40
Hours Devotions, Talk #2
Monday, Dec 6th, 9:30am, St.
Michael
He grew in
Wisdom, Grace, and Stature: Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord. (Talk geared
towards our seniors)
Praised
be Jesus Christ!
St.
Michael the Archangel, pray for us!
St. Nicholas, pray for us!
I
thought we should begin with the passage from the Gospel of Luke 2:41-52, which
(I presume) inspired your pastoral team’s choice of titles for this talk {He grew in Wisdom, Grace, and Stature}.
“Now every year his
parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was
twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was
ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but
his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers,
they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their
relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem
to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among
the teachers, listening to them, and asking them questions. And all who heard
him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him,
they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like
this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He
said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be
in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them.
Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. His
mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom
and in years, and in divine and human favor.” [Harper Bibles. NRSV Catholic Edition Bible.
HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]
If you were ever looking for proof that
there is something over the course of the centuries and millennia in the life
of the world which we can call a human constant, at least in terms of
developmental psychology, this passage we just read has pride of place in
pointing one out and deserves to be quoted. Here in this passage, we meet Jesus
the perfect 12-year-old. There is not a well-adjusted 12-year-old in the world today
who would be surprised by the behavior of the young God-Man. “Child, why
have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for
you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you
not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Jesus is not behaving like
an adult in this passage, but rather like a 12-year-old, who wouldn’t think to talk
through with His parents His decision to remain in the Temple. One of the
struggles parents have with a younger, not yet technically a teenage son is to bring
him to understand that being grown-up implies talking through lots of things
for which we really don’t need permission.
So! How is this talk supposed to go today? Granted, there
could be value in sorting through the Fifth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, Jesus
found amongst the elders in the Temple, but for us here in church today given
that the rest of the title for this talk reads: Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord, maybe we should leave adolescent developmental psychology aside. The
bigger question to address would seem to be what does this passage have to do
with senior citizens?
We’ll come back to it again at the end, but my
encouragement to you would be to render the Lord age-appropriate worship. Our call
is to give witness to Jesus really and truly present here in the tabernacle in
a way that is different from that of a twelve or even of a twenty-year-old (I
could even say a 40-year-old). Aging
and adoring the Eucharistic Lord!
Every year around Thanksgiving one of my
classmates from the North American College in Rome, class of 1976 (He is a
priest of the Archdiocese of Dubuque), puts together and sends out our class newsletter,
which offers us updates on all those who choose to stay in touch by writing in
to him. I say that, because very few of us write every year and some never
contribute to the newsletter. This year for the first time, Father also attached
an updated necrology to the newsletter. More than a quarter of my classmates
have passed on.
I am basically happy to get the letter each year, whether
the individual letters from classmates are interesting or maybe not so much. It
has been 49 years since we first met each other in Rome. Some of us have become
lifelong friends and some not. Some of the entries are no less annoying coming
from men over 70 years of age than the men themselves were back in seminary in
their early to mid-20’s. Even so, I look forward to each edition as the better
part of the letters are really a joy and, friends or not, these men have been
an important part of my life.
One of the men, a good friend of mine back then, (I
think he is suffering from Parkinson’s) lives most of the year with his brother
and sister-in-law up in North Carolina and occasionally drives down to his
diocese in Florida for meetings, doctoring and what not. He’s a very colorful
figure and always was. In the seminary he used to tease me a lot, but I really
enjoyed his attention. This year he waxed eloquent about the significance of finding
ourselves in the autumn of our lives as a metaphor for facing our common health
challenges and especially for him facing his own which are tougher than most. With
his disability I am sure he is more pensive than I would be about the
inevitability of physical and mental decline, and yes, of death. As he tells
it, he was driving back to North Carolina just as the fall colors were in all
their glory. His reflection was on the particular beauty of the autumn of our
lives, comparable let us say to the beautiful fall colors of North Carolina. All
the aches and pains of age aside, he wanted us all to take courage from the
powerful imagery he penned into his letter to the class.
