September 2020 - First Friday Holy Hour - The wedding Feast and Eucharistic Adoration

Weddings are a recurring theme in the Gospel. The Lord’s first miracle recorded in the Gospel of John takes place at a wedding—the wedding at Cana—where the Lord transforms water into an abundance of wine. And, as we heard in this evening, the Lord compares his ministry—his dining with tax collectors and sinners—to a wedding feast. He is the bridegroom—and can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?

The Lord’s original audience would no doubt have picked up on the messianic undertones of the all of this wedding language. The age of the Messiah, the long awaited for final stage of human history, when the Lord’s Messiah would usher in the definitive kingdom of God—is scripturally linked to the wedding feast. Through the work of the Messiah, the Lord God would provide for his people rich food and choice new wines—juicy rich food and pure choice wines.

So, the Gospel reading certainly helped the early church understand their place in history. This is the age of fasting. In the words of the Lord, “the bridegroom has been taken away”—he has ascended to the Father’s right hand. And so, we fast and do penance and prepare our souls for the bridegroom’s return. We are to be like those wise virgins who await the bridegroom with lighted lamps, waiting to be welcomed in the wedding feast. 

And yet, at the same time, the bridegroom is already here, isn’t he? We are already fed with the rich food and choice wine, of the Eucharist. At holy Mass. This is why the Church fathers speak of the Mass as a foretaste of heaven. Already we sit at the banquet table of the lamb. Already we are fed with the rich food from heaven—the Eucharist. And already we are able to mystically experience and celebrate the joining of the bridegroom to his bride—the Church—when we participate at Mass.

And when we come to Holy Hour, and adore the Blessed Sacrament—we are able to glimpse the Bridegroom—with joyful anticipation—like the Bride in the Song of Songs—who rejoices at the sight of her lover right standing at her window. “Here he stands behind the wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattices. My lover speaks; he says to me, Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come!” The bridegroom of the Song of Songs says, “the flames of true devotion are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away.”

This night, we gaze upon the bridegroom. May he set our hearts afire with the flames of true devotion—flames that cannot be drowned by worldliness or selfishness or the floods of worldly anxiety. We kneel, and adore, and await his return where he will arrive, not simply under sacramental signs—but in the fullness of his glory…for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

November 2019 - First Friday Holy Hour - All Saints & the Eucharist

Last month, our first Friday Holy Hour fell on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, and we reflected upon Francis’ Eucharistic spirituality.

This month, we gather on the great Solemnity of All Saints to adore our blessed Lord. So many of the saints have written or preached on the importance of the Eucharist in their lives and for the Church. St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote that “it is most important that the Holy Eucharist becomes life’s focal point: that the Eucharistic Savior is the center of existence.”

To grow in sanctity is certainly to grow in one’s hunger and desire for the Eucharist. Our own patron saint, St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote of his desire for Christ in the Eucharist. He wrote: “I hunger for the bread of God, the flesh of Jesus Christ ...; I long to drink of his blood, the gift of unending love.”
St. Therese the Little Flower, spoke of how what we do here tonight, spending time in Eucharistic Adoration, is a little taste of heaven. “Heaven for me” says the Little Flower, “is hidden in a little Host Where Jesus, my Spouse, is veiled for love. I go to that Divine Furnace to draw out life, and there my Sweet Saviour listens to me night and day.”

This connection between Eucharistic Adoration here on earth and the Adoration of God in heaven is not surprising. After all, in our first reading from the book of Revelation for this Solemnity of All Saints, we heard of the Adoration of God by the Saints in heaven. “I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb” Up and down the centuries we witness the saints, men and women of every nation, race, people, and tongue adoration the Eucharistic Lamb, and we join them tonight, that we may join them in eternity.

May the Saints continue to teach us to make the Eucharistic Lord the center of Our Life, to love him, to desire him, to allow him to set our hearts on fire with divine love, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

28th Sunday in OT 2017 - Mystical Marriage and the Wedding Feast

On Tuesday evenings, we’ve been offering the video series titled “The Pivotal Players”. The series beautifully presents the lives of men and women who deeply impacted Church history. We’ve studied St. Francis of Assisi who brought important reform to the Church of the Middle Ages by calling men and women back to Gospel simplicity in a time when Christians were beginning to become enamored with the luxuries of their day.

We learned from St. Thomas Aquinas, the priest, scholar, and theologian whose writings and systematic thinking about God and the Church continue to be of inestimable value.

