eucharist to sit on the ground until they return to the church. The way the Eucharist is carried indicates a procession with our Lord. Later rules narrowed this to a prisoner or a man dangerously ill, at Easter, at night, and only with the bishop’s permission.¹² The strictest ruling came later still, from Patriarch Ishoʿyahb IV, who allowed that in necessity the Mysteries might be brought as far as the outer door of the church, with lights and incense, but forbade going past that door.¹³

The reason our fathers were strict was that they feared the elements might decay or be desecrated.¹⁴ One cannot be afraid that the Body of Christ will rot in a cupboard unless one is certain that it is the Body of Christ. The strictness is reverence with its teeth showing. It is the same instinct as the deacon who is not permitted to sit down while he carries Him through the dark. One must protect the Eucharist at all costs, because of who He is. This is why many of our fathers would not allow reservation. In fact, the scholar who edited Ishoʿyahb IV’s questions about the Eucharist concluded, though this is debated, that the later canonists of our Church knew of no permission to keep the consecrated Bread, and that the Western practices — a liturgy of the Presanctified, a standing reserve for the sick, the Eucharist kept for the consecration of altars — are not found among us.¹⁵ How do we respond to this?

Well, the canons of Patriarch John bar Abgare record the exceptions, Ishoʿyahb’s own questions assume them, and so do other bishops. When more had been consecrated than the priest could consume, or when there was no one left to consume it, the Mysteries could remain overnight. Sometimes they were kept in the place our books call the Beth Gazza, the House of the Treasury. Sometimes the Eucharist was on the altar itself. But never carelessly. The chalice had to be consumed. A lamp had to be kept burning, and a man had to stand watch through the night, and was not to leave without a substitute.¹⁶ The next day, when there was no consecrated chalice, the priest signed the chalice with that same particle from the Treasury, showing that what had been left overnight was still the same Lord.¹⁷ Additionally, Dadishoʿ Qaṭraya, whom we will meet below, allows a hermit who is not keeping complete solitude to come out of his cell on the night of the Sabbath and receive the Mysteries consecrated on Friday.¹⁸ Some scholars suggest that the Church allowed communion services at funerals,¹⁹ and that hermits without a priest had their own rite for receiving the consecrated bread.²⁰ These were not regular services but exceptions, and each one meant keeping the Mysteries after the Mass.

Our tradition, then, makes room for reservation of the Eucharist through practicality and pastoral charity. The strict rejection of reservation was for the protection of the Eucharist, but when a pastoral need arose, the Church responded by leaning toward pastoral mercy and not strict legalism. The same ancient Church that sends the priest out to the sick without pause, and that requires an abiding presence before the remaining Eucharist, also allows the faithful who are in need of the Eucharist to come and receive healing. As so many of our prayers say, sin makes us sick and we are in need of the Divine Physician.²¹ This Divine Physician is the one whom our Church has found for centuries in the burning coal — the coal Isaiah saw, which the angel could touch only with tongs, and which now rests in the hands of our priests.

But the man with the lamp came to guard, not to gaze. Whether anyone in our tradition ever came simply to look at Him is the second question, and the one that matters.

Gazing on the Eucharist

So let us go back to the books. Not to a canon or a scholar this time, but to the hymns we sing on an ordinary Sunday. Our Church did produce systematic theology — ʿAbdishoʿ’s Marganitha is one of the few examples — but most of her theology is carried in poetic verse: in the homilies of Narsai, or in the hymns of the Hudra, to name a couple. While the Latin Church produced statues and paintings, and the Byzantine Churches their icons, we produced hymns. Our theology is sung before it is written down. So listen to what the deacon chants while the Mysteries are on the altar.

Hear, for example, what we sing on the Third Sunday of the Apostles, at the Hymn of the Holy of Holies: “at the time when the priest enters the sanctuary, the choirs of Seraphim above him stand in reverence and watch as he breaks and shares the Body of Christ for the remission of sins.” Or on the Sixth Sunday of the Apostles, at Communion: “see how the angels stand in awe before Him as they tremble to gaze upon the splendour of His Light.” The same hymn continues: “But Christ gives it to us through His abundant mercy … Come, approach the Son of the King Who grants us His Mysteries and sing Halleluiah.” At Pentecost we pray: “choirs of angels now surround the blessed table, the altar, and sing.” On the Sixth Sunday of Epiphany: “the Table is prepared, and the angels above and the priests in the Church reverently praise it.” And on the First Sunday after the Nativity: “these glorious Mysteries which the angels longed to see.”²²

