“Could you not watch 

one hour with me?”

                              ~Matthew 24:40

Eucharistic Adoration

Thursday, February 3

7:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m.

This story was taken from Matthew Kelly's book Rediscovering Catholicism.

Years ago, I received a letter from a priest who had worked as a lay missionary in China before he returned to his homeland of America and became a priest.  He shared many stories about the Church in China, but there is one that made a huge impression on me.  It is a story I have told hundreds of times and one that always humbles me.

Many years after being ordained a priest, he returned to China, incognito, for a brief visit.  Even today, there are priests and bishops in prison in China for nothing other than refusing to let the Communist government control their churches.  For this reason nobody in China knew that he was a priest.

On the second night of his visit, he was awakened in the middle of the night by the noise of people moving around the house.  A little scared, he got up and went to his door.  Opening it, he asked one of the men living in the house what was going on.

His Chinese host replied, “We are going to the wall.”

He inquired further, “What is the wall?”

His host replied, “Come with us and we will show you.”

There were more than twenty people living in the small house and while none of them knew he was a priest, they knew he could be trusted.

Not satisfied with the answers he had received, he went downstairs and found on of the older women whom he had known many, many years earlier and asked her,  “What’s going on?  Where are you all going?”

She gently replied, “We’re going to the wall.”

He persisted, “Yes, but what is the wall?”

She replied with the same gentleness, “Come with us and we will show you.”

He got dressed and ventured out into the night with the group.  They walked for miles and along the way other groups joined them.  Now, all together, they numbered almost 120 men, women, and children.  Soon they came to a forest and as they began to walk into it, he noticed that some of the men in the group were climbing trees.

Several minutes later they came to a clearing in the forest, and in the middle of the clearing was a small wall about four feet tall, from an old, derelict building.  The old woman turned to him and smiled with all the love in her heart, and though he sensed an incredible excitement in her he did not know what to make of it.  The people seemed excited, but he was scared.

Looking up into the trees, he noticed that there was a circle o men in the trees surrounding the clearing.  And now, as the group came close to the wall, they fell down on their knees before it.

Moments later, one man got up and walked toward the wall, then, reaching out with one hand, he took a single brick out of the wall.  Behind the brick was a tiny monstrance holding the Eucharist.  The group spent an hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and then the same man got up, approached the wall, and replaced the single brick.  The men came down from their lookout positions in the trees and the group went quietly home.

The next day he told the people that he was a priest and they told him that they had not had Mass in their village ten years.  Once or twice a week they would got to the wall in the middle of the night, risking their lives, to spend and hour with Jesus, truly present in the Eucharist.

The following night, the priest said Mass at the wall and replaced the host.  It was one of the highlights of his priesthood.