Brenda, your question. Yeah, my question is: I lived with--well I rent a room from a
lady who's a Protestant. She's ecstatic about the fact that there's
another Christian in the house, because she is. She's non-denominational, as far as
the church; but she sees me going all the time to adoration, because our perpetual
adoration Chapel opened up the 1st of February. And she sees me going all the
time; how is the best way that I can explain to her what adoration is and
why we do it? Because I went to fill in for somebody the other night, I got
the eye-roll, but I'm like, "How do I explain it to her?" We've already had the
Immaculate Conception conversation, but.... I'll tell you what I do, Brenda, is I kind of go the way
the Church went in the first several hundred years of the Christian era,
because everything begins with the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist
when you consider adoration. You know, because once you understand, for example,
I start with 1 Corinthians--you could start with John chapter 6, of course,
"Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you--"
but I get to 1st Corinthians 10:15- 17, where St. Paul says "The cup of
blessing which we bless, is it not a partaking of the blood of Christ?" So first
you see here that Communion is, what? Partaking in the blood of Christ. "And the
bread which we break, is it not a partaking of ("koinonías," in Greek)
the body of Christ?" So there you have--okay, well, this communion is the
partaking in the body and blood of the Lord. Then you go to chapter 11:27-
29, "Whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup unworthily eats and
drinks damnation to themselves." Why? "Because they do not discern
the body of the Lord." So not only is it a partaking in the body of the Lord, but there,
plainly, it is the body of the Lord. And that's why it's a partaking in the body
the Lord. So once you see that, oh my goodness, then it makes sense. Because as
you probably know, adoration didn't start immediately in the Church. I mean, you can
see, in the earliest Christian documents, they would take, you know, the sacred host
to those who were not present, and they were careful not to let one crumb fall
to the ground because of the belief in the Real Presence; but adoration would
actually come later. And it naturally follows from the reality, "Hey, this is
Jesus, and he doesn't leave (as the Lutherans teach) at the end of service."
Right? But there is a real transformation that happens. We call it
transubstantiation, where the bread and wine don't exist anymore. So once you see
that--and that's what you see in the Scriptures there. In fact, if you back up
to 1 Corinthians 11:27, "Whoever eats the bread
or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of
the body and the blood of the Lord," there you even have an indicator that Jesus is
entirely present under either species; because if you eat the bread or drink
the cup unworthily, you're guilty of the body and blood of
the Lord. So you have all sorts of theology there; "Wow, he's entirely present
under both species, and if I don't recognize this and I receive, I eat and
drink damnation to myself. Wow, Jesus is really present there." And as a result of
that, what else can we do except get on our knees and worship Him? Brenda, thank
you so much for that question.