The angels do not receive. They stand, they watch, they tremble, they praise. They are in awe of the reality before them. And notice what the hymn does next. It sets them beside us to tell us how much we have been given: they can only look, but Christ gives Himself to us. Our books are not shy about it: to receive Christ truly and substantially is greater than to gaze upon Him. So if anyone fears that a chapel will empty the altar, our own hymns answer him. The hymn, though, also establishes that the seraphim are not idle. You cannot tell a man that the angels can do no more than gaze unless gazing is worth doing. Their gaze is itself worship. This is all adoration asks for. Not the greater gift, but the one the angels have. The answer is in our own books, and it is not hidden, but sung.

There is even a story in the Book of Governors about Mar Narses, Bishop of Shenna, who describes how, whenever he attended the liturgy, the hidden spiritual mysteries were revealed to him. He says:

Every time I am in the church during the service of the Mysteries, my mind is lifted up above the sight of these things which are done during the service, and above the church and its congregation, to the things which are in heaven; and these things which are before my eyes are explained [mystically] by the things which are secret and hidden from every man. The church which is depicted before me [represents] that of Jerusalem which is upon earth … the Book of the Gospels [represent] the New Covenant and the throne of Christ at the time of His dispensation here.²³

For the sake of brevity I have not quoted the whole passage. But notice where his mind is drawn: not away from the altar, but past the liturgy to what the liturgy carries — above the sight of these things which are done during the service, and above the church and its congregation. Here is a man attending to the hidden reality rather than to the rite, in the middle of the liturgy, and our books kept the story as a mark of holiness rather than a fault. He goes on to read the whole church in the same way: the bema as Zion, the altar as the throne of the Deity, the priests as the nine choirs of angels, and the two facing choirs as the seraphim who cry Holy — the very seraphim our hymns place above the priest. And of the veils that hang before the Mysteries he says that they show us that the Godhead is hidden even from the angels. That is the hidden reality we are speaking of: not something withheld from us, but something too great to be looked at — hidden from the angels themselves, and given to us under bread. We see here the mystery that we are called to be lifted to.

Yet an objection can be raised here: our liturgy speaks of gazing upon the Mysteries only during the Holy Mass. So how can we respond to this? Well, let us see how our spiritual fathers approached the Eucharist. This mystery, it turns out, can be experienced outside the liturgy itself. In the Hudra, for Holy Thursday, we sing: “Come, all ye who believe, and whilst beholding the Lamb of God upon the altar who is sacramentally sacrificed every day, let us with renewed hearts confess Him without doubtfulness … Let us, therefore, in fear and awe cry out and say: Holy, Holy, Holy, art Thou, O God, who fillest heaven and earth with Thy glory.”²⁴ This is sung on Holy Thursday, on the eve of the two days on which our Church celebrated no Mass at all, Good Friday and Holy Saturday — not even the Presanctified liturgy that the Latin Church kept on Good Friday. Our people went into those days with the Lamb on the altar before their eyes, and with the altar empty until Easter, they could carry that beholding only in their hearts.

Even more, ʿAbdishoʿ states: “We worship Christ’s humanity because of the Godhead in Him; so, through the Cross, we worship God our Saviour. … When, therefore, we look upon this emblem of our salvation, we conceive as though we were beholding our Saviour outstretched upon it for the remission of our sins, and for the renewal of all creation. Hence we offer a fervent and eucharistic worship, not to the fashioned matter of the Cross; but to Him whom we figure as upon it.”²⁵ “We conceive” helps us to understand the drawing of our hearts and minds to that which we cannot see. And notice what he settles in his first clause: to worship Christ’s humanity is not to worship a creature, because of the Godhead in Him. If, then, worship may rightly pass through wood to Him whom we only figure upon it, how much more may it rest upon Him where there is no figure at all, but His very Self. But centuries before ʿAbdishoʿ, a solitary monk invites us to reflect and gaze upon the hidden reality.

