Below are excerpts from John Macquarrie’s book, Paths in Spirituality, chs 1 and 2. These ideas express a thoroughgoing Anglican and Catholic sensibility, which of course is not surprising given the he was a preeminent Anglican theologian of the 20th century.
In what I’ve quoted, Macquarrie discusses themes of practice, adoration, discipline, and ascetical theology. In doing so he is thinking similarly to Martin Thornton:
So I am claiming that man [even today] needs the practice of religion for the fulfillment of his humanity. As Teilhard de Chardin has expressed it, ‘The more man becomes man, the more will he become prey to a need, a need that is always more explicit, more subtle, and more magnificent, the need to adore’.[1] . . . If we in our time are to experience the need to adore, then adoration will need to be interpreted more subtly than on my model of homage paid to an absolute monarch, which is how many people do think of it, and they can scarcely do otherwise in view of so much of the traditional language. But ‘to adore’ (Latin: ad-orare) is ; to pray toward . . . ‘ It is to go out of oneself, to commune with a Reality larger, deeper, purer than one’s own being. Adoration is an enhancement of one’s being, though paradoxically this comes abut through going out of oneself.