Sanctification of persons, families and parish communities through growth in deeper prayer before our Eucharistic Lord.

Living a Eucharistic Life
Bishop’s Message from Most Rev. Joseph N. Perry

As conscientious Catholics we are seeking to live authentically the Christian life. We are constantly searching for what more we can do to be close to God. For this reason we find Eucharistic Adoration valuable. Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament is a precious opportunity we have to be close to Christ and thereby discover sustenance and direction for our lives.You cannot be an adorer for long without noticing and others noticing change in your life. Eucharist is meant to not only sustain us as food from heaven but also to empower us to do great things for God and his Church. And doing great things for God and his Church means that we become better mothers and fathers, better sons and daughters, better students, better priests and religious. God desires our holiness more than we know. Living as faithful disciples of Jesus is about a way of life grounded in practices of faith that nurture virtue in us.

I recall hearing a brother bishop mention that when teenagers or young adults tell him that they get nothing out of the Mass he finds it is often simply a matter of a lack of proper catechesis and faith practice. He suggests to the teenager or young person to commit themselves to go to Mass with the same parish for six months. And during that same consecutive six-month period, work as a volunteer weekly in a parish soup kitchen or meal program for the poor.

Now, if the young person carries out his instructions to the letter, the bishop finds they will come to understand what it means to be Catholic. Perhaps, they begin the exercise out of skepticism but eventually the rhythm of the practices will redirect their hearts and they will see the Mass for the miracle of grace it is, namely, the most miraculous intervention in our lives this side of Heaven.

The bishop is right. You see, young people are often not seeking so much theory about our faith as they are seeking a way of life. Certain practices and the beliefs that form our actions constitute this way of life. Christian life is a way of being that is inextricably linked to certain ways of acting. A combination of practice with communal worship and service to the poor help young people understand who Jesus is - the poor, suffering servant -and, therefore, helps them understand the Catholic way of life from the inside.

Intentionally engaging in the practices of Eucharist and service, young people discover that God embraces them in these ordinary actions. They come to understand that our daily lives are all tangled up with the things God is doing in the world. Eucharist will make sense to them. Worship and service are activities that nurture and bring together the liturgies of the Word and Eucharist with the liturgy of the world.

The same is true for adult Catholics.

Spiritual practices require commitment and regularity if they are to transform us. Spiritual practices like attending Mass, days of reflection, and adoration before the Blessed Sacrament are journeys, not day trips into the realm of the sacred. They are not hobbies or occasional exercises that depend on our moods or our latest interests. They demand a personal discipline, a personal stick-to-itiveness.

Spiritual practices require commitment, the deliberate setting aside of time to do them regularly. Examples include reading Scripture ten minutes a day, worshipping every Sunday with our parish, spending an hour before the Blessed Sacrament, or praying a daily rosary.

Spiritual practices give us direction to our cooperative enterprises like showing up every Saturday afternoon to work at a soup kitchen; becoming involved in the lobbying efforts of Pax Christi; Amnesty International, or the Pro-Life movement; getting involved with the parish’s St. Vincent de Paul ministries to the poor; or becoming a participant in activities that commingle us with people of other races and backgrounds. This way we begin to shed from our consciousness the thought patterns, assumptions, and prejudices that plague society and form barriers in our social lives.

Spiritual practices and Catholic action do not require changes in others but instead demand changes in us: regarding our use of time, our finances, our resources, our prayer, our thought patterns. We begin to do and think as saints would do and think.

Catholic culture illustrates well this combination of worship and action. The late Bishop Fulton Sheen is known to have spent an hour a day before the Blessed Sacrament. He believed this spiritual practice gave sustenance to his ministerial actions as priest and bishop.

So too for us, our adoration before the Blessed Eucharist is an action that reminds us about the combination of bringing together our faith practices and Catholic action that change our lives and ultimately transform the world.

Eucharist is about worship and change: changing the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus; changing people – you and me – so that our lives can transform the world in the vision and hope of Jesus. The Church reminds us that Eucharist is something to adore and to feed upon and something to be lived all at the same time.

It is not by accident that Jesus gave us the Eucharist the evening before his action of emptying himself in ignominious death so that we might have life.

During the Eucharistic prayer of the Mass, we hear the words, “This is my body, which is given up for you. This is my blood which is poured out for you.” Then we hear, “Do this in memory of me.” What is this “this” that we are referring to, “this action?” It is Jesus’ own giving of self. We are to imitate Jesus’ self-giving, represented in the action of the bread of his body being broken and the wine of his blood being poured out.

When we take and receive, we say “amen” to imitating Jesus’ gift of self. When we adore, we are in awe only to be empowered to go out and do as he did.

Simply put, after adoration we must do something !Eucharist as action means that we will imitate Jesus’ self-giving by loving God above all else and by loving others as Jesus loves them. The action of Eucharist means that we are willing to die to ourselves and give our lives in service to others, being broken and poured out just like the elements of bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Jesus.

And once broken and poured out, we return to adore once again only to go out and repeat the same action of being broken and poured out in the manner in which God may require of us.