Today I want to begin with a friend of mine, a woman whose experience has stayed with me because it brings us to a question we can spend our whole lives avoiding, even while we speak very confidently about religion.

Do you know Jesus?

We may know His name. We may know what the Church teaches about Him. We may be able to defend Catholic doctrine and recognize when someone has misrepresented it. Those things matter. We need the truth.

But do we know Him?

My friend was Protestant. Her husband was dying of cancer, and she needed somewhere to pray. At noon, she would look for a church where she could go inside and spend time with God. The Protestant churches she tried were locked. But she found a Catholic church with an open door.

So she went in. And she began going there each day at noon to pray. There was no exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. No monstrance on the altar. Jesus was present in the tabernacle.

And in that church, in the midst of the suffering she was carrying, she became profoundly aware of His presence. She called her sister and said, “God is here!” Her sister answered, “He is in every church.” And my friend said, “Not like this!”

Not like this.

She did not come into that church prepared to explain the theology of the Real Presence. She came carrying the anguish of a wife whose husband was dying. She came because she needed to be with the Lord. 

And she recognized Him.

Eventually, she became Catholic. She had fallen in love with Jesus, and she wanted all of Him.

That is what I want us to consider today. Because when I think about her, and when I think about the saints, and when I think about the men and women who have surrendered everything for Christ, a phrase keeps coming back to me.

If you only knew Him!

If you only knew the One who waits for you. If you only knew the One who sees everything you carry. If you only knew how completely you are loved, and what that love can make possible in a human life.

We sometimes look at a person who spends an hour before the Blessed Sacrament and wonder what there could possibly be to do for an entire hour. We look at someone who forgives an extraordinary injury and wonder how anyone could do that. We look at someone who leaves a comfortable life to serve the poor, or remains faithful through terrible suffering, and we ask where such strength comes from.

And the answer begins with a Person. 

If you only knew Him.

Think about the first disciples. Some of them were fishermen. Ordinary working men, with families and responsibilities, habits and weaknesses. They had no reason to imagine that their names would still be spoken throughout the world two thousand years later. 

Jesus came into their lives, and He called them.

They followed. But following did not mean that they immediately understood everything. Read the Gospels carefully. They misunderstood Him. They argued about which of them was the greatest. They were afraid. Peter could profess his faith with tremendous conviction and then, when the danger became personal, deny that he even knew the Lord. 

These were human beings. Their weakness should sound familiar to us. Yet look at what happened to them.

After the Resurrection, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, these frightened disciples became witnesses who could face persecution and suffering for the sake of Jesus, and ultimately give their lives. 

What had happened to these ordinary men?

They had lived with Him. They had listened to Him. They had seen His mercy, watched Him pray, encountered Him risen from the dead. Through the Holy Spirit, their relationship with Him became the center of their lives. 

They were willing to suffer because the One they loved was real. 

We can discuss courage as though it were simply a personality trait. But Peter’s courage did not begin with Peter being naturally fearless. We know that he was not. His courage grew through grace, through repentance, through being loved by the Lord he had denied. That is a tremendous consolation for the rest of us.

Jesus does not call only the people who are already strong. He calls people who need Him. He calls us with our confusion, our divided hearts, our embarrassing failures. And He invites us to remain with Him long enough for His grace to change us.

If you only knew Him, you would begin to understand why they stayed. Why they returned after failure. Why His love became more precious to them than the safety they once clung to.

And that brings us to holiness.

Sometimes we imagine holiness as a great project of self-improvement. We will become disciplined enough, impressive enough, strong enough, and then perhaps we will finally qualify as saints.

Of course, discipline matters. Our choices matter. We must resist sin, examine our consciences, repent, and cooperate with grace. Love asks something of us.

But holiness begins with God drawing us into His life.

We become holy by belonging to Him, by receiving His grace and learning to live in it. We become holy through prayer and the sacraments, through obedience and charity, through allowing Him to reach the places we would rather keep closed.

You know how spending time with someone can affect you. You begin to recognize the way that person speaks. You learn what delights them and what grieves them. Their concerns become important to you. Sometimes you even catch yourself using one of their expressions.

Something of their way of being seems to rub off on you.

With the Lord, that is an image of something much deeper. His grace truly transforms us. The Holy Spirit works within us so that we can begin to love with a love we could never manufacture on our own. 

We begin to notice the person we used to overlook. We become troubled by the cruelty we used to excuse. We recognize a sin we used to defend. We find ourselves able to ask forgiveness where once we would have insisted on winning.

The change may be slow. We may have to bring the same weakness to confession many times. But we keep returning, because He is faithful. 

So how do we come to know Him?

Certainly through Sacred Scripture. We need to hear His words, to enter into the Gospels, to allow the Word of God to question us and form us. We need Sacred Tradition and the teaching of the Church because our understanding of Jesus must be grounded in the faith handed on by the apostles.

We cannot simply invent a Jesus who agrees with everything we already think.

But how do you come to know someone you love? You spend time with them.

You listen. You speak honestly. You remain where there is nothing particularly entertaining happening. You make room for their presence in your life.

And that is why I want to speak to you about Eucharistic adoration. 

