This weekend is all-night vigil in our parishes where Our dear Lord is exposed overnight for all of us to adore Him.  When I read this chapter, I was reminded how few people who claim to be Catholic take advantage of this extreme privilege!!  If we do not respond to God's call of love, He will take our graces away from us.  Through the years, we have already lost a lot of what we had and didn't appreciate.  We still are blessed to have a few good things left so let us  take advantage of this great honor and adore Him!

 

 

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten!  Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee:  if I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.  Ps 136: 5-6

 

Jerusalem had long since ceased to re-echo the hurried footfalls of her children, and the winds of the desert had many years back blown away their footprints, as they went their way of exile into Babylon.  Poor slaving Jews, how the memory of Sion haunted them!  When morning broke, before the lash of the taskmaster had hissed its first stroke, they heard from out the past the silver tones of the priestly trumpet that had been wont to greet the dawn from the Temple's summit.  All through the day they would visit in memory God's holy Temple, and as darkness fell they would gather in spirit about the evening sacrifice that once ascended in an odor of sweetness to the one true God.  But oh, how sad they were that in days gone by they had so often forgotten the house of their God!  Broken-hearted, they wailed aloud on a foreign air:  "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten!  Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee:  if I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy!"

 

So, too alas! in these later days of God's love, the Blessed Sacrament, like most gifts in this shadowed world, must be taken from many of us before we appreciate it aright.  The days will come, and please God they will not be many, when we shall be far away from the One we love.  Our way may be along untrodden paths where Christ has not yet found a home, or day after day we may be far out on the lonely sea, or we may toss the long day and longer nights on our bed of pain.  Then will the past rise up before us, when in the forgetfulness of our youthful day we sped the fleeting moments and never thought to stop and stay awhile with our dearest Friend.  Sick at heart and full of sore regrets, we shall turn our face to where we know our Friend still finds His home and we shall stretch out our arms in longing for those loved portals.  Just for one short visit to our Friend!!!  Just for a moment's talk with Him whose invitation we had so often failed to heed!  How we should pour out our hearts and ease our souls of their heavy burdens - but we may not.  We fools!!  We forgot God's best gift and now we reap the fruit of our wasteful folly.  "Too late, too late, you cannot enter now!"

 

Dear Lord, strange as the prayer may seem from one who is Your friend, let me learn to visit You.  Visiting is inseparable from other friendships, then why should it be wanting in ours?  Oh, it must no be!  By Your good grace so let Your love take hold of my poor heart and the realization of Your presence on our altars so grow in my life, that I shall never pass Your home without at least a hurried call to let You know that You are ever in my thoughts.  Let me so live now, dear Lord, that when the day of separation comes, I can cry with Your Psalmist of old, "I have loved the beauty of Thy house and the place where Thy glory dwelleth."