From Secrets of the Eucharist:
Our times are critical and the Sacred Heart is among us. He is granting special power. He is coming with the same overt grace that the Virgin has displayed at places like Fatima.
It is the time of the Eucharist. When we spend time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, we feel a power similar to that during elevation of the Host. We encounter a holiness second only to Mass. While nothing is more powerful than the liturgy, Adoration comes in second. During Adoration, which keeps the Blessed Sacrament right there before us, prayers are heard and answered.
I have spoken to nuns who have had visions of mighty angels in chapels of the Blessed Sacrament, and others who have encountered delightful and reverent strangers who, in retrospect, seemed like angels praying fervently before the Host or even prostrate on the floor of a chapel. In one shrine dedicated to Fatima in Youngstown, New York, a medical doctor reported the inexplicable materialization of a Host in the hands of a woman she was accompanying in the Blessed Sacrament chapel.
Others saw or felt wonderful things while praying there, including an image of the Shroud that seemed to take shape in the monstrance.
If we could see just a fraction of the graces available before the Blessed Sacrament, we would flock to the nearest chapel each and every day. When I visit a church to deliver a speech, I can often sense when that church has Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. I can sense it because there’s a feeling of peace and unusually high Mass attendance. The Blessed Sacrament draws people. It imbues the church with an aura of holiness. It gives the parish an active charism. It becomes the very heart–the radiant and vibrant heart–of a parish.
St. Margaret Mary saw the Host this way, as radiant. Often, while praying before the Blessed Sacrament, it came alive to her. It served as a window a porthole into the heavenly dimension.
It drew her like a powerful magnet. “I could have spent whole days and nights there, without eating or drinking, and without knowing what I was doing, except that I was being consumed in His presence like a burning taper, in order to return Him love for love,” said St. Margaret Mary, speaking of the Blessed Sacrament.
It was there that St. Margaret Mary found a sense of safety.
It was there that she got a taste of heaven. And on the eves of Communion she found herself “rapt in so profound a silence” simply by meditating on the greatness of the action she was about to take that she could talk only with great effort.
After receiving Communion she felt such great peace and consolation that she wished neither to eat, drink, or speak.
One day, while praying before the Blessed Sacrament, St. Margaret Mary suddenly felt a strange sensation. It was as if she was being penetrated with the Divine Presence to such a degree that she lost thought of herself and where she was. She had abandoned herself totally to the Holy Spirit, Who lifted her by the power of purity and love. It was then that she felt herself reposing in His grace and received the “inexplicable secrets of His Sacred Heart,” which she later saw “as a resplendent sun, the burning rays of which fell vertically upon my heart.”
This was the beginning of what would become one of the great devotions. This was the beginning of the Sacred Heart.
On another occasion Jesus presented Himself to St. Margaret Mary in resplendent glory with His five wounds shining like little suns. “Flames issue from every part of His Sacred Humanity,” she said, “especially from His adorable bosom, which resembled an open furnace and disclosed to me His most loving and most amiable Heart, which was the living source of those flames.”
These flames will mean more when we discuss the flames of purgatory. I’ve mentioned how Blessed Faustina had similar revelations. Many of them took place before the Blessed Sacrament. Once, in 1934, Faustina had a dream and during the vision she saw Jesus exposed in a monstrance under a big sky. Out of the Host came the same two rays that she saw coming from His Heart in the Divine Mercy image. This happened on other occasions as well: Sister Faustina seeing actual rays of light coming from the Blessed Sacrament. She described the rays as “bright and transparent like crystal,” which is similar to how St. Teresa of Avila described Christ’s Light as “not a radiance which dazzles, but a soft whiteness and an infused radiance.” She compared it to looking at “a very clear stream, in a bed of crystals, reflecting the sun’s rays.”
I’ve already mentioned the radiance St. Margaret Mary saw, and many will recall that when Sister Lucia of Fatima saw Our Blessed Mother, she described the apparition as “more brilliant than the sun, shedding rays of light clearer and stronger than a crystal glass filled with the most sparkling water and pierced by the burning rays of the sun.”
Indeed, after enough prayer the Blessed Sacrament–whether in a monstrance or elevated during Mass–seems to transform into a white luminosity. When the priest was blessing the people with the Blessed Sacrament, Sister Faustina saw the Lord and His rays over the whole world. “Jesus concealed in the Host is everything to me,” she wrote in her diary. “From the tabernacle I draw strength, power, courage, and light. Here, I seek consolation in time of anguish. I would not know how to give glory to God if I did not have the Eucharist in my heart.”
We remember Padre Pio saying that a few minutes before the Blessed Sacrament are worth more than years of any worldly endeavor.
No wonder so many saints spent hours before the altar–in some cases, as with St. Francis of Assisi, entire nights or days.
One Holy Thursday, prostrate and without interruption, St. Margaret Mary spent 14 hours in Adoration.
It is during Adoration that we get direction from On High.
It’s during Adoration that God speaks to us through the peace that touches our hearts. He speaks best not in locutions or visions but in the deep recesses of our consciousness.
–MHB
[resources: Secrets of the Eucharist]
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