Jesus Christ is truly present in the Most Holy Eucharist: Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. During exposition, we adore Him in the consecrated Host placed in the monstrance. When the Blessed Sacrament is reserved in the tabernacle, the same Lord is present.

My friend encountered Him in a church where He was present in the tabernacle. There was no dramatic ceremony to explain the depth of what she experienced. She had come to pray, and she found herself in the presence of the One she loved.

We need to remember that when we enter a Catholic church.

Our familiarity can become a kind of sleep. We know where the pews are. We know when to stand and when to kneel. We know what comes next. And somehow we can grow inattentive to the astonishing reality before us.

He is here.

The Lord who called Peter. The Lord who welcomed sinners. The Lord who suffered for us and rose from the dead. The Lord who knows your name and every burden you brought through the door.

He is here.

You do not need to arrive with beautiful words. You do not need to pretend that you are peaceful when you are frightened, or grateful when you are struggling with disappointment. 

Tell Him the truth.

“Lord, I am afraid.”

“Lord, I do not understand.”

“Lord, I am angry, and I do not know what to do with this anger.”

“Lord, I believe You are here. Help me to love You.”

Then give Him some silence. Open the Gospel. Read a few lines slowly. Let His words settle. Speak, and listen. 

Listening in prayer does not mean treating every thought that enters your mind as a message from God. We listen within the faith of the Church, allowing Scripture and the Church’s teaching to help us discern. Sometimes what prayer gives us is a quiet recognition that we need to apologize, or a little more strength to do the good we already know we should do.

Some days you may feel great consolation. Other days you may feel distracted or dry. His presence does not depend on your ability to feel it. 

Remain with Him.

Because prayer changes more than the way we feel inside a church. If we allow Him, He will change the way we see the world outside its doors.

And that includes the way we see things like politics.

This is where our relationship with Jesus can become uncomfortable. We may welcome His consolation and resist His correction. We want Him near when we are suffering, but we can be reluctant to let Him question the loyalties that make us feel secure.

In recent election seasons, for example, Catholics have heard forceful arguments about voting. Some commentators have gone so far as to say that you cannot be Catholic and vote Democrat.

The defense of unborn life is a grave moral responsibility. Abortion deliberately takes an innocent human life. Catholics must never become indifferent to that reality or treat it as a minor political preference. The child in the womb is a human being whose life deserves protection.

But our responsibility to human dignity does not end when we have identified that evil.

Our opposition to abortion must form us into people who recognize the preciousness of human life. That conviction must keep widening our willingness to protect the vulnerable, including when doing so becomes inconvenient for our political allies.

We can become so fixed on one issue that we stop examining anything else. We begin by supporting a policy we believe is right. Then we become attached to a party. Then to a leader. And eventually we find ourselves defending conduct that we would once have recognized immediately as wrong.

We change the subject. We minimize. We say the other side is worse. We become angry at the person who asks an uncomfortable question.

And somewhere along the way, our political loyalty begins deciding which parts of our conscience we are willing to hear. 

That is a spiritual danger.

No candidate, president, party, or commentator can take the place of Jesus Christ. A vote does not give anyone ownership of our conscience. Supporting a particular policy does not require us to excuse every action of the person who promotes it.

We must remain free to say that something is wrong when it is wrong.

We owe that freedom to the truth, to our neighbors, and to the Lord whose name we bear.

And I want to speak plainly about something that happened on October 12 in Youngstown, Ohio.

A woman wearing a shirt that said “Release the Epstein Files” was struck in the face during President Trump’s rally. News footage showed the confrontation and her removal by officers. The president mocked the protester’s weight.

Brothers and sisters, we should be able to look at that and say clearly: a person’s political protest does not make her a legitimate target for violence or humiliation. 

You do not have to agree with her. You do not have to approve of her words, her gestures, or her decision to interrupt an event. Questions of order and security can be addressed without treating a human being as an object of contempt.

She is a person made in the image and likeness of God.

That truth does not disappear because the crowd is angry. It does not disappear because a leader makes a joke. It does not disappear because acknowledging it might make our political side uncomfortable.

What should concern us is how easily a crowd can cease to see a person. Someone becomes a nuisance, an enemy, a body to be shoved aside, a target for laughter. And those watching are invited to join in. 

A Christian must resist that invitation.

We should be asking whether the person is safe, whether she needs help, whether violence has been properly investigated. The early reporting included a statement from Youngstown police encouraging an assault complaint so an investigation could proceed. The sheriff’s spokesman said deputies made no arrests at the event. Those reports do not establish whether charges have subsequently been filed. We should expect a fair investigation and accountability based on the evidence.

And we should expect leaders to recognize the dignity of the person before them. Ridiculing someone’s body while that person is being removed from a violent confrontation fails that responsibility. 

There is also the message on that shirt. Behind the words “Epstein files” are real victims of sexual abuse and exploitation. Their suffering must never become merely a weapon to use against an opposing party, or an embarrassment to be hidden when it touches people with power. 

Those victims deserve truth, protection, and justice. Anyone who committed abuse, and anyone who knowingly enabled or concealed it, should be held accountable through a fair process, regardless of wealth, influence, or party.

