Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites. I am sure most of us have seen paintings depicting this scene of Peter meeting Jesus out on the water. Peter is sinking as he is desperately grabbing for Jesus’ hand. Jesus, for His part because He is God, is very much in control as He calmly reaches out his hand to Peter rebuking him for his lack of faith, “O man of little faith why did you doubt?”

It is easy for us to be hard on Peter and want to “rebuke” him as well for his lack of faith. The interesting thing about this story that we must remember, however, is that-- Peter got out of the boat. How many of us would do the same? Peter walked on water. How many of us have enough faith and trust in Jesus to be able to do that?

But where did Peter then go wrong; why did he begin to sink? The answer is simply that Peter took His eyes off Jesus. Then Peter saw the strength of the wind, He stopped walking toward Jesus; He became frightened, he no longer saw that Jesus was with Him even in the darkness of the storm. It was then that he began to loose hope and sink in the sea of despair.

The lesson for us today is obvious. When we look at the storms waging in our world, when we see only the waves and the struggles in our lives; it is then that we must struggle to keep our eyes focus on the face of Jesus. Another name for looking at the face of Jesus is call adoration. Adoration is to look at the face of Jesus and see the loving and merciful face of God Himself. Adoration moves us to offer ourselves completely and to abandon ourselves completely to God, without fear and with total trust

In our spiritual life and in our everyday life (the two should never be separate) we can indeed follow Jesus anywhere, fully, if we just keep our eyes on Him. To often however, we take note of the wind and the waves, we see the dangers, the difficulties, and the sufferings and so we fail to keep looking at Jesus. In our relationship with Him, we then begin to count the cost of following Him totally, fully and absolutely in love, and so we take our eyes off of Him and begin to sink in to despair, despondency and even, God forbid, loss of faith and love.

Yet even so, if we just call out to him and return our gaze to Him, reach out to him through our adoration of Him, then He will grab us, like He did with Peter, by the hand and save us from sinking; He will increase our faith, hope and love. And then with Jesus, and with our eyes daily focused on Him, we can do anything He asks us to do. United to Him we can even do the miraculous, that is we can leave all behind in order to follow Christ and His Church and become great saints.

But we must keep our eyes on Jesus, not as some ideal, but as a Divine Person who is truly present in His Church. And so we can only keep our eyes on Jesus if we adore His very Person in the Holy Eucharist both at Holy Mass and outside of Mass.

We look at the Eucharist with faith, we “see” the face of God and adore Him truly present there. The more we adore Him there in faith, the more we can handle the great winds and waves of this present world and of the spiritual life; the more we trust Him the more we can overcome the storms, that is the temptations, passions, and persecutions of our age. And the more we love Him in the Holy Eucharist, the more closely we can be with Him always, united to Him in love, until He finally leads us to the safe harbor of eternity.

In the Holy Eucharist we have to remember Jesus, our Lord and our God, doesn’t manifest Himself to us in great and stupendous marvels, or speak to us in a thunderous voice, but He comes to us hidden in the smallness of a little white host, and He speaks to us in the silence of our hearts with the tiny whisper of His Divine Love. Yet, united to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, with our eyes focused on Him in adoration, trusting in Him completely, listening to Him speak through His Church and accepting her teachings as His own, and living them with the help of the grace of prayer and the Sacraments, we will never sink for He will unite us to Himself now and forever.

It is the blessed Mother who will help us, if we turn to her, to keep our eyes always focused on Jesus through adoration of the Holy Eucharist, which is Jesus, God in the flesh. And as a result of our adoration of her divine Son in the Holy Eucharist, she will also help us to keep our eyes on Him during the ordinary events of our every day lives and to never lose hope even when the darkness of the storm may come. She will help us draw closer to the Sacred Heart of her Son in the Holy Eucharist and become one with Him in love.