Today the optional memorial in the Church calendar is the Holy Name of Jesus. It’s not only the name for Our Lord and Savior, it makes a perfect prayer… “Jesus”.  Here’s my own little homage to Jesus for today… a sampling from my column at Patheos…

When I consider the proximity of Jesus to me personally in the Mass, and in particular when I sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament, that’s what warms my heart toward his; to know that his heart is first turned toward me, that his heart burns for mine.

When I humbly kneel or sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament elevated in the monstrance, I’m looking into a holy portal to the other side of all we can hope and imagine. The host in the monstrance is, out of its element, in suspended animation. Its bread was consecrated so that it might be consumed and receive by a communicant—to strengthen them with the very body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. It is destined, still, to be Holy Communion that nourishes and becomes part of its recipient. Yet, for the moment, that purpose is delayed, as the Church in her wisdom “exposes” the Incarnate One on the Altar that we might draw near to the very love that beats for us, from the heart that gave all.

This is why it’s called Adoration.

When we come face to face with heart of this love, we learn what it means to adore. True adoration brings an intimate knowledge we cannot find on our own. In adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, we get a foretaste of the infinite, a prolonged visitation of the True Presence outside of the Mass. Within that thin opaque portal, the Host holds all we need to know and can imagine.

I admit I cannot often describe what goes on in those moments of prayer. But in my finite knowledge of the ways of love I fathom it as my heart “seeing” the face of Jesus, the heart of Jesus, the hands of Jesus—all the infinite Good that my heart can hold. And I can almost imagine passing through the veil between heaven and earth.

The rest is here.

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Here’s a little bonus for the feast day in honor of the Most Holy Name of Jesus… (I’ve long loved this simple song from Margaret Becker.)