Faith & Spirit Quote by Evelyn Underhill

Underhill’s “Adoration” isn’t the soft-focus devotion of greeting cards; it’s a deliberate act of reordering. The phrase “caring for God above all else” uses a domestic, almost parental verb - caring - to recast worship as sustained attention rather than a mood or a performance. That choice matters. “Caring” implies duty, patience, and maintenance: you don’t just feel it, you practice it. Underhill is defining adoration as a disciplined prioritization, a kind of interior budgeting where every desire competes and God wins.

The subtext is gently confrontational. “Above all else” is a quiet ultimatum aimed at the modern self, forever tempted to treat spirituality as one interest among many - alongside career, romance, politics, self-improvement. Underhill, writing in an era when industrial modernity was accelerating and institutional religion was being pressured by skepticism and distraction, insists that adoration can’t be a weekend hobby. It’s totalizing, not because God is needy, but because the human person is scattered. Adoration is her remedy for fragmentation.

Contextually, Underhill’s wider work on mysticism and spiritual formation pushes against both dry moralism and vague sentimentality. She’s trying to rehabilitate the inner life as something rigorous. The line also sidesteps theological abstraction: she doesn’t define God; she defines the human posture toward God. The power comes from its blunt hierarchy. You can argue doctrine endlessly; you can’t dodge the personal question embedded here: what, in practice, sits at the top of your care?