Praying through Lent

Over these forty days of Lent, we focus on what are called the "Three Pillars": prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. It’s no accident that prayer is first on that list. We often get pre-occupied with the "fasting" component of Lent, which focuses on giving something up, but Lent is first and foremost about our relationship with God.

In the book of Hosea, God tells His people "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." Above all else, God desires that we love him and know Him.

Knowing and loving someone - even God - begins with spending time together. Prayer is a relationship, after all. And one of the most important things we can do with anyone we're in any kind of relationship with is to spend time together.

It was in the Middle Ages that the devotion of Eucharistic  Adoration became more popular. During that time, there was a cultural understanding that the average parishioner only received the Eucharist once a year during Easter. Out of that understanding, what became colloquialized as "the gaze that saves" - gazing upon Christ in the Blessed Sacrament through Adoration - took off in popularity.

This devotion has continued to remain prominent today. But if we've never really taken part in Adoration or if we're "out of practice," it can feel foreign, even stressful to simply sit in the presence of Jesus.

When trying to promote the devotion of Adoration in his local community during his tenure as a parish priest, St. John Vianney had an incredible exchange with one of his parishioners:

Listen well to this, my children. When I first came to Ars, there was a man who never passed the church without going in. In the morning on his way to work, and in the evening on his way home, he left his spade and pick-ax on the porch, and he spent a long time in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Oh! how I loved to see that!

I asked him once what he said to Our Lord during the long visits he made Him. Do you know what he told me?

'Eh, Monsieur le Curé I say nothing to Him. I look at Him and He looks at me!'

Isn't this often the case with the ones we love the most? We may find that we don't need to say anything at all, but that simply being in one another's presence is enough. So, too, it can be in our relationship with Christ.

There are many ways to pray and to commit ourselves to prayer, but I find Lent to be an excellent opportunity to recommit myself to Eucharistic Adoration. Lent offers me a wonderful time to look at Him and to let Him look at me.