Do I Understand What I'm Praying?

Have you, like me, ever stumbled over the wording of a prayer? Let me tell you about a prayer I routinely stumble over, even after taking it to God and to my angel with meditation. It's not because the words are difficult to pronounce or archaic. I actually love the more ancient prayers and wordings. But I became part of a rosary group last year that prays the Fatima Prayers before starting the rosary. I absolutely love the angel prayer "my God I believe, I adrore, I hope and I love thee and I beg pardon for those..." You know the one. I use this one a lot while walking from building to building at work, it comes so easily to my lips.

The second Fatima prayer is the one that causes me to stumble. It feels strange to me and too great or almost beyond me, mostly beyond my power. I have a hard time engaging with it and I wonder if I'm not the only one. Here is the text: "Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore Thee profoundly. I offer Thee the most precious Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifferences whereby He is offended. And through the infinite merits of His Most Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of Thee the conversion of poor sinners."

Wow. When I first read this prayer and re-read it a few times it was a real stumbling block. The wording seems foreign to our modern idea of offering anything. How can I think to offer, to the Holy Trinity, the body and blood of Jesus. And THEN to add "present in all the tabernacles of the world." How is it possible? None of this is under my power to offer. The Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is a great gift from God the world over. How can I offer it to God? And when you offer something to God in your life, doesn't it mean that you are giving it up or willing to sacrifice it? Bear with me... because this was my original organic train of thought when I first encountered the prayer. To lose the great gift of our Lord Jesus's holy body and blood, soul and divinity given ot us in the Eucharist when it is not ours to gift to God to begin with? This was beyond me.

Of course, I was not taking into context the source of the prayer. This prayer was taught to the children at Fatima by the an angel of Portugal as he lay flat - protrate - before the chalice and the eucharist which he had brought to communicate the children in preparation for the apparitions of Mary to them. I can almost hear my angel sighing in the backgroun when I say this prayer gives me difficulty.

So, contemplating the prayer briefly, my first thought being "I can't pray this, I don't get it." a second thought appeared in my mind on the heels of the first, as if in answer to my confusion: "What, then, could I offer? If not the body and blood of Jesus present in the Tabernacle, in all Tabernacles, then what?" And no matter what I could come up with, the most valuable things to me, none of it was not given to me first by God. Also, anything I could think to offer would pale in comparison to the sacrifice of His Son.

The other thought that came to me during this very brief meditation came right from scripture. It was Jesus's admonition in Matthew 22:21 "give to Caesar what is Caesar's but give to God what is God's." For me, this really drove it home. If we are to offer to God what is God's then, certainly, his presence in every tabernacle of the world could very well be first on that list.