Dadishoʿ Qaṭraya invites the solitary monk who is living in a silent cell to meditate upon the holy mysteries, even when he is not present at the liturgy. He states, “And every time the remembrance of the holy mysteries passes over your mind, direct the gaze of your mind toward the altar, and cry out in affliction mingled with love, and thus say: My soul thirsts for You, O living God.”²⁶ He puts it even more powerfully:

For although you are restrained from their fellowship the whole of your week, because of the canon that stillness requires — yet from their beloved and awesome remembrance let not your mind cease, and more especially on the days of the Sundays. And if you keep and do these things — all the days of your week your sitting will be in affliction and contrition, and in wakefulness and love of labors. And at the end of the week, when you go out to the assembly to receive the holy mysteries with the saints of our Lord, there surges within your soul a divine joy from the reception of His Body and Blood, which has no comparison among created things, and there is no taste in creation that is like its taste.²⁷

The whole reason he wants the solitary to do this is “for the honor of the holy mysteries.”²⁸ And he does not expect the solitary to find this honor on his own; he sends him to learn it from those who went before him: “When, then, you understand, O my beloved, and know what love and fear and honor the anchorites and the confined acquired toward the Body and Blood of our Lord — you too, be like them, especially in meditation such as this, the whole night and day of the holy Sunday.”²⁹ If the solitary must learn from the masters, so must we. God does not call all of us to be solitaries and hermits, but He does call all of us to holiness and to a living relationship with Him, and we learn that from those who have attained it.

Our Church Fathers show us what it means to gaze. So let us be like the man who for forty years was far from the Mysteries in body, and went to the altar in thought. Dadishoʿ states:

And be diligent and strive to acquire within your soul that perfect love, full of wonder, toward the holy mysteries — which that anchorite acquired in his soul, the one worthy of all blessings, who used to eat the pith of reeds for forty years. After forty years, in which he ate no bread nor even saw it, it happened that after all this time he saw bread with certain people crossing the wilderness. From the boundless love he had in his soul toward the holy mysteries — when every Sunday he ran in his thought and entered the altar, and gazed longingly, in the vision of his soul, upon the Body and Blood of our Lord Christ placed upon the altar, and in them delighted spiritually like the angels in heaven — because all this love and honor and fear he distributed to the holy mysteries while he was far from them in body — as soon as he saw the bread that is by nature like that holy bread placed upon the altar, from his great joy his soul rejoiced in the remembrance of the Body and Blood of our Lord, and he cried out with a loud voice and thus said: “Glory to You, O Lord Jesus Christ, who for forty years have made me worthy to see bread that is by nature like that bread which the priests offer up upon Your holy altar — and through the prayers and priestly blessings, and through the descent of Your Spirit upon it, it becomes truly Your body, and gives forgiveness and grants eternal life to those who receive it.”³⁰

Conclusion

At the beginning of this article I offered three possible answers, and said I would argue for the third. I do. But first, the truth: the monstrance, the chapel, and exposition are borrowed. What is not borrowed is everything they are made of. Adoration brings no new object among us — the Body and Blood of our Lord, which our books have always said are truly changed. It brings no new place — the church, before the altar, which is exactly where our canons insisted the Mysteries remain. And it brings no new act — the reverential gaze, which can take place outside the Holy Mass, as our Fathers showed us for centuries in the stories of holy people. What adoration adds is duration and ceremony. The reverential guard who protected the Mysteries has his counterpart in the man who ran to gaze at them. The guard stayed beside the Body of Christ all night, with a lamp burning, but he did not come to look at Him. The anchorite looked at Him with love every Sunday, but he was far away in the wilderness and never came near. In an adoration chapel we are asked to do both at once: to keep watch beside Him like the guard, and to gaze on Him like the anchorite.

To those who say that adoration is not part of our spirituality, I would say that they are half right, and it is the half that matters most to them. The form is borrowed, and their instinct to protect what is ours is a good one. But the substance is not borrowed. It has been an invitation from our own theologians and poets for centuries: to gaze upon the hidden reality that is present before us, and to be drawn into the mysteries.

At the beginning I admitted honestly that I am not a neutral party. I still am not. But I am now convinced that what I found in that chapel was not foreign to our Church. Eucharistic adoration can be more than reconciled with our Church. It is not a foreign imposition, but something our own tradition can account for, receive, and shape — something that allows the faithful to be drawn into the hidden depths of our merciful and loving God, and to experience now the eternal joy that is promised. We can and should embrace Eucharistic adoration as a form given to us by a sister Church, whose substance has been present among us for centuries.