He grew in Wisdom, Grace, and Stature: Aging and
adoring the Eucharistic Lord.
First and
foremost, in order to give glory to God and enter into the mystery of our
salvation in Christ, other than being a person honestly striving for holiness, you
have to be a person who prays. I
won’t say that you have to be certified as a blackbelt when it comes to praying,
because there is no jury or manual of certification for prayer. Besides, eager
and good pray-ers are never content with their own performance. They are always
critical of themselves, just like the good husband never judges himself worthy
of his beloved wife, the mother of his children. As with so many things in
life, so also with prayer, it is not finesse or my personal prowess in prayer that
counts. Achievement and success are categories appropriate to competitive
sports but not necessarily relevant to happiness in life. Let me repeat the
statement again! To be good at Eucharistic adoration you
have to be a person who prays and who prays without ceasing. When I left
Kyiv, Ukraine for Bern, Switzerland, because of a customs ruling, I had to
leave behind my favorite icon, the first one I received as a gift there. Even
though there was not an ounce of gold on it and the holy image was not done by
some great artist, just because it was over 80 years old, I could only have
taken it out of Ukraine with a license from its owner. As the priest who gave
it to me had recovered it from the trash, there was no way possible. I have my
memories! What I loved about it was that it was an image of Christ the King,
seated on His Throne. On the open book in His Hand, you could read the
admonition “Pray without ceasing” written in everyday Ukrainian (…). Never
cease praying or pray constantly. That is our task in life entrusted to us by
Christ Himself. Always have your heart and mind fixed on the Lord.
Let me insist on that point, that we must be people of
prayer, for reasons which are intimately bound up with advancing or advanced
age! Prayer, among other things, is basically about lifting your mind and heart
to God, and adoration declares God to be Who He is, our Creator, Redeemer, and
Friend. At some point, I am sure no later than high school I learned that
adoration means giving God His due. Already years ago, since forever really, we
as Catholics have been clear that giving God His due means adoring Him and He
only as God is deserving of our adoration. The more English and less Latinate
word for adoration is worship, which as every Catholic knows does not apply to the
saints, not even to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our honor for the saints and for
the Mother of God is called not worship but veneration. We do not worship, but
rather we venerate Mary and the saints. We express our love for the saints, our
brothers and sisters in Christ, who have fought the good fight and won the
race. We pray to them yes, but in a different way than we pray to God. The
saints are now in glory with God and can intercede for us before the Heavenly
Throne. Mary, in a special way as our mother from the foot of the Cross, can
intercede with her Son for us.
I want to insist on the central
importance of prayer, of living consciously in the presence of God and making
the Lord the focus of our lives: heart, soul, mind, and strength. Apart from
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as important as it is, being the source and
summit of Christian existence, Perpetual Adoration can help us in our prayer,
can help us draw close to God. Different from the Mass, Eucharistic Adoration
with ongoing Exposition in the monstrance is more of a big city, downtown kind
of thing. It usually means or takes on the form it has at the monastery of our
Adoration Sisters here in Sioux Falls up by the Cathedral. After early morning
Mass each day, the priest exposes the Blessed Sacrament to the view of the
people in the monstrance set on high above the tabernacle; the sisters take
turns keeping silent watch before our Eucharistic Lord all day long and the chapel
is open all day for people who want to drop in and pray.
I know parishes or cities around the world without a
community of religious who guarantee that watch before the Lord. The lay people
themselves are the ones who organize a schedule of people to be in church for
the hours of exposition. In Switzerland, I was invited for anniversary
celebrations by groups of Perpetual Adoration at the city level in both
Freiburg and Sion. To be able to do that, you have to be able to guarantee that
people will be there to watch and pray before the Lord. Perpetual Adoration is
a value in itself, but in recent years it has also been the source of countless
vocations to priesthood and the religious life. Lots of younger priests will
tell you they found their vocation in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.
