Never A Burden

The Holy Hour. Is it difficult? Sometimes it seemed to be hard; it might mean having to forgo a social engagement, or rise an hour earlier, but on the whole it has never been a burden, only a joy.

monstrance-st-mary-002

I do not mean to say that all the Holy Hours have been edifying, as for example, the one in the church of St. Roch in Paris. I entered the church about three o’clock in the afternoon, knowing that I had to catch a train for Lourdes two hours later. There are only about ten days a year in which I can sleep in the daytime; this was one. I knelt down and said a prayer of adoration, and then sat up to meditate and immediately went to sleep.

I woke up exactly at the end of one hour. I said to the Good Lord: “Have I made a Holy Hour?” I thought his angel said: “Well, that’s the way the Apostles made their first Holy Hour in the Garden, but don’t do it again.”

(Venerable Fulton Sheen – Treasure in Clay)

One thought on “Never A Burden

  1. Agreed. My weekly routine includes an hour before the Blessed Sacrament. I wouldn’t call most of those hours “edifying,” not in a directly-experienced way. But I think it is a good routine: good discipline, if nothing else.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s