Dr. Wojciech Kosek
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Meditations led by seven people:
A, B, D – women; L, P, W, Z – men.
This translation was published here on 20 Dec 2023.
To see the original Polish text ← click, please!
(Duration of meditations with songs: about 35 min)
Z Beloved Savior! By participating in the Holy Mass, we began our special meeting with You: the holy hour, that is, the time of unity in love with You, suffering loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane. You revealed the value of such vigilance to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque during the third apparition in 1674. You then said, “Every night between Thursday and Friday, I will make you partake of that mortal sadness that I felt in the Garden of Olives. To join with Me in the humble prayer which I then offered to my heavenly Father in agony, you are to arise between eleven and twelve o’clock and remain with Me upon your knees for an hour, with your face to the ground, to appease the anger of My Eternal Father, and to ask of Him pardon for sinners. You will thus share with Me, and in a manner soothe the bitter grief I suffered when my disciples abandoned Me and I was constrained to reproach them that they could not watch with Me even for an hour.” [1] (1:26)
Z Song: Garden of Olives – 1st stanza (1:56)
B Dearest Savior! Thirsting for our love, You asked St. Margaret in a revelation in 1674 to unite lovingly with You in the hour of Your immense suffering during the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, that is, in the time immediately following the Last Supper. We note that You in also our times asked St. Faustina to unite with You during Your suffering on the cross, and therefore, in the hour that followed that hour of Gethsemane and belongs to the time after the Last Supper. Therefore, we today, having fed by Your Divine Life, listening to Your word, wish to enter with You into the time of those holy hours, the time opened by the hour revealed to St. Margaret and crowned by the hour revealed to St. Faustina. (1:09)
B Song: I Want to Give You Everything – 1st stanza (1:34)
W Lord Jesus! Moving are the words You spoke to St. Faustina, “At three o’clock, beg for My mercy, especially for sinners, and immerse yourself, even for a short moment, in contemplation on My Passion, particularly when I was left forsaken at the moment of death. That is the hour of great mercy for the whole world. I shall allow you to enter into the depths of My mortal sorrow. At this hour, I shall not refuse anything that a soul may ask of Me, for the sake of My Passion…” (Faustina’s Diary, No. 1320). We believe, O Beloved Savior, that this hour of mercy strikes not only when our earthly clocks point to three o’clock, but above all when in Holy Communion we receive You – delivering Yourself to a saving death for the whole of humankind. (0:56)
A Beloved Savior! By participating in the Holy Mass, we began our special meeting with You – the holy hour… the hour of mercy. We received the immense grace of how close we were to God Himself… We listened attentively to Your words of life and came up with holy fear at the table of Your Body and Blood. We are conscious of how much we have received by participating in the Holy Mass. Behold, an extraordinary miracle, inaccessible cognitively to our senses, has once again taken place in our lives: You have truly carried us into the time of the Last Supper so we could participate with You and the Apostles at the same table of the New Passover liturgy. (1:01)
A Song: Your Heart, Jesus, is Burning with Love – 1st stanza (2:30)
L Beloved Jesus! We believe that by attending the Holy Mass, we have truly become participants in that Divine Liturgy that You celebrated on the night immediately preceding the day of Your Death at Golgotha. We believe that this liturgy made us witnesses of Your Death and Resurrection before these poignant events occurred in history. We believe that when we partook of Holy Communion today here in the Church of Divine Providence, we were, in fact, participating in the Holy Communion that You Yourself gave two thousand years ago in the Upper Room to the Apostles. (0:53)
L Song: We Worship to Your Heart – 1st stanza (2:18)
