Good evening. It's a pleasure to be with you this evening for this to Mystic Institute quarantine lecture,

to think about the human vocation to worship God, to talk about what it means to live this vocation,

to live a life of divine worship, even at a time like this in the midst of this terrible pandemic.

The reality is that at present, many Catholics throughout the world, most Catholics in this

country cannot go to Mass, which for a believer is a cause of great suffering.

The Eucharist is the source and summit of our Christian lives.

And so to be cut off from sacramental communion, from being able to receive our Lord his body and blood, even for a time, is undoubtedly a source of great suffering.

But this is not the only thing that the Catholic is deprived of, so to speak,

when the public celebration of the Mass is suspended. Because the celebration of the Eucharist

is itself something broader than the reception of the Eucharist in sacramental communion.

That is to say that when a Catholic goes to Mass,

he or she is not only there to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist,

which of course is an unspeakable gift,

but there is in fact something more fundamental happening and a more fundamental reason for going to Mass,

namely to worship the one true God.

This idea of divine worship is what I would like to reflect upon with you this evening.

What does it mean to worship God?

What does it mean to say that we go to Mass, firstly, to give worship to God?

And how can we do this in an extraordinary situation like the one we find ourselves in now?

A 20th century orthodox theologian named Alexander Schmaiman coined this felicitous phrase

that captures the theme that we're here to consider tonight. Schmaiman speaks about the human being

as homo adorans. It's a Latin phrase that basically means man, homo, is a worshipping being,

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