“Advent Adoration” Homily for the 33rd
Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2023
I returned
this morning from the National Catholic Youth Conference in Indianapolis, and
it was a great experience! Fr. Meyer and
I have always prioritized our young people having experiences where they are
connected to the larger Catholic Church, and this year there were over 12,000
people who attended NCYC!
The morning
and evening sessions took place in Lucas Oil Stadium, while the break out sessions
took place in the Convention Center across the street from Lucas Oil Stadium.
On Saturday
night, during dinner, we asked the teens and chaperones to share, at their
tables, their favorite experiences of NCYC, and overwhelmingly the favorite for
most of them was Eucharistic Adoration, which took place for approximately one
hour on Friday night in Lucas Oil Stadium.
But that holy hour only had about 5 minutes of silence, and the rest of
the time there was music and talks going on.
There was
also SILENT adoration taking place throughout the 4 days of NCYC in the Convention
Center as well, and most of our young people and chaperones shared that they
actually preferred the SILENT adoration in the convention center.
Cardinal
Robert Sarah wrote about several years ago called “The Power of Silence” with
the subtitle “Combatting the Dictatorship of Noise” and we do live in a very
loud world…radios, tv’s, social media, earbuds, smart phones…we are assaulted
by noise all the time.
So at our
parishes during Advent, we are going to be ending our Masses during Advent with
just a few minutes of silent adoration and then move right into Benediction…there
are handouts as you leave Mass for those who want more info…but this is part of
the Eucharistic Revival that has been talked about a lot.
Fr. Meyer
and I hope that this experience and exposure to a few minutes of silence in the
Eucharistic Presence of Jesus will draw us all closer to Christ, to the
Catholic Church that Jesus established…and closer to one another as well!
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