D Jesus! We believe that by receiving Holy Communion in our church, we received with the Apostles from Your hands in the Upper Room You, delivering Yourself in a saving Sacrifice on the cross at Golgotha. So now, when the holy celebration of the Last Supper, that is, the celebration of every Holy Mass, has been completed, we want to go with You on the way that You passed two thousand years ago after this celebration. As we abide in adoration in sacramental union with You, we wish to respond to the gift You have just given us during the Holy Mass. Here, we have received You in Holy Communion, in a holy personal union, the depth of which we cannot fully comprehend today. We will see only in eternity how important it is, which we receive today with faith. (0:57)
D Song: Jesus, Veiled in the Sacred Host – 1st stanza (1:00)
P St. Faustina recorded in her Diary in the period before Christmas, “I’m going through this time with the Blessed Mother, preparing for the glorious moment of Jesus’ coming. Our Lady is instructing me on the soul’s inner life with Jesus, especially in Holy Communion. We shall only find out in eternity what a great mystery Holy Communion works in us. O most precious moments of life!” (Faustina’s Diary, No. 840) (0:37)
P Song: Your Heart, Jesus, is Burning with Love – 4, 5, 6th stanza (2:30)
B Beloved Jesus! I repeat in my heart the confession of St. Faustina, “We shall only find out in eternity what a great mystery Holy Communion works in us. O most precious moments of life!” The saint’s confession takes me to the depths. I marvel at her naturalness in seeking to open her heart as fully as possible to Your physical presence with and for her as she comes to the Eucharistic table. “O most precious moments of life!” – I repeat, aware that, behold, it is the hour of union with You in love that has now struck for us… that, behold, You now bestow upon us these most precious moments. (0:55)
B Song: O the Silent White Host – 1st stanza (2:00)
Z O Lord Jesus! In the Gospel (22:19-20), St. Luke conveyed the words of consecration, spoken by You at the Last Supper: “This is My Body, giving itself for you… This cup is the New Covenant in My Blood, pouring itself out for you.” You did not say: “Body which was given, Blood which was poured out…”. Using the participle of the present tense: “Body which is giving itself / Blood which is pouring out itself,” – You indicated that You, under the species of the Sacred Host, are in the existential state of giving Yourself out to death, in the state of pouring out Your Blood. Your state of utmost tension in the face of evil, which is determined to kill You, does not pass away with the passing of the ages but remains always open to those who wish to co-suffer with You when they eat the Body and Blood and adore the Body and Blood… (1:16)
A Looking at the white Host, I know that I am before You, God, who, out of love for people, was willing to accept the scorn of the world, the unjust judgment and sentence condemning You to death. Beneath the whiteness of the Host hides the redness of Your blood, which our frigidity, unbelief, littleness has drained from Your body… Yes, in sacramental form, You are, O Jesus, as the Messiah delivered to death and as the Bridegroom rejected by His bride… The record made by St. Faustina elsewhere in her Diary (No. 252) allows me to see the wounds that I also inflict on You through my lack of love for You. The saint wrote thus: (0:56)
W “Four days had passed since my perpetual vows. I wanted to make a Holy Hour. It was the first Thursday of the month. As soon as I entered the chapel, I was overwhelmed by the presence of God. I distinctly felt the Lord at my side. After a while I saw the Lord, all covered with wounds, and He said to me, ‘Look Whom you have espoused.’ I grasped the meaning of these words and said to the Lord, ‘O Jesus, I love You more when I see You like this, wounded and spent, than if I saw You in Your majesty.’ Jesus asked, ‘Why?’ I replied, ‘Your great majesty overawes me, the tiny nothingness that I am, but Your wounds draw me up to Your Heart and tell me of Your great love for me.’ After this conversation there was silence. I gazed at His holy wounds and felt happy suffering with Him. I suffered, yet I did not feel the suffering, I felt happy to discover the depth of His love, and the hour went by as if it were just a minute.” (1:28)
W Song: I Want to Be Closer to You – 1st stanza (1:30)
D Beloved Jesus! Thanks to the teaching of the Church, we are aware that You are now with us in a way that cannot be compared to any other way of Your presence. Now, our community of love with You is reaching its peak. Such intimacy as we have just now, when the sacramental species of the Blessed Sacrament last in us, in our bowels, does not connect us at any other time in our lives. Therefore, we desire not to waste this Gift. We desire to truly open our hearts to Your presence with and for us, O Beloved Jesus! (0:42).
