Eucharistic Reflection - Offer Him Your Misery and Poverty

(Photo©Michael Seagriff)

“Go to our Lord just as you are. Make a simple meditation. Exhaust your own fund of piety and love before you make use of books. Love the inexhaustible book of humility and charity. However, it is well to take with you a pious book, in order to recall your thoughts when your mind wanders or when your senses are dull. Remember that our good Master prefers the poverty of our heart to the most sublime thoughts and affections borrowed from others.

Understand well that our Lord desires our own heart, and not that of others. He wants the thought and the prayer of your heart as a natural expression of love for him. To be unwilling to go to our Lord with one's misery and one's humiliating poverty, is often the fruit of subtle self-love, of restlessness or tepidity, and yet that misery and poverty are what our Lord prefers to every other gift. He loves it. He blesses it.

Glorify the grace of God, without which you can do nothing. Open your heart to heaven as the flower opens its chalice to the rising sun, to catch its beneficent dew.”

(From My Eucharistic Day-Rules and Practices Recommended by Saint Peter Julian Eymard)