Gratitude in Prayer

"Time dedicated to prayer, meditation and reflection cannot be lacking in the Christian's day and week. Only when we speak with God can we also speak about him." – Pope Leo XIV

The clock just struck 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 4^th as I am composing this bulletin article. I have found in the last several years that perhaps the most precious hour of prayer during my day is the 5:00 a.m. hour. It is a quiet hour. It is an hour of welcoming a new day. It is an hour of hope for what lies ahead. I do not always arise for this hour, but when I do, I can often look back at the end of the day with gratitude for this special time.

Today, in the words of our co-patron Blessed Solanus Casey, I am thanking God ahead of time. Today is our third annual Lenten Eucharistic Day. This is a day devoted to the first of the three traditional Lenten disciplines: prayer. It is a day that will begin together with our most important prayer: the Mass. As Mass concludes, Eucharistic Adoration in the Church will begin and will continue throughout the day until an hour of praise and worship from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. that concludes with benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

In the last two years, this day has been a great reminder for me of a key principle about our life of prayer. Our life of devotional prayer is derived from the Mass and leads us back to the Mass. The Church articulated this clearly at the Second Vatican Council and has encouraged Catholics in years since to see their lives of personal prayer as having a sort of procession to and from our communal experience of the Mass.

For many Catholics throughout the world, I would argue that this principle has a more profound meaning than we experience. Just one month ago when I was in Guatemala, I was fortunate to join a community in the small village of Candelaria for an evening Mass. It was the feast of the Presentation, the patronal feast of the village and the Church. Here at Saint Patrick Parish we are fortunate to have three Sunday Masses and at least five other opportunities to pray at the Mass each week. 

That night in Candelaria, it was the only Mass celebrated in the village all year.

Our parish has a special devotion we partake in communally each Lent: praying together the Stations of the Cross. As an additional element of our participation this year we have placed our parish’s relic of the True Cross in one of the six devotional niches in the rear of the Church. We are continuing our discernment of how best to fill these devotional niches with religious items that, like the True Cross relic and statue of the Virgen del Cisne, will remind of us God’s closeness to us in prayer as individuals and as a community.

Gracias a Dios.

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