L The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that your manner of presence under the Eucharistic species is absolutely unique. The Catechism ( No. 1373) explains: “Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us,” is present in many ways to his Church: in his word, in his Church’s prayer, “where two or three are gathered in my name,” in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, in the sacraments of which he is the author, in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister. But “he is present … most especially in the Eucharistic species.” (0:53)
B The Catechism (No. 1374) then notes: The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” “This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present.” (0:59)
B Song: The Hidden Jesus – 1st stanza (1:46)
P Dearest Jesus! We do not always remember the unique nature of this encounter that we access with the reception of You in Holy Communion. We do not always arrange our daily schedule with due prudence to have time for You when You come to us in the absolutely most perfect way: as God Incarnate, God who comes as a flesh-bearing human being. We do not always take into account Your desire for us to be able to distinguish the importance of this encounter from our other, less intense encounters with You during the day. We usually live as if the Eucharistic encounter with You might continue as well a few hours after Holy Communion – during prayer or work outside the time of Eucharistic union. However, this is not the case, in keeping with the truth of the unique nature of Your presence under the Eucharistic species… Therefore, today, we give thanks wholeheartedly for the grace that we have remained in our temple of Divine Providence after Mass to enter as fully as possible into the time and place of the most intense encounter with You. (1:25)
P Song: I Know in Whom I Believe – 1st stanza (1:50)
A Jesus! We usually live as if the Eucharistic encounter with You might continue as well a few hours after Holy Communion – during prayer or work outside the time of Eucharistic union. However, this is different. Here is what the Church teaches in the Catechism (No. 1377), “The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist.” You Yourself, O Divine Savior, willed that Your most privileged form of presence with us should depend on the scant permanence of sacramental species, which are subject to digestive processes and gradually fade after consumption. Therefore, if we do not choose to continue meeting with You immediately after the Eucharist, then later Your presence with us will be of a different degree. St. Teresa of Jesus wrote about this, and in our time her testimony was shown to the whole Church by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments 2004, on the occasion of the proclamation of the Year of the Eucharist by Blessed John Paul II. Let us listen attentively to the words of the Holy See: (1:26)
Z “The renewal brought about by this holy year will most certainly depend on the depth of our prayer. We are all invited to celebrate, receive and adore the Eucharist with the same faith of the saints. How could we forget the fervor of the great Spanish mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, whose feast we celebrate today in the liturgy? In reference to Eucharistic communion, she writes, ‘It is not necessary to go far to look for the Lord. For until our natural heat has consumed the accidents of the bread, the good Jesus is in us. Let us draw near to Him!’ (Way of Perfection, 8).” [2] (1:02)
Z Song: Be Hail, Living Host – 1st stanza (1:20)
D Jesus, the Host, the Mystery of Love! We desire to show You our faith and love now when You, in the time of our union with You, make us truly participants in Your saving way, which You gradually pass from the Upper Room of the Last Supper to death on the Hill of the Skull, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. We are with You on this way, marked by the blood of Your feet, the way that leads through the Garden, the seizing, the judgment, and the way of the cross… (0:33)
D Song: Be Hail, Living Host – 3rd stanza (1:20)
W Dear Jesus! You are our Creator! Before You called us into existence, You loved us. By the power of this love, You made us begin our eternal existence a dozen or more years ago. Its first stage is temporal life on Earth. You love us very much. You desire our happiness. You know that we will not find it outside of You, the loving Creator and Bridegroom of us! That is why You want us to understand more and more how to grow in our relationship with You, in friendship, in betrothal, and, finally, in spiritual marriage. (0:42)
W Song: Be Hail, Living Host – 5-6 stanza (1:20)
B Jesus! Looking at the Most Holy Host, I marvel at how You desire so that we do not feel compelled to love You, to give a loving response to Your love. Yes, You are here as the Omnipotent Lord of creation, its absolute beginning, its source of existence… You are here, O Mighty One, and yet You do not reveal by even the slightest manifestation of Your power that You are. (0:31)
B Song: Be Hail, Living Host – 7-8 stanza (1:20)
L You are here, O delightful Divine Beauty; however, You do not reveal that extraordinary radiance, the seeing of which would cause in the heart of each of us an irrevocable admiration for You and the compulsion to love You unconditionally. You are hidden, waiting for the love aroused in the heart of a man free from the compulsion to love. (0:24)
L Song: Here in this Sacrament – 1st stanza (1:44)
A Dear Jesus! You once told St. Faustina a while after Holy Communion, “It is for souls like yours that I am searching and longing, but there are few of them; your great trust is forcing Me to keep granting you graces all the time. You have great and infinite rights to My Heart, for you are an absolutely trusting daughter. You would not be able to bear the full power of the love I have for you if I were to reveal all of it to you here on Earth; often I unveil just a small fraction of it for you, but you should know that this is only a special grace from Me. My love and mercy know no bounds.” (Faustina’s Diary, No. 718) (0:42)
A Song: Here in this Sacrament – 3rd stanza (1:44)
P Jesus! In the consciousness of a man who does not make an effort to go with his mind and heart in Your direction, beyond the reality perceived with the eyes, here there is nothing but white, round, unleavened bread. This reality – merely temporal – is in the consciousness of a man in whose heart the source of Catholic, Divine faith in Your true presence as God-Man, hidden under the extremely ordinary-looking species of the consecrated Host, has not been ejaculated. (0:38)
P Song: O my Jesus in the Host Hidden – 1st stanza (1:50)
D We believe, O Divine Savior, that You, our Creator, know us better than we know ourselves. We believe that You have hidden in the depths of our hearts a deep desire to love You, to unite with You in a way that will make us a gift to You – in response to the gift of Yourself that You bestow upon us, O Beloved! We desire, therefore, to love You with our presence beside You in the most difficult moments of Your mortal life. In a moment, we will take up the Rosary prayer with the knowledge that through the Holy Communion we received during the Holy Mass, by the power of sacramental union, we will truly be co-participants in Your way that You passed two thousand years ago, beginning with the seizing of You in Gethsemane. Jesus, I love You! (1:01)