Adoration - There and Back Again

There is nothing more exciting - or more challenging - than practicing our Catholic Faith in ordinary life. Join Mary Beth Ellis as she shares the practical side of her life in Christ.

WASHINGTON (Catholic Online) - I'm in and out of the Confessional all the time on this one: When tension over my work seeps into my marriage, I snarl at my husband of one year, pushing a pile of turkey cold cuts in a bag in his general direction and inviting him to enjoy his dinner.

Needs work.

So I tried something this week I'd been encouraged to do my whole Catholic life but never actually did- an hour of Eucharistic Adoration. It's kind of a way of keeping Jesus company; unlike me, apparently, Jesus was a people person. Not because I'm so incredibly super-holy awesome, but brother, because I desperately need the extra-credit assistance.

So what you do is, you go to the church when the Eucharist is present (or- and I can't tell whether this is awesome or depressing-online) and you sit. Or kneel. Or both.

But mostly you're quiet. Physically, anyway.

I wasn't sure exactly what to do there, so I did a Rosary and sat some more. Half an hour to go. One of the priests came and went to hear a by-appointment Confession. Another parishioner showed up to make a circuit of the Stations of the Cross. Still I sat.

I am highly unused to being still with God. Dude's busy. We talk mostly in the form of please and thank you's. There's Mass on Sunday and there's the Rosary or Bible study and then there's this... sitting business.

For an hour.

What is a person supposed to say to Jesus? "So... that Jimmy Clausen, major improvement on the hair, huh?" Do I whine the way I usually do in prayer? Think about the physical pain of the Cross? Go through an enormous litany of thanks and "please bless"es? Mentally recite the lyrics of "I Can't Drive Fifty-Five" and check all ten fingernails for splittage? Because that's what I wound up doing. It was some pretty craptastic adoring I was throwing down there. Worst. Adoring. Ever, in fact.

I studied a lot of carpet fibers.

I didn't mean to. But then, at the fifty-minute mark, I realized that all the earlier fidgeting had in fact been an enormous mental flushing. Sammy Hagar went away, and so did the carpet. I worked through a slow realization about humility in my work, and there weren't any thunderclaps or exploding statues or anything, but it was something I could sit next to on the couch, maybe offer it some gum. That's a start, right? Jimmy aside?

At the end of the hour I stood in the aisle for a few seconds, like a moron. The main good thing about hanging out with Jesus is you don't have to go through the whole brain-numbing social leavetaking: "Thanks so much!" "No problem- you take care!" "You too!" "Drive safe, now." "And have a nice weekend!" "Uh-huh!" And so on and so forth until somebody hangs up or dies.

But for the first time ever, I wavered in the aisle for a bit before immediately taking a knee, as I've done since I mastered gross motor skills. (Fine motor skills: Still waiting.) I'd been perfectly rotten company for fifty minutes. Maybe it was that I'd never stayed that still for that long, or maybe it was the tabernacle, but I very calmly cooked a steak for my husband and me to eat. Plus a side dish.

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Mary Beth Ellis is a freelance writer living perilously on the Beltway edge of Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Random House's Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers and Grotto Stories. Other credits include Smithsonian Air & Space, the Cincinnati Enquirer, Weber: The Contemporary West, Notre Dame Magazine, and many more.

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