Holy Cross Parish in Hutchinson, Kansas, where my
mother lived, had a very successful program of Perpetual Adoration. The people
of the parish had their adoration chapel open all day and all night throughout
the whole year. The people themselves organized it, and over the years the
parish priests were firm supporters of the effort. The older priest, who was
there when they began, was very soft-spoken but fervent in faith. He believed
that Perpetual Adoration was one of the reasons Holy Cross had been spared from
storms, especially tornadoes, over the years. The good priests, who came after
him, were just as supportive of this effort which the people of the parish
themselves carried. My Mom’s hairdresser and her husband, a carpet layer, were
not even registered in the parish but faithfully kept their hour, one day a
week, and they did it at like three in the morning. For most of the hours of
adoration the organizers had two people signed up. Mom volunteered for an hour
each Sunday afternoon, which was actually the hardest time to find people to
cover. Quite often she would be there alone. Occasionally, something would
happen that the person or persons for the next hour, or maybe their substitute,
would not show up. Mom would just stay on then for another hour until someone
came. Everyone knew that you could not leave Jesus alone, outside the
tabernacle on the altar, unwatched and unguarded.
Here in our part of the world where the
Church is predominantly rural and farming used to completely absorb people’s
lives, we have more common and older traditions for adoring Our Eucharistic
Lord. Men used to tip their hats, and everyone would make the Sign of the Cross
when they passed by a Catholic Church on the street. When churches were
generally open all day, before vandalism and crazies became so common, believing
people would often stop into church to make a visit to Our Lord in the tabernacle.
During my years as nuncio in Ukraine, riding in the car with bishops or priests
in various parts of the country, none of them would ever miss making the Sign
of the Cross when they drove past a church.
Not too long ago, I was visiting with an
older woman, who had moved to South Dakota to be close to her son and
grandchildren. They live in a small town outside of Sioux Falls. She was
distressed because here, different from where she had been living in another
state near a community of retired priests with Mass every day, here she no
longer had daily Mass and Communion. Her priest had another parish to care for
as well, so each parish got daily Mass two days per week. The woman drives, so
I asked her why she didn’t drive to another town on the off days for Mass.
Sadly, her fixed income would not allow the extra gas money, and truth to be
told, at her age and health, I don’t think her son wants her driving on the
highway. Doing her own time in the parish church before the tabernacle, keeping
Christ company, probably best fits her bill. Aging and adoring the Eucharistic Lord.
What is
age-appropriate adoration? Remember the perfect 12-year-old! One of my
brothers-in-law, when he was traveling on the road selling, used to work it out
where he could stop each day, when not for Mass, then to spend his hour before
the Blessed Sacrament. I know people still on the job who make a point of
leaving early for the office so they can stop for a brief visit to Jesus in the
Blessed Sacrament or who make a brief detour on the way home from work. I know
others who could not stay for weekday Mass, but could come to confession, which
Father offered daily before morning Mass. Thoughtfulness and creativity find
ways to draw near to the Lord, when not in an Adoration chapel, then in a
parish church, which (please God!) is open and accessible for folks to make
visits to the Lord.
Retired
and you still have your vehicle? Make an appointment with our Eucharistic Lord just
like you would to meet a friend for coffee or for lunch! Make a stop at church
on your way to pick up groceries! Don’t give Father the silent treatment! If
something is not right, let’s say the church entry is too dark or there’s a mat
there or missing which puts you at risk of stumbling, then speak up! When Jesus
cleansed the Temple, people noted His action and quoted Scripture to say, “Zeal
for Your House consumes me”. 12-year-olds have theirs and we as senior citizens
have ours!
If you
are homebound, then pray! Turn off all the noise, maybe withdraw to your room
away from other people in the house to spend time with the Lord of your life!
That fits in with my statement about prayer as the gateway or presupposition for
Eucharistic Adoration! To be good at Eucharistic adoration you have to be a
person who prays.
Praised be Jesus Christ!
St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle! Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the
Devil! May God rebuke him we humbly pray and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly
Host, by the power of God thrust into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who
prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls! Amen!
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