Hello everyone. I hope you are well and keeping safe. I must say the water is perfect down here at the Jersey shore. So refreshing. I also find the beach such a prayerful place. Thoughts turn into prayers and prayers turn into gratitude.
I hope soon we could return in a safe way to adoration of Jesus in the Eucharist. Msgr Sweeney, our new pastor to come, told me that he thought it was such a blessing that we had steady and beautiful adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. It would be nice to meet him with having adoration in place.
You might appreciate these words from part of a homily given by Fr. John Henry Hanson, O. Praem from the St Jose Maria Institute. Enjoy the rest of the day.
Happy feast day of St Clare of Assisi.
“I know of a young man whose loneliness was cured by a priest’s simple reminder during a Sunday homily: ‘With Jesus always present in the tabernacle, we never have a reason to feel lonely.’ Sometimes we need to be reminded of the obvious, and perhaps it takes a particularly difficult moment for a familiar truth to hit home: Jesus is ‘here on earth for you’ (The Way, no. 539).”
The Lord does not remain with us in the Eucharist for His own sake, but to meet our deepest human needs for love and friendship: “Jesus, who has encouraged this feeling of emptiness in us, comes out to meet us” (Christ is Passing By, no. 170). In some, like that young man, the Lord allows a certain loneliness so that they will seek Him out and discover the truth of another equally simple reminder: “When you approach the Tabernacle remember that he has been awaiting you for twenty centuries” (The Way, no. 537).
A relationship of permanent remaining or abiding with us is what Jesus ardently desires, and He is most forthright about it in connection with the Eucharist: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him”; “Abide in me, and I in you” (see Jn 6:56; 15:4). The Lord describes the special kind of relationship that He wants to have with us as a mutual abiding. Almost inexplicably, as St Josemaria says, Christ does not want to be parted from us even for an instant.
This ‘incomprehensible’ fact demands reflection: Hasn’t Jesus Christ been an eyewitness to our entire lives, seeing right through us at every moment? Hasn’t He seen us at our worst? He has, and in spite of (or because of) our occasional or frequent stupidity, our vanity, selfishness, blindness to what is truly important, Jesus still wants this. He still wants to dwell within us; He still wants holy communion with us. For reasons that love alone can explain, the Lord “does not want to be separated from us,” but wants us to be as branches to His vine.