Last week, we studied the life and impact of different sort of theologian, the mystic St. Catherine of Siena who is pivotal in helping the Church to contemplate the mystery of God’s love. Listen to her words: “You are a mystery as deep as the sea;” she says, “the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find, the more I search for you.  But I can never be satisfied; what I receive will ever leave me desiring more.  When you fill my soul, I have an even greater hunger, and I grow more famished for your light.”

Catherine’s deep yearning for God was also accompanied by extraordinary mystical phenomena such as visions and revelations, raptures, the stigmata. Catherine, lived many years eating nothing except the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist.  And often, her prayer was so intense, she would begin to levitate.

Catherine was named by Pope Paul VI as a Doctor of the Church, which is surprising because she was illiterate. As a Doctor of the Church Catherine teaches the Church of all ages essential lessons about the Christian Life. And Catherine is very clear that the purpose of the Christian life is to grow in union with God through prayer, fervent meditation on the suffering of Christ, fasting, cultivation of the virtues, purification from sin, reliance on the Sacraments of the Church, and total abandonment to the Holy Will of God.


Union with God was a theme of her writings and reflections. At the age of 19, having already attained tremendous sanctity, St. Catherine had a vision, in which Jesus gave her a wedding ring, symbolic of her union with Christ the Bridegroom of the Church. Theologians call this the Mystical Marriage, a foreshadowing of the eternal union the blessed obtain in heaven. This is the point of the Christian life, to grow in this union here on earth, that we may share in this union in heaven.

This image of mystical marriage with God isn’t just the fanciful imagining of medieval mystics. Jesus himself uses this image in the Gospel parable we heard today: A king had thrown a wedding feast for his son and sent out servants to invite the guests.  Some guests ignored the invitation.  Others abducted the king’s servants, mistreated them, and killed them. One guest was found unworthy or at least unprepared for the feast.

Who is the king in this parable? Who is the son? Who is his unnamed Bride? Who are the servants? Who are the guests?

Well, of course, the King is God the Father, who celebrates the Marriage of Christ, His Son to  the Church. The Marriage was accomplished on the cross. Jesus himself announces this on the cross, when he says, “Consummatum est”—it is consummated. The servants are the apostles and all those God has sent out into the world to invite sinners to repent and become members of the Church. The guests are those who are given a choice: will you join the wedding feast or not?

At the end of the parable, there is a guest who is thrown out because he is not wearing the wedding garment. Perhaps, this is a Christians, who had lost his wedding garment through sin. Perhaps here is a Christian-in-name-only who went through life simply going through the motions, but never actually sought the intimate union that God wants to establish with us.

In baptism we do receive a wedding garment. But it is up to us to keep that wedding garment unstained and intact. And if it becomes stained or tattered or lost by sin, it must be cleansed and repaired through the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrament of Confession.

The wedding feast of the parable is certainly an allegory for heaven. And yet, we cannot help but see a parallel to what we are doing here, right now.

Since the earliest days of the Church, the Mass, celebrated each Sunday and every day for almost two thousand years, has been called “the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.” Here at Holy Mass, we are the wedding guests who have responded to the invitation of the King. Here at Holy Mass, those who are prepared through Sacramental Confession, are able to feed on the richest food and choicest wine of all, the Body and Blood of Jesus. Here we are able to receive a foretaste of the Communion the blessed enjoy at the eternal wedding feast of heaven.

Over the last few decades, millions of Catholics have fallen away from the Catholic Church.  BUT, the number one reason why Catholics return to the Church is because of their hunger for the Eucharist.  People return to the Church, because here and only here does Christ give us his true flesh and blood.

Many Catholics come to Mass every day because of this deep hunger for Him. To paraphrase Catherine of Siena, the more we eat, the more we hunger. The desire to know God, to be with God, to be close to God is very good, it’s our deepest longing. But it’s up to us to pursue it, to pursue the God who wants to see us flourish in holiness, who wants to see us become saints.

As I mentioned St. Catherine subsisted for years only on the Eucharist. This was possible because the Eucharist is the supersubstantial food of heaven, it is the very life and presence of God. St. Catherine would often see blazing fire in the consecrated host, for rightly so, the Eucharist is the ardent fire of God’s love for us. The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Church’s life, for from it we receive the grace to live out our union with Christ in the world.

May each of us like Saint Catherine be set aflame with divine love, be united to the Lord in his sufferings, and be devoted to the building up and serving of his Holy Church for the glory of God and salvation of souls.