Adaptation of St. Louis de Montfort’s Prayer to Jesus
Jesus Christ and Caesar Augustus: Competing Claims in a World Searching for Peace
Adoration: The First Step in Evangelization
Receiving the Eucharist Fruitfully
I had an experience. A spiritual experience. I think it was from an Angel, maybe because I am a member of Opus Angelorum and we are supposed to “live” with the Angels, but it could have been the Holy Spirit. I don’t know. Either way, it was a positive thing and sort of life-changing, even though it lasted only a moment.
I was studying the gospel for the day – Saturday in the 3rd week of Ordinary Time, Year A. It is the story of the sudden storm that came upon the disciples on the Sea of Galilee while Jesus slept on a cushion in the back of the boat. The Storm was so fierce that the disciples feared for their lives and finally woke Jesus. They must have been shouting to be heard over the squall, “Master, do not you care? We are going down!” Jesus rose and rebuked the wind, and immediately the Sea settled down, and a great calm came over it.
The disciples were dumbfounded, in awe over what had happened. They asked one another, “Who can this be? Even the wind and sea obey him! Of course, Jesus was showing, through this action, who he is. Only God could do such a thing! That’s when it happened. That’s when I realized, in a moment of “enlightenment”, who Jesus really is. I had been imagining myself in the boat with the disciples, experiencing the same thing as them, but I grasped what they did not: Jesus really is God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, the Lord!
I basked joyfully in my experience for a couple of days, and as I returned to my prayer and study, I became aware of something I had never paid much attention to before. The Gospels are like one long exclamation of who Jesus really is. He is constantly telling his disciples and the Pharisees by his words and actions, Hey, it’s me! I am Lord! And he is not alone. Other people are saying the same thing. The Angel Gabriel declared him God to Mary before his conception. This sort of sets the stage. At the Visitation, Elizabeth calls Mary the mother of my Lord! At his Nativity, the Angels declared it. All his miracles and exorcisms speak to it. When he claims, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” he is saying he is God. In fact, every time he uses “I am” in reference to himself, he is saying it. It is the constant thread that runs through the Gospels. Even at the end of his life, a pagan soldier declared, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”
I am sure many, if not most of you, have already had this realization. But for me it was something new. Of course, I, too, believed Jesus was God, but I had never really experienced it before. I am not telling this story to brag. And I am not lying. I am telling the truth. Perhaps someone needs to know that prayer and study of the Gospels really do pay off. Or at least they can. That’s why I am writing this: it’s not something you might keep to yourself, even if you wanted to. It needs to be told and repeated – in my experience – and the witness of all the Gospels, Jesus really is Lord!
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