Adoration: deeper into Love

This is a year of Eucharistic Revival, and it's been on my heart to share a small piece of my own story:

"When you receive the Eucharist, you'll be a living tabernacle!" I said to my niece and goddaughter, just days before her First Communion. "Oh! I've never heard that before!" she responded with delight. Though I smiled and shared her joy, my heart broke again that it was me, not her mother, who gave and received the gift of this moment. 

Though Heidi seems gone, she lives in Christ. Contemplating this, I saw an additional treasure within my niece's First Communion: receiving the body, blood, soul & divinity of Christ, in whom her mother eternally lives, there would be a physical unity of daughter with mother-who-is-in-Christ, members of his one body.

My love for the Eucharist began with encountering Adoration, but not as one might imagine. I was in high school, a protestant on a heavily-Catholic mission trip. The chapel where we ate lunch offered daily Mass, so we attended, daily. As a conservative Lutheran, attending Mass felt like visiting a distant cousin (I knew better than to receive Communion). I didn't feel terribly out of place until we arrived early one day and my friends were delighted that there was "Adoration" in a side room. 

Asking if I'd like to go with them, they may as well have asked if I wanted to "cultivate" - a nonsensical use of a somewhat familiar word. It didn't seem the time to ask for clarification so I simply said, "No thanks, I'll hang out in the bookshop." They disappeared through a door and didn't return for quite some time. I meandered around, occasionally glancing curiously at the door, wondering what might be going on behind it. If memory serves, it was then that I first saw the book, A Severe Mercy. I recall being intrigued by the cover's mention of letters from C.S. Lewis. I would run into the book again a few years later during a minor existential crisis about what it meant to "love" and sense its familiarity was a beckoning to pick it up, but that is part of a bigger story.

After returning home from the mission trip, I occasionally attended Sunday evening Mass with the same friends, after which we'd hang out or do some activity. One such evening there was "Adoration" following refreshments after Mass. There it was again, that mysterious thing. What was it that my friends had explained on our mission trip? Something about a communion host? Curious, but also feeling like a fish-out-of-water, I followed back into the church (which was actually a gym) hanging back as teens walked past me through the doors. 

Making my own way into the small vestibule, I could see the same folding chairs we had just sat on for Mass set up facing the same portable altar, but on it now was (I would later learn) a monstrance containing a Consecrated Host. From the monstrance right into me went a shockwave of palpable Peace that stopped me in my tracks. I didn't know what I was witnessing, but I knew that it was something I'd never encountered, could never get enough of, was made for, and couldn't approach. I remember sitting right there in the vestibule by the door, unable to participate further out of both awe and confusion, but Peace held me there, captivated.

Perhaps I will share more of the larger story another time. But suffice it to say, tastes of that peace have accompanied my experience of Adoration through the last 20+ years. In the months leading up to January 2023, my weekly Adoration hour became increasingly sensorial and I recall writing in my journal and mentioning to Mark the gift of the profoundly tactile peace I experienced in those hours. As Psalm 23 promises, Jesus set the table before me and truly my cup overflowed as he filled my body and soul with himself. When Heidi's sudden, horrific illness thrust us deep into the valley of the shadow of death, what was more true, more real, more tangible was, "Thou art with me," and I could proclaim with conviction that God is still good. He is still good.

Click here if you're interested in finding an Adoration Chapel near you, or call your local Catholic parish.