Eucharistic Adoration is Life Changing

I’ve written before how my fraying life snapped back into focus during a chance encounter with Eucharistic Adoration. I’d been driving down a street with the windows open and heard the noontime bells ring as I passed a church. Obeying an impulse – ahem – I decided to stop in and maybe light a candle.

When I entered the church I saw the altar, alive with candles, and the gleaming monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. “Oh, they do Adoration here,” I thought, with something like joy bubbling up inside me. I fell to my knees before the Presence and simply, quietly adored for what I thought was five minutes. When I rose and looked at the clock, an hour had passed.

Nothing in my life has been the same, since then. And that is a very good thing. Since that experience I have rarely missed a chance to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, and when a week goes past without that opportunity, I can feel the lack and the longing. Last year’s retreat, which afforded me the opportunity to Adore for hours was, as regular readers may remember, when I returned, everything was different. It still is; the lessons of that retreat have not yet run out.

Little have I realized, as we learn here, in this little gem of an exposition on the subject by Fr. Robert Barron, of Word on Fire, that some would see my love of Adoration as a sign of my ignorant, ill-educated mind. I am, of course, ignorant and ill-educated, but my visits to the Eucharistic Christ do supplement my education. I once heard a nun describe Adoration as being analogous to sitting in the sun. You don’t feel its effect until later.

Related:
Jennifer Fulwiler, former atheist, makes me jealous as she recounts her monastic retreat and what she learned from living on a monastic prayer schedule
Category: Eucharist