The Presence of Jesus in Adoration

Written by Lauren Stark
A Sophomore on the Leadership Team
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            Growing up Catholic and attending 13 years of Catholic school, I had experience in practically every Catholic activity. I was an altar server and Communion minister. I attended and led retreats. I prayed the rosary. But for some reason, I avoided one event:  adoration.

            I guess I considered adoration something I could do without. I prayed on my own, so why did I need to do it in front of a shiny monstrance?

            So when I attended the Steubenville Youth Conference this summer with my home parish and found out that we would be participating in an hour-long adoration, I was a little nervous and skeptical.

            But that all changed the minute the priest came out holding the monstrance in the air.

Something inside of me stirred. I felt…Jesus. It seems almost too cliché to say, but in that moment when the monstrance was right in front of me, I for the first time truly felt God’s presence—His real presence—inside that host. I fell to my knees and joined all the people around me in prayer. I cried and smiled. The feeling of God’s love filling me was something I had never felt before.

That hour was the quickest of my life, and from that day on, I was hooked on adoration.

Adoration is something uniquely Catholic. When the monstrance that holds Christ is set before the worshippers, He is really and truly in that room. Although we do believe that God is always with us, this is a more tangible way to recognize that—and to remember Jesus’ sacrifice for us. I am truly lucky to be a Catholic and to have adoration as a way for me to worship.

A few weeks ago, I was struggling. I felt disconnected from my friends, my school life, and my faith. And I didn’t want to stay that way. I had been wanting to participate in adoration in Indy since the start of school, but I had been putting it off, once again thinking that I could do enough on my own.

But that day, something—God—was tugging at my heart, telling me to go see Him. I jumped in my car and drove to St. Luke’s down the street. There, in the beautiful adoration chapel, I saw my God again. It was only a short thirty minutes of prayer. And for most of that time, I didn’t say anything. I just sat in His loving presence. And it worked. My spirit was revived, and I felt happy and full again. Adoration connected me again to my faith and the world around me.

I know adoration can seem intimidating or unnecessary. But I really encourage you to give it a try. Just twenty minutes. Bring a prayer book or the Bible. Bring a rosary. Bring some worship music like I do (“Savior, Please” by Josh Wilson is my favorite song to adore God to). Bring your needs and desires. Or just bring yourself and your openness to hear what God has to tell you. You won’t be disappointed.

Miracles

Posted by Chris Antolin
Leadership Team

So I've been listening to this song called "What Faith can do" by Kutless. It's a great song! I actually heard it while working (or leading) a Christian awakening retreat this past Oct. This song constantly strikes me. More notably, it reminds me of It all goes back to when I was a Senior back at Roncalli High School. It was in May, just a few weeks before Graduation. My parents and my sister were off at one of her gymnastics meets (she got a gold in vault! I was proud of her!) and I found myself alone at home. I decided to go and eat lunch out by myself. Most of my friends had spring sports and jobs that took up a lot of their time. As I was eating alone, this man confronted me and asked me if I was a priest. Me, being kinda shocked by the question, said that I was a little too young to be one. I asked him why he thought I was a priest. He told me, "I have never seen a kid wear a cross (refering to my retreat cross) and value it so much that he does not want to ever forget it".  I told him how great of an experience I had and how I think of my faith as something that will always stay in my life. The gentleman and I had a conversation about faith for the next half hour. I will remember this conversation for time to come. I remember how he considered it a miracle that I wore the cross. He told me how he sees kids now and how they don't tend to live up to their faith. He never thought that he would see a kid, yet a guy, show his faith off so proudly. I found his comment true, but I never thought the word "miracle" would seem fit for this. I asked him why he used the word "miracle". He then went to ask me a question I will never forget. He asked me "Do I believe in miracles?". Now me, having a different definition of a miracle (a supernatural one), said no. He told me that I should, because they are always happening throughout the world.

 I thought about what he had told me at that point. I still didn't know whether or not they exist. I, later, changed my opinion.

 Many of you probably had no idea, but for the past 18 years, I struggled to be able to hear like a normal person. I was born with a 95% hearing loss. My hearing was compared to someone talking to someone else and that someone else is under water. My parents said that they would yell my name while I was near them and I could not hear them. My parents hated it, and I had no idea what was going on. They made a decision: I had my first surgery on my ears in first grade. It was either that or a hearing aid. There was one problem that occurred as time went on. My hearing got better, but there were "issues" that came with the surgery. I was one of the kids with a rare case in which the holes in the eardrums did not close after surgery. Seems like this was not problem? It was the worst problem. This smallest drop of water into either of my ears would give me a serious infection for a week sometimes. I went through this and 2 more surgeries as my life continued on.  This July of 2012, I had an opportunity to try and have this problem fixed for good. Another surgery, except this time it was to patch the holes created in my eardrums.

The surgery day came, and my surgery went well. The surgeon told my family and I something that shocked me. My eardrum had hardened into a bone-like eardrum (they are suppose to be soft for sound to bounce off of it). The surgeon said that I was another kid with an extremely rare case. So I was already a kid with an extremely rare issue with my ears. The surgery went from being a simple patch job into a complete removal and reconstruction of an eardrum.


 Now going back to the song I mentioned earlier, there is a part of the song where the lyrics go like this:

I've seen miracles just happen

Silent prayers get answered

 My surgeon told me that the condition of my "Petrified" eardrums was the most interesting scenario. For the past 4-5 years, my eardrums were like this, petrified and rock hard. He told us all that my eardrums were NOT suppose to be working (In other words, I was suppose to be deaf for the past 4-5 years). Today that remains a mystery. My surgeon has no idea on how I could hear or even hear as well as I did.

