Tuesday Adoration…Delight of the Father

Today during Eucharistic Adoration, in preparation for the Feast of St. Teresa of Avila, (a Solemnity for Carmelites),  I was reading some of her Spiritual Testimonies and received, from the Saint, a beautiful new insight into what transpires during Holy Communion.  Perhaps what St. Teresa reveals will be a blessing to you as well.

 

Once after receiving Communion I was given understanding of how the Father receives within our soul the most holy Body of Christ, and of how I know and have seen that these divine Persons are present, and of how pleasing to the Father this offering of His Son is, because He delights and rejoices with Him here–let us say–on earth.  For His humanity is not present with us in the soul, but His divinity is.  Thus the humanity is so welcome and pleasing to the Father and bestows on us so many favors.  I understood that He also receives this sacrifice from the priest who is in sin, except that He doesn’t grant to his soul the favors He grants to those who are in the state of grace.  But the reason for this isn’t because these influences proceeding from this communication, by which the Father receives this sacrifice, lose their force, but because of a lack on the part of the one receiving it; just as the lack is not on the part of the sun when it fails to shine on a piece of pitch as it does on crystal, but on the part of the pitch.  If I could now describe this, I would give a better explanation, for there are deep interior secrets revealed when one receives Communion.  It is a pity that these bodies of ours do not let us enjoy them.

The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume I
Spiritual Testimonies, No. 52, Deep secrets revealed in Communion
ICS Publications,
Washington, D.C.
(Italics by me)

Jesus among us…..yesterday, today and forever!

JESUS…The Wonder of You!

I see You walking along dusty roads with Your disciples, Your hair blowing in the wind; Your eyes squinting at the sunlight. I see You eating and drinking and sleeping, just as I do.

And I am in awe!

You are God! You are the Alpha and the Omega; the Beginning and the End. You are Mighty God and Prince of Peace.
You are Lord of All. Yet, You have chosen to be also truly One of us.

In Your Adorable Person dwell both Perfect Humanity and Perfect Divinity.

I am fascinated! And I shall be lost in loving You, My Perfect One, for all eternity.

O Wisdom so Beautiful! O Mercy so Tender! O Goodness so Sublime!

My nothingness adores Your All!

Tonight, from a back pew at Mass, I watched at the Agnus Dei as Father raised Jesus, and we sang the sweet strains of “Lamb of God…”

My eyes filled with tears as I gazed at the True Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the world…and I thought of what He was about to do.

I watched as people began to fill the aisle and form two lines, but not just people….God’s beloved children. In the priest’s hands, Jesus waited to become our Food. He waited with such Love, such Longing, such Thirst for us. Just as He had poured out Himself on the Cross, so now He would also pour out His Entire Being to become One with each of us.

What kind of God does such a thing? Hides His Glory beneath a tiny Host and allows Himself to be consumed by anyone who approaches Him?

My mind drifted back to a talk I had heard this morning, on the Humility of God, and how Satan so hated God for becoming Incarnate….a mere Man. But, the priest had continued, how much more does the devil hate the Holy Eucharist, for God’s Humility reaches Its most Sublime Expression when He assumes the appearance of mere bread that He might feed the children He loves with such Infinite Tenderness…with His Own Flesh and Blood.

And now, I too was in line…awaiting the Food of my soul, the Living Bread come down from Heaven. The Bread which gives eternal life. Food for the journey. His Glorified Body. His Real Presence. His Beating Heart. What wonders, what miracles take place in our souls when we receive Jesus with love. What joy for Him to be loved by His poor little ones. As Therese taught:  His Love reaches Its Height, when It touches lowliness with Its Fire.

Father, help me to love Your Son,
Jesus, teach me to love Your Father,
Holy Spirit, inflame me with love for
My Triune God!

His Word….and a kiss

My Eucharistic Jesus,

It is JOY to see only
the appearances of Bread and Wine.

It is GLORIOUS not
to experience Your Presence.

For then, as You give to me
the very Gift of Yourself,

I have something in return
to offer You –
FAITH.

Absolute TRUST in Your Words
and Your PROMISE:

Whoever eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood
lives in Me, and I live in him.

O my Faithful One,
should I require anything more than
YOUR WORD?

Father Jacques Daley, OSB, filling in for Mother Angelica one night on EWTN, said something so beautiful that I wrote it down.

In discussing how we are to receive Holy Communion, he said, “I feel Jesus prefers the mouth, because it is more intimate.”

And I thought, “Like a kiss……”

Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth…..  (Song of Songs 1:2)

More than adopted…..by God

I do not envy the Seraphim their fire, for I have a greater gift deposited in my heart. They admire You in rapture, but Your Blood mingles with mine.

St. Faustina Kowalska
Diary #278

Several years ago, a wonderful diocesan priest used to give talks on the interior life to my Carmelite community.

He was very informative and inspiring, but on a couple of occasions, he made the comment that we are more than God’s adopted children (as referenced in Ephesians 1:5.)  Father explained that although we are not eternally begotten in the way that Jesus is, we are still something beyond adopted, by God. He explained that “adopted” was not an exact translation of the original Greek word.

I have an adopted son, and so does one of the other community members.   She and I would seek each other out after these talks, feeling somewhat disturbed.  Didn’t Father know that adopted parents love their children just as much as other parents do?   We also worried that adopted individuals would feel offended, if they heard his comments.

Afterall, he did make it sound like being adopted made one a somewhat inferior member of a family.

Secure in my love for my son, I had long ago forgotten all of this when I went on a retreat last January.,

At the very first conference, the retreat master spoke exquisitely of our identity in God, of our sharing in His Divine Nature…, and then he said something which made my heart quicken:

Holy Communion makes us not only adopted children of God, but of the same Blood.

This was exactly what the first priest was trying to make us understand.  But great mystery that it is, somehow the retreat master was able, by the Grace of God, to penetrate my heart with the breathtaking beauty of this unspeakable Gift.

God’s Infinite Love found a way to impart to us not only His Fatherhood, but to actually “relate” us to Himself.  Jesus “mingles” His Most Precious and Divine Body and Blood with the flesh and blood of His poor creatures by giving Himself to them in the Most Holy Eucharist.

I felt that I would die of joy if I could but grasp the depth of His Love, His thirst for union, His Perfect Fatherhood, the Ecstasy that Holy Communion really is!  When I consume Jesus, we become one.  He possesses me, and imparts a spark of His Divinity to me through sanctifying Grace

During those moments of Holy Communion, Jesus and I are like two candles melted into one – His Flesh and Blood joined to mine, in a way that not even a biological mother is united to her unborn child.  And when the Sacred Species is no longer present within me physically, the \\ of Jesus still remains.

Father spoke of these mysteries with such reverence that my eyes welled with tears. Such sublime matters transcend our understanding; we can only glimpse for a moment at such wonders before our minds and hearts give way beneath the Blinding Light of Divine Love.

If I could have been the one to give life to my son, to bear him within me and bring him into the world, would I have chosen to do so?  Oh yes!  It is because I love him so much that I would have wanted a deeper, more intimate bond with him, a bond of my very own flesh and blood.  But this was not possible for me.

If I could desire such a thing, how much more would God desire that His children be “born” of Him.  And because for God, all things are possible, He found a way.  We are not only redeemed by His Flesh and Blood, and nourished by His Own Substance, but we are also bound to Him by His Own life-giving Flesh and Blood.  More than adopted, we are children of His Blood – true sons and daughters of God!

 “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.”   John 6: 56-57.