Where Everything Has a Voice 1997 To Recognize You What is it that we are here before you to do, O Lord? We are here above all to adore. Adoration – you have taught us this – is the realistic attitude of the one who recognizes that there is something greater than himself. He discovers that this something, or someone, is the source of everything, because he comes to recognize that he did not make himself. Then he discovers that this something or someone guides the world. Otherwise he would have to accept the idea that everything is pure chance and therefore a terrible, tragic injustice. This “You” that precedes us is therefore the source of wisdom, the one from whom we draw, hour by hour, the meaning and weight of what we live. Our attitude toward this “You,” therefore, cannot be the stupid familiarity of one who takes God as an equal, as an already known quantity. God is, and remains, other. “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord” (Psalm 111:10). But this fear – this, too, you teach us – is not terror, but only the intelligent discovery of a mystery that pre-
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