Eucharistic Reflection - We Must Believe and Live This Truth!

 

Monday Musings - For The Prophets Among Us

How to Be His - A 33-Day Dedication to our Eucharistic Lord, authored by Father Jesse J. Maingot, O.P. and Father Ignatius John Schweitzer, O.P., enriched my Advent, reignited my love for the Eucharist and opened my eyes to the prophetic voice we are all called to share. I highly recommend their work.

Here is a summary of some of the more important insights these wise Friars shared about prophets and their role in God's plan of salvation.

To speak a prophetic word, Father Ignatius instructs us, "is not so much about foretelling something in the future. Prophecy is seeing the unfolding of history as God sees it."

A prophet gets God's people to read the sign of the times and to be aware of their lives and the events of their days in light of God's wisdom and God's plan. A prophet is able to interpret what is happening from God's perspective.

To speak a prophetic word is to speak into a situation, a living Word that manifests what God is up to and encourages the hearers to come into accord with and further God's plan.

A prophet also stirs up in people's hearts a love and desire for God and to conform their life to God's will, which will bring much life and nourishment.

To be that type of prophet, we need to be on the mountaintop. We can't be in the marketplaces, in the noise. We have to go into the marketplaces, but it's not the way a prophet begins his mission. Prophets begin their mission on top of the mountain which is a symbol of that intimacy, that place of carving out, that alone time with the Lord, of learning to waste time in prayer and to linger in His Presence - learning to wait on the Lord and to develop that interior ear to hear the voice of Jesus. 

We need to hear the voice of Jesus. We need a lot of silence to do that and that's why Eucharistic prayer and silence in a Eucharistic Chapel is one of the most nourishing places where we can develop our prophetic task as God's people where we could learn to listen to Him in silence so that we could speak a word into our heart so we can bring that word into life [by sharing it with others].

My Dominican brothers have given us much to ponder. For this we should be most grateful!

Eucharistic Reflection - Linger. Don't Leave

"We need to change the [current] culture that once Mass is over, we leave Church and are gone, that we don't linger [in our pews]. 

In the past tradition, it was understood that people would stay back after Mass to continue their thanksgiving with the Lord, to really receive the grace of Holy Communion because this is the most important moment of our life - the Lord has united us so amazingly to Himself. Our prayer is most powerful in these minutes after Mass. 

So let us not lose the graces of prayer that is born from our Holy Communion with Jesus."

Linger. Pray. Don't rush to leave.

(From How To Be His - A 33-Day Dedication to Our Eucharistic Jesus, by Father J. Maingot, O.P. and Father Ignatius John Schweitzer, O.P. with Dan Burke).

Monday Musings - Contemplate His Humility

In How To Be His - A 33-Day Dedication to our Eucharistic Jesus, Father Jesse J. Maingot, O.P. shares the wisdom and insight of St. Peter Julian Eymard; here are two brief samples: 

"Few persons think of the virtues, the life, the state of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. We treat Him like a statute; we think He is there merely to forgive our sins and to listen to our prayers. That is a wrong viewpoint. Our Lord lives and acts in the Eucharist. Look at Him, study and imitate Him!...Observe Him practicing virtue and you shall know what you have to do."

                                                                   (St. Peter Julian Eymard)

Father reminds us: that our Lord is patient and quiet; that He's waiting for us; that He's so available, so generous - anyone can come and talk to Him; that He looks at His humanity and humbles Himself to look like bread, but it's really Him!

We should contemplate the humility of Jesus in the Eucharist. He has veiled His Glory so that we would not be afraid to get close to Him! Let our Eucharistic Lord teach us to be humble, available, patient, kind and ever courageous...

"Eucharistic Adoration is the most necessary mission to the Church, which has even more need of prayerful people than preachers of men and eloquence..."

 (St. Peter Julian Eymard)

We need to be courageous, Father Maingot tells us,  to fight so many temptations that distract us from our time of prayer.

We must persevere in Adoration.

Merry Christmas

 

Eucharistic Reflection - Of Mute and Silent Tabernacles and Lifeless Hosts

 

[I first shared the following thoughts more than 10 years ago. I do so today with a renewed sense of urgency. We are spinning our wheels and jeopardizing souls if we do not become lovers of the Eucharist.]

“We ministers of the Lord, for whom the Tabernacle has become mute and silent, the stone of consecration cold, the Host a venerable, but lifeless, memento: have been unable to turn souls from their evil. How could we ever draw them out of the mire or forbidden pleasures?

And yet we have talked to them about the joys of religion and of good conscience. But because we have not known how to slake our own thirst at the living waters of the Lamb, we have mumbled and stuttered in our attempts to portray those ineffable joys, the very desire of which would have shattered the chains of the triple concupiscence much more effectively than all our thundering tirades about hell…Our lips have been unable to speak the language of the Heart of Him Who loves men, because our converse with Him has been as infrequent as it has been cold.

Let us not try to shift all the blame onto the profoundly demoralized state of society. After all, we have only to look, for example, at the effect on completely de-Christianized parishes of the presence of sensible, active, devoted, capable priests, but priests who were, above all, lovers of the Eucharist.”

(From  The Soul of The Apostolate by Jean Baptiste Chautard, OCSO)

Monday Musings - His Magnetic Pull