Wordsworth's

" . . . the holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration . . ."

has nothing to do with nuns or adoration but is about the beauty of evening. I have occasionally wondered where Wordsworth got his ideas about nuns from: was it as a young man, full of hope for the French Revolution and delighting in a kind of nature pantheism, or as the dutiful Church-of-England-sonnets man he later became? Either way, he got one thing absolutely right: the centrality of adoration to the life of any Christian.

When life is overfull or a bit bumpy, I have only one remedy. I go and kneel before the Blessed Sacrament. It helps, of course, if there is no one else around because when one feels one can't pray but can only kneel, (with all the prayer being in the kneeling), anything and everything can be a distraction. So one just kneels before God and turns everything over to him. This is the prayer of Total Incompetence, the prayer of the Everlasting Beginner. It is also the prayer of Adoration because at its heart is the recognition that God is God, supremely good, supremely beautiful, supremely loving. As Walter Hilton said, "I am naught; I have naught; I covet naught but Thee". It is a prayer for all times and seasons, when we ask nothing but allow God to do all. That can be hard for some of us, but letting go is essential because the more there is of us, the less there is likely to be of God. If you have never tried this kind of prayer before, today would be a very good day to begin.