I read a very interesting story about Saint (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta. When her work was just beginning there were just a few of them. Before long they found that there were huge demands being made on them because there were so many people to be helped, so many dying in the streets, so many orphans. They were feeling overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. So they decided to ask the Lord, in prayer, what they should do. The answer they got surprised them. They felt the Lord telling them that He wanted them to give an extra hour of their time, on top of their ordinary prayer time, to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. That is, an extra hour to him and an hour less to work among the people. This didn’t make sense to them, but they really believed that this was what the Lord was asking them to do. So they did and soon they found that many more people began to join their work and then they were able to do more of the work than before. Mother Teresa attributed the success of her order to being faithful to this holy hour every day. She said it was an important lesson for them to learn, to always put God first, no matter what.
The more I thought about this, the more it made sense to me as well. If we give our time to the Lord, is He not going to use us all the more powerfully? God is never outdone in generosity and will always make up any time we give to him. We can run around on our own and do a certain amount of work, or we can spend more time with the Lord and let him do far more work than we could possibly imagine. I have found this in my own priesthood too. At different times I have felt the Lord asking me to give more time to prayer. That meant getting up earlier, which I wasn’t happy about(!), but I have to try and be obedient to the Lord. I have always found that the more time I give to prayer, the more happens around me and I don’t mean that I do more, or that I get new ideas. Rather, people come to me and offer to do work or start new ventures.
This doesn’t just apply to people in religious life, it applies to us all. We are living in a very fast and very busy world. There is always so much to do and so many places to go. This is one of the tricks of the Devil too. He keeps us busy so that we seem to have no time to stop and listen to the Lord speaking to us in our hearts. And then we wonder why we seem to be so removed from God. Why isn’t He speaking to me and helping me? He is, but we are often blocking him out. If we don’t listen to him, how are we going to know what He is saying to us. We have to learn to listen to the Lord. Where could be a better place to do this than before the living presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. In every tabernacle in every Catholic church in the world, Jesus is there in the sacred host, available to all of us to come and be with him.
There was a priests’ retreat a few years ago and they asked a Buddhist monk, a woman, to direct it and she agreed. The first day of the retreat she came in and went up to the place where she was to speak from. She sat down and remained in complete silence for half an hour. The priests weren’t too impressed, but since it was the first talk they said nothing.
The second day she came in and sat down and began to meditate again. After half an hour of silence, she got up and left again. Now the priests were a little more agitated, and a few of them complained to one another, but they decided to give her one more chance.
The third day she came in and sat down and remained in silence again. By the end of the talk several of the priests decided to approach her. So they did and they said that this was getting out of hand and why wasn’t she speaking etc. So she finally spoke to them and said, ‘So far all you have been doing is talking to each other and complaining about me and wondering why I am not speaking. Yet you say that you’re on retreat. How do you expect to listen to God if you can’t even learn to be silent.’
There is a lot we can learn from this. We pray that God will help us and sort out all kinds of situations and give us the answers to different problems, and yet we are slow to sit down and listen to him, adore him, love him, be healed by him. We expect him to sort everything out for us while we are running around doing things. We can be like spoilt children at times. Once we begin to learn to listen to the Lord, we will find that He is continually inviting us to spend time in his presence. This is where real healing takes place. This is where we learn to put things in the right order in our life.
All of us carry so much different psychological baggage, wounds from the past and prejudices, etc., we hurt each other. We don’t mean to, but we do. Where do we look to for healing? Well, there’s the doctor and the psychologist, faith healers, places of pilgrimage, religious articles and relics. Strangely enough, often the last person that we turn to is the Master himself, the Creator of all that exists, the One who can create life out of nothing. He is here in the Blessed Sacrament, but He is often the very last one we go to.
All of us are in need of healing, whether physical or spiritual. Where could be a better place to receive it than at the feet of Jesus himself. There is no place in the whole world better than before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
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Sometimes when people don’t receive physical cures, they get angry, or feel disappointed, or disillusioned and sometimes give up on the Lord, but spiritual healing is far more important than physical healing, because our soul is immortal, our body is not. Sooner or later our body will stop working, die and disintegrate. Only our soul will go on to the next world. If there is anything that needs healing, it’s our souls. The Lord knows this and I believe that far more spiritual healing takes place than physical, because the Lord knows where we need to be healed much better than we do.
In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus says, ‘I am the living bread come down from heaven…Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you cannot have life within you, for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.’ (See John 6)
When we spend time before the Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, He is healing us from the moment we sit down. Not only that but He will be touching others through us. The more time we spend with him the more he helps us to become harmonized, wholesome, holy. We learn to focus on ourselves less and on Jesus more. That’s what Mother Teresa’s sisters did at the beginning. They focused less on their own problems and shortcomings and more on the Lord Jesus and look what happened, they developed into probably the most successful Order of our times, because they focused on Jesus.
If we spend our time worrying about our shortcomings and all the things that are wrong with us and our world, we may feel overwhelmed and depressed. If we focus on the Lord, He will help us overcome our shortcomings, He will teach us to be more patient and to see what is really important. No one else can heal us in this way. And if we are healed by another, it is only because the Lord is working through them. So why not go directly to the Lord and let him teach us his ways and heal us of our ills? Let us have Christ at the center and adore him as our God.
Often when we come to the Lord and pray for a resolution to a problem, the Lord will answer us by showing us what we need to do, rather than fixing the problem. But we must listen, or we won’t hear what the Lord is saying.
Remember, God is never outdone in generosity and will always bless us for the efforts we make to serve him. Whatever time we give to him, He will give back to us. Whatever money we give to him, He will give back to us.
‘Come to me all you who labor and are overburdened and I will give you rest.’
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