Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament will take place each Friday afternoon, following the 12:00 Noon Mass and end at 6:00 pm. On First Fridays of each month there will be 20-Hour Adoration from 12:30 pm Friday until 9:00 am Saturday morning. As we must have two people in attendance of the Blessed Sacrament at all times please sign up in the narthex of the church to help us plan ahead.
The Holy Hour – An Opportunity of Grace
The image of an hour with Jesus has been part of Catholic Tradition since the very beginning. Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, mournfully asked His disciples, “Could you not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40).
A Holy Hour gives us the opportunity to honor Our Lord’s request and place ourselves before Him. We join our own prayers, works, joys, and sufferings with His.
The Holy Hour is given to us by the Church not as a set of rules to keep but as an opportunity for an open encounter with the living God. There are many ways to keep a Holy Hour but what really matters is that our encounter with our Lord be sincere and prayerful with a genuine openness to the presence of God and allowing the distance between us to diminish. Some thoughts on ways to keep a holy hour are:
- Simply by sitting in the presence of God in silence with a heart open to His love;
- Focusing intently on the offertory we celebrate at each Mass reflecting upon the great mystery of Jesus’ love for us;
- Set aside a special time for meditation on Scripture or other spiritual materials: reading it, meditating on it, conversing with God about it, contemplating God in light of the Scripture;
- Devoting a special time for prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication which encourages us to adore God who loves us so much and gives of His very self to us. We grow in the knowledge that God is and that praising and adoring God makes us stronger and wiser;
- Offer Thanksgiving and supplication in which we give God thanks for his goodness and make our requests known to Him in prayer allowing him to be present in us, give us His grace, and guide us to accept His response to our requests.