During the season of Lent we are asked to connect with Christ on a deeper level. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is a really wonderful way to do this at this time. It is a form of prayer that we feel is needed more than ever. Below is a beautiful testimony from Bernadette Price about this devotion and what Christ has done in her life through it. 

“Jesus wants you to do more than to go to Mass on Sunday.  Our communal worship at Mass must go together with our personal worship of Jesus in Eucharistic adoration in order that our love may be complete.” St John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 1979

I was blessed to grow up in a parish which held regular Eucharistic Adoration, though for a long time I thought little of it. I believed in the Real Presence, but Adoration was not exactly something that, as a young university student, I wanted to commit to on a regular basis. When I heard about a Holy Hour for young people, every Thursday evening at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne,  I went along, mainly because I saw it as an opportunity to meet some people I could relate to on a spiritual level. The prayer was a bonus! Yet God used my attendance to a good end. I came to depend on my weekly hour with Jesus. My heart opened and expanded as I experienced the Eucharist on a ‘heart level’. I met the Person of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar. This awareness flowed through to my reception of Holy Communion and truly changed my life. Alongside Sunday Mass and regular confession, Adoration quickly became another spiritual ‘non-negotiable’ in my life.

For many years I made a weekly Holy Hour, meditating on Scripture, getting to know the Lord, praying for the Church, family, seeking guidance about life decisions, entrusting needs both small and great to Jesus. Sometimes I prayed with words, other times it was enough just to be there with Him. Just as one cannot read the Word of God without being changed in some way, one cannot enter into His Presence without leaving just a little closer to Him, just a little more whole and healed. It has been the knowledge of this which enabled me to continue this devotion through times of busy-ness, dryness and distraction. It has been so worthwhile.

When I married, I moved to a city which had limited opportunity for Eucharistic Adoration. We went to Mass on Sunday, daily when possible, but I felt the lack of my one-on-one time in Adoration. I started to lose my peace. I had drunk from the well, and I was thirsting for my special time with Jesus, but I fell out of the habit. By the time we moved back to Melbourne I was full of excuses, masked under the guise of maternal responsibilities: “I have two children now, God wants different things for me…” “God will compensate.” Such were the things I told myself, and eventually it fell out of my consciousness, so excuses were no longer necessary.  

One day, God in His mercy, helped me to realise that if I am to live my vocation, to flourish as a wife and mother, a Catholic  and daughter of God, I need to stay close to Him. I needed to stop ignoring the desire in my heart to spend time in personal prayer and Adoration. In February last year, a few friends and I made a commitment to make a monthly holy hour together, followed by some fellowship. Needless to say, all the obstacles fell away. I will never forget that first month. It was my first whole hour of Adoration in years. I was troubled by something when I arrived, but as soon as Christ was exposed, and I gazed at Him, I felt my troubles leave me. Peace followed, and the sense that I was home, that He carried my burdens, that no matter my faults or successes, He held me in the palm of His hand, and He had been waiting for me. I was loved. Every aspect of my life had meaning and purpose. In the stillness of that candle-lit chapel, I recommitted myself to this beautiful devotion and treasure of the Catholic Church. The only question in my heart that evening “why did I wait so long to come here? Of course it was Your voice deep in my heart, all this time, calling me to come to You.” The overwhelming emotion I experienced was gratitude that He kept on calling me. That gratitude remains to this day.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once said that “Eucharistic Adoration is essentially an embrace with Jesus in which I say to him: ‘I am yours, and I ask you, please stay with me always” (15 October 2005).

If Jesus is inviting you to this embrace, do not be afraid, and do not delay! There are few things as beautiful and transformative, strengthening and healing and as life-giving, as being in His Presence. Jesus always gives us so much more than we give to Him.

~ Bernadette Price