Miracles happen when we sit before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. We get answers we need, we receive the comfort we desire, we have a friend who listens to us … and we’re healed. Yes, miraculous things happen.
Before she entered the Missionary Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and Mary Immaculate, Anna Rodriguez had a personal encounter with the Eucharistic Lord that inspired her to leave her job, and her boyfriend, for the religious life.
“I was before the Blessed Sacrament, and I wondered, ‘What am I feeling?’” she said. So she asked, “Dear Lord, what am I going to do?”
A lover of horses, she immediately thought of the blinders they wear in the mountains, so they can stay focused and not be distracted by the cliffs.
A voice told her, “Put the frame on just like you put on your horse. Look forward and not to the side, and I will be there.’”
“That’s when I said, ‘the Lord wants me to be a sister.’” Forty-two years later, she is still focused on the Eucharistic Lord, serving as the mother of her convent in Bridgeport.
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Marie Moura would take her grandson Johnathan to Eucharistic Adoration at St. Joseph’s chapel in Shelton.
At two, he developed a special friendship with Jesus. They talked to each other, they prayed together, and sometimes they just stared at each other lovingly.
“He loves to be close to Jesus on the altar and look up at him,” Marie said. “He would get Rosary beads and kneel where Jesus was on the altar. He’d look up and show him the Rosary and said, ‘Jesus, I’m praying the Rosary!’”
When he walked into the chapel, he’d spread his arms and say, “I love you this much, Jesus!”
“You could tell he’s in the presence of the Lord, and it’s amazing to watch. I learned so much from this little boy who has so much love for Jesus, just watching him praying and blowing kisses to Jesus.”
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Brianna Farens was convinced she’d pursue a career in medicine like her father, Dr. John Farens.
Today, she is Sister Maria Antonia of the Holy Wounds of Jesus, a member of the cloistered religious order at Poor Clare Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe in New Mexico.
“All the while, my prayer life was deepening and intensifying,” she recalled. “I was spending more and more time before our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and I just couldn’t get enough. Being before the Lord and gazing at him, caught up in his love, it felt like my heart could just leap out of my chest and go out to him. He was drawing me into this divine intimacy, and the only response I could make was that of totality, anything less would not satisfy.”
One evening during Adoration, “I heard Jesus calling me so clearly in the utmost depths of my heart to the cloister. In hearing this, it was like my innermost being was illumined, and it felt like I was on fire with peace, consumed by love.”
“It seemed like from the very place within me Our Lord drew out this call, there also came all my love and therefore my response,” she said. “This profound moment of realizing my vocation was simply an encounter of love: his love meeting mine.”
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This account is from “Real People, Real Presence” compiled by Cardinal William Keeler.
“Where do I begin to tell about the most powerful experience I have had before the Eucharist? My story starts in the late 1970s, when as an unmarried teenager, I became pregnant. In a time of doubt, fear and confusion, I committed a sin that I will regret as long as I live—I aborted my unborn child.
“Years later, I stopped at a 100-year-old church in downtown Baltimore for Eucharistic Adoration … I had prayed to the Lord about my aborted child many times before. As I prayed for God’s forgiveness again, I suddenly had the feeling I was not alone. I called God’s name and asked, ‘Is that you?’ His answer was ‘Yes.’ At that moment, a shimmering, white being came down and sat beside me. For the next 15 minutes, he and I sat in each other’s presence. From him I sensed no anger or condemnation, simply warm, unconditional love and joy.
“Then, he left my side and went away. When I told a devout friend about what had happened, she believed (as I did) that I had received a great gift from God. He allowed me to feel his complete and total forgiveness for my sin so long ago. Do I love the Eucharist? Absolutely! I have no words to truly express the peace and joy it has brought into my life.”
