The One Best Answer to Life’s One Worst Temptation

Father Michael Brungardt, a priest in the Wichita Diocese, shared the key to a good Lent with his parish in Wichita, Kansas: Eucharistic Adoration. He said his experience of  adoration — both at Totus Tuus as a child and at Benedictine Colelge in Atchison, Kansas, — was crucial to his own vocation. What follows are excerpts from his homily, the full version of which you can find here.

Every year we begin Lent by meditating on the temptations of Jesus in the desert … but really “there is only one temptation. All particular temptations are expressions of this one original or ‘primordial’ temptation. [And] this is the temptation to believe that the fulfillment of the desires of the human heart depends entirely on us. Dependence on another leaves us at the mercy of what we cannot control. [And so] we are tempted to reject all forms of dependence” (Albacete).

Commitment to depending on the Lord, especially through an hour of Eucharistic Adoration each week, will change your life.

Now, I get it, committing to an hour of adoration a week can seem like a lot, but it can change your life. Adoration can change your life. Case in point. As I’ve shared before, I first heard the call to the priesthood while in adoration.

It was during my freshman year at Benedictine College that I decided to enter seminary. And lo and behold, guess what was at the center of the story: adoration. I played rugby at Benedictine, and one thing the rugby team would do once a month was help the Monks with all night adoration on a Saturday night; we would take the slots throughout the night. And so on this particular Saturday night I was in adoration.

The next day was Divine Mercy Sunday, and I was helping my friend with a holy hour he was organizing for Divine Mercy Sunday. And so that weekend, spending two hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament — it was at that time that I was finally able to accept the call of the Lord. Literally the next day I called the vocation director and went to meet with him to begin the process of joining seminary.

But look, at the center of it all was one thing: Adoration of the Lord in the Eucharist. Now, God isn’t calling all of you to be a priest, I get that. He is calling some of you!

My sister who is a nun, do you think one day she just decided to go to the convent? No, she spend many hours in prayer, many many hours in adoration. Following the Lord doesn’t happen magically, it takes a commitment, it takes prayer, it takes time. But especially in Eucharistic Adoration.

Thank God that we have this opportunity here at the parish, in the new chapel, beginning in just a few short days. Will you allow the Lord to change your life and spend one hour with him in adoration?

In Adoration, we have time to talk with the Lord, to spend time with him.

But most importantly, we give the Lord the opportunity to speak to us, to work on us. Our patroness, St. Margaret Mary once said, “My greatest happiness is to be before the Blessed Sacrament, where my heart is, as it were, in Its center.” When St. Margaret Mary was before the Blessed Sacrament in Adoration, she placed herself in the center of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And within His heart, she could experience the happiness and joy that her heart was truly in search of.