 To me, this is that "miracle" that the gentleman was talking about. I knew at that time, that miracles DO exist. Think of it like Love; there are so many definitions of what it is or can be, but it happens all over the world that we know so well. I believe that God had blessed me with this miracle and I am extremely grateful to have had such an experience.

 So, to those reading this, take the man's advice that he gave me. Believe in miracles. They happen all over the world and they may even happen to you one day! Never lose HOPE and never lose faith in what God has in store for you!

The Greatest Adventure of All

by Kaitlyn Willy (BCC Chaplain’s Apprentice)

The Gospel reading this weekend was Mark 10: 17-30. This is one of those readings that I think we read a lot and miss the point. Often, we look at the rich young man and imagine him to be selfish, he doesn’t want to give up everything he owns and so he won’t gain entrance to heaven. It’s like this great attack on the rich, but then those of us without money are safe. NOPE! That is definitely not what God has in mind. In fact, I think that this is a reading that can speak to us at our core if we make ourselves open to it.

I don’t know about you, but this Sunday I started to feel uncomfortable sitting in the pew even before the priest got to the selling everything part. After all, the rich young man says that he has observed the commandments from his youth and is so comfortable with them that he is willing to ask what more he can do. Can you say that you have followed these commandments with that kind of faith? I certainly can’t. Even if we try to be perfect (it would be impossible for us to actually be perfect) and follow these laws completely, Jesus calls us to sell what we have and give it to the poor. Now, that certainly doesn’t seem fair! We’ve done all this work and tried so hard to follow these commandments and now we have to sell everything? No wonder the rich young man went away sad! I think we always imagine that he did not in fact sell his possessions—a failure, rare in Christ’s ministry.

I would like to think that if Jesus appeared before me and asked me to sell all that I have and give it to the poor, I would react at least a little better than the rich young man did, walking away without a word, his head hung down in sadness. But then I have to take into consideration my own priorities and recognize that they might be different from those of the rich young man. I don’t really value wealth above other things (if I did, I probably wouldn’t be a campus minister). I certainly don’t treasure money or possessions above my faith. While I might like my iPad a little too much to live in complete simplicity, I do like things being simple. My ideal house is a tiny house with 117 square feet (see Tumbleweed Houses if you don’t know what I’m talking about) where I wouldn’t be able to fall into the temptation to buy things because there would be no place to put them. I’m not really a money person. My biggest downfall in regards to materialism is probably my book collection, but even that I would give up (albeit sadly) if Jesus asked. But let me tell you what I do value so much I wouldn’t want to give it up for Jesus: my relationships.

St. Ignatius of Loyola talks about radical detachment: “We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one.” According to Ignatius, when something is taken away from us, we should be detached enough that the loss cannot shake our trust in God. We accept that all things are for the greater glory of God. Ad maiorem dei gloriam!

When I moved to Indiana to go to Notre Dame, it was really hard for me to leave Dallas: a place where I was loved, where I had made the connections and friendships that were my most prized possessions. It’s one thing to leave home for college. The relationships that sustained you in your childhood, the family and friends who have known you your whole life, those generally survive distance and time. But the relationships you make in college don’t always make it. Sure, I still have my best friends (my bestie even texted me this morning and woke me up), but some of the relationships I had in college necessarily had to change: we didn’t bump into each other in the hall anymore; we didn’t see each other in the cafeteria. Other than the occasional facebook status, I might not hear from some friends at all for months. This was difficult for me at first because a lot of my relationship with God had been centered around the people in my life with whom I ate, studied, hung out, and prayed. In moving to Notre Dame, I had to learn which prayers I said because my friends said them and which ones I said because I needed to pray them.

Last year, speaking with seniors who were getting ready to graduate, it seemed that this was the same fear that they had. How do you worship without the community that has helped you grow? How do you live a life as a Catholic without the BCC?

Friends, God can ask us to give up or change our relationship with many different blessings in our lives. For the rich young man, it was money. For me, it was my community and friends from UD. Fortunately, before I left UD, my spiritual director taught me about detachment. I learned that sometimes even the greatest blessings (like community) have to be taken away in order for us to grow. My friends and community at UD had become my safety blanket and as long as I clung to it, I could easily resist the change that God was calling me to. Sometimes, we must be brave enough to let go of our desires, our treasures and our loves in order to become who God calls us to be.

As is said so many times in Scripture, “BE NOT AFRAID!” I can tell you from experience that although these times of transition and letting go are hard, once we give up the things that we cling to (money, friends, habits, desires, plans, and sometimes even beliefs) we can become ourselves-- not someone else, not someone entirely different, but someone who is even more ourselves than we ever dreamed of being. I am more me now than I have ever been and I will continue to grow into myself the more I let God change me. These changes are never easy, but if we have the courage, we can embark on the great adventure of becoming ourselves. We become not only ourselves, but ourselves in relationship with the God who knows us more intimately even than we do: the greatest adventure of all.

Welcome

Written by: Kaitlyn Willy, Chaplain’s Apprentice

Hello and welcome to the BCC Blog!

Fr. Jeff and I first started talking about having a BCC Blog last year and since then, we have been working out some kinks.

If you would like to write something for the blog, please send it to me at kwilly@butler.edu. 

More to come!

Thanks,

Kaitlyn