We must distinguish proven facts from allegations. We must refuse careless accusations. But we must also refuse the impulse to dismiss serious questions simply because we do not like where they might lead.

Protecting children requires more from us than a slogan.

If our concern for the vulnerable is real, it must survive an encounter with the misconduct of someone we supported. And if we find ourselves making excuses for a woman being hit, or laughing at her humiliation, we need to bring that reaction before Jesus.

We need to ask what has happened within us that another person’s suffering has become easier to tolerate because we dislike her politics. 

I am asking that question as a matter of discipleship. 

We cannot receive the Body of Christ and then treat the bodies of other people as though their suffering were entertainment. We cannot kneel before the Lord and willingly surrender our judgment to a crowd.

And our response must not become another form of hatred. The person who struck her also needs repentance and conversion. The president needs prayer. Every person involved remains accountable to God and remains a person for whom Christ died.

We can insist on justice without delighting in anyone’s destruction.

That is part of the freedom Jesus gives us: the freedom to tell the truth without becoming cruel ourselves.

And brothers and sisters, defending human dignity becomes difficult when we are asked to recognize it in someone who has done terrible evil. Yet even then, that dignity remains. Society must protect the innocent and hold offenders accountable, while preserving the possibility of repentance. We must bring our desire for punishment before Jesus, too, and ask Him to reveal whether we are seeking justice or allowing vengeance to take hold of our hearts.

This is why I keep returning to the importance of knowing Him.

When we spend hours listening to angry voices, those voices begin to shape our instincts. We absorb their suspicions, their contempt, their permission to dismiss whole groups of people. 

We need to consider whose company is forming us. 

Who is teaching us what to notice? Who is teaching us whom to fear? Whose voice do we hear most readily when we encounter a person with whom we disagree?

Do we recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd?

That recognition grows through familiarity. Through returning to the Gospel. Through worship. Through confession. Through time spent with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Through doing what He asks when obedience costs us something.

Bring your politics into that prayer. Bring the stories you share, the jokes you laugh at, the people you have stopped trying to understand.

Ask Him, “Lord, what am I refusing to see?”

And then be willing to stay long enough for the answer to reach you.

Perhaps He will show you a cruelty you have excused. Perhaps He will show you that your anger, even about a real injustice, has become hatred. Perhaps He will remind you of someone you have reduced to a label.

We all need that examination. I need it. We cannot assume that being able to speak about Jesus means that we have allowed Him to govern our hearts. The fruit of prayer must enter our lives. It must reach our conversations, our families, our treatment of strangers, our concern for victims, our willingness to speak truth when silence would be easier.

Holiness becomes visible there.

It becomes visible when we protect someone who cannot help us in return. When we refuse to pass along a claim we have not checked. When we acknowledge wrongdoing by someone we admire. When we listen to a person whose suffering we were tempted to dismiss.

These are ordinary moments in which belonging to Jesus begins to cost us something, and begins to make us free.

I think again of my friend walking into that Catholic church at noon.

Her husband was dying. She had no way to make that suffering easy. She needed the Lord.

And there He was.

“God is here.”

“He is in every church.”

“Not like this.”

How often have we walked past that same gift? How often have we hurried through prayer and then wondered why we feel so far from Him? 

This week, make some room to be with Jesus. If you can spend an hour in adoration, give Him that hour. If you are beginning with a short visit before the tabernacle, begin there. Give Him your attention and your honest heart.

You do not have to solve your whole life before you come. 

Come because you need Him. Come because He has already loved you. Come because the One who called those fishermen is still calling ordinary people to follow Him.

And when you fall, return. Go to confession. Receive His mercy. Let Him teach you how to begin again. 

The saints learned to live that way. Their lives took different forms, and their temperaments were different, but at the heart of holiness is this belonging to Christ.

They stayed close enough to be changed.

That is my prayer for you, and for myself: that we will stay close enough to be changed. That we will let Him reach beyond the parts of our lives we find easy to surrender. That our faith will become a living friendship with the Lord who gives Himself to us.

Because He is worthy of our trust. He is faithful in our suffering. He is merciful when we repent. And He will teach us how to love. 

If you only knew Him. 

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus Christ, truly present in the Most Holy Eucharist, draw us close to You. 

Teach us to recognize Your voice, to receive Your truth, and to trust Your mercy. Give us the desire to spend time with You and the patience to remain when prayer is difficult.

Forgive us for the times we have excused cruelty, ignored suffering, or placed our loyalties above Your Gospel. Give us courage to defend the vulnerable and humility to acknowledge our own sins.

Protect children and all who suffer abuse. Bring healing to victims, truth into places of concealment, and justice through those entrusted with responsibility. Turn the hearts of those who do harm toward repentance.

Bless those who are sick and those who love them. Be near to the person who walks into a church today carrying a burden too heavy to explain.

Make us holy through Your grace. Form our hearts in Your love. Help us to follow You in the ordinary choices of this day. 

And bring us, at last, into the fullness of Your presence, where we shall know You and love You forever.

Amen.

Thank you for joining me on The Watchman’s Lamp. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland

Bishop Emeritus