Adoration offers peace, healing
November 20, 2023
The national Eucharistic Revival initiative of the U.S. bishops aims to inspire, educate, and unite the faithful in a more intimate relationship with Jesus in the Eucharist.
Adoration is one way to grow closer to Jesus through the Eucharist. It’s a way to find peace and healing.
St. Augustin in Des Moines offers perpetual adoration at its chapel on 42nd Street. Other parishes, like Holy Rosary in Glenwood and Christ the King Parish, in Des Moines, offer extended hours for adoration.
Many parishes offer adoration. Check with your parish for days and times.
St. Augustin
For more than 20 years, St. Augustin’s side chapel has hosted 24-hour adoration seven days a week.
Parishioner Mike Woody started coming while he worked at a stressful job.
“It was a nice way to calm things down,” he said.
After a 24-year run teaching religious education, Woody felt pulled in a new direction.. He so enjoyed his time in adoration and the people he met there, he decided to pivot and help his parish by becoming a leader in ensuring that enough people pledged to spend time in adoration that Jesus was always in the company of someone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I decided this is what I want to do,” Woody said.
He was amazed at the stories people shared of how adoration changed their lives, helped give them direction, and offered them peace. One woman met her future spouse at adoration. Another person came for healing while feeling suicidal. And, a woman drove at 3 a.m. from a suburb with something on her mind that she wanted to think about while in the presence of Jesus, he said.
Woody has been leading a push for more volunteers in or out of the parish to pledge to spend an hour a week or whenever they could in the adoration chapel. Email him at AdorationStA@gmail.com.
Adoration can be a transformative experience for people, said Father Christopher Pisut, the pastor of St. Augustin Parish.
“It’s a place go to for consolation, for clarity of thought. A lot of vocation stories in Des Moines include time spent in the chapel,” he said.
ion,” said Father Pisut, who invites anyone who wants to spend quiet time with Jesus to stop by the parish’s adoration chapel.
“Our Lord is for everyone,” he said.
Holy Rosary
Holy Rosary Parish in Glenwood offers adoration from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week.
Sara Koch started going to adoration at Holy Rosary when she was in high school. In fact, the first date for her and her husband included a stop there.
“This chapel has been very good to me,” she said.
Koch has been going to adoration for about eight years.
“It’s a really good place for me to go and discern what I should be doing in my life,” she said. “Whenever I’m worried and anxious, God calms me down. I rely on that hour every week. I don’t think I could ever give it up.”
Hanna McGinnis went to religious education while growing up, but not to Mass. As soon as she could drive, she started going to Mass.
She had a nagging feeling that she ought to go to adoration.
“As a kid, my heart was listening to God but I didn’t know where to go,” she said.
So she would sit in her car in the church parking lot in front of the adoration chapel and talk to God. She began working with Monica Hughes, who helps with ministries at Holy Rosary. Hughes encouraged McGinnis to go in the chapel doors for adoration.
“I love it!” McGinnis said. “God’s voice calms you. Satan’s voice pushes you and worries you. I turn to God to figure out where to go.”
Adoration deepens her faith.
“I’ve become such a better person with God in my life. I’m still learning. The more I learn, the more my life has gone better,” she said.
Christ the King
Kris Beltrane remembers her weekly prayer group at Christ the King Parish. The small group would both sing joy and praise and silently pray to God during adoration.
When Monsignor Frank Bognanno became the pastor, her group asked if they could have expanded adoration hours.
“I like the quiet time. You feel the Spirit. You feel God’s presence,” she said. “There’s just something about being in that space in front of the Blessed Sacrament, especially in the chapel because it’s smaller and intimate, that just draws you in.”
Christ the King doesn’t have perpetual adoration, but it’s close; more like 24 hours a day for six or six and a half days a week because it’s a challenge to have people stay with the Eucharist in adoration over the weekends.
“At the end of the last Mass of the weekend (which is typically the Spanish Mass), we expose the Blessed Sacrament in the church for a period of silent prayer, have some songs and devotions, and then process with the sacrament to the adoration chapel, where it remains until the following weekend,” explained Father PJ McManus, the pastor.
“Then on Saturday, before the first Mass of the weekend, we process the sacrament back into the church and have a common holy hour together as a parish, often with praise and worship music.
“This allows the community to see the connection between the sacrament celebrated and the sacrament adored, that we’re really living from Eucharist to Eucharist, and that adoration is always best understood as a preparation for our next communion and a thanksgiving for our last one,” he said.
Adoration is one way a diverse parish can join people in prayer. Second, the silence draws people.
Beltrane encourages people to spend time in adoration.
She said: “God can always touch our lives, but in adoration he seems to touch it so much more deeply.”