Volume > Issue > Alone At Last With My God

Alone At Last With My God

GUEST COLUMN

By Richard D. Courtney | October 2008
Richard D. Courtney, who writes from Muncie, Indiana, is author of Normandy to the Bulge: An American Infantry G.I. in Europe During World War II (Southern Illinois University Press, 1997).

When I was in the eighth grade, I went to a weekend retreat at a nearby Catholic college. The first night there we were each assigned a half-hour period for adoration in the chapel where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed.

I was given the 8:00-8:30 PM period. When I relieved the other boy and knelt down on the kneeler, there in front of me on the stand was a big card with the heading, “Alone at last with my God.”

I was struck by these simple words. I am alone with God, just He and I. And all through my life, I remembered those words as I attended the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in various churches.

This past Sunday afternoon, as I knelt in adoration at my home parish, I asked myself, “Where is everybody?” Jesus is here on the altar, but where are the other people? They were all here at Mass today when adoration began. Why not now? What is more important in their lives on a Sunday afternoon — TV, sports, shopping at the mall?

Enjoyed reading this?

READ MORE! REGISTER TODAY

SUBSCRIBE

You May Also Enjoy

The News You May Have Missed

Silent Witness... Adoption, the Loving Option... Bishop's Bloody Blessing... The Pre-Fig-Leaf Church... How to Leave the Church... Sanctuary for Women... Hacked Off

Last Things: September 2021

Who knows what experiences help make people one kind of person or another, and what little change might have made the villain a hero or the hero a villain.

The Roman Catholic Church in Central Europe

The heavy-handed Russian attempt at easternization made central Europeans far more conscious of their Western heritage.