Corpus Christi: A distant dogma gets personal

By SUSAN BRINKMANN
CS&T Correspondent

Sometimes the most extraordinary miracles can take place in the most ordinary way.
This was certainly the case with Suzette Moyer, who attended her first Mass at St. Mary Church, Schwenksville, the weekend the parish was conducting a sign-up drive for a new perpetual adoration chapel. While the priest spoke about all the blessings that would come to the parish, Moyer found herself growing more and more agitated.
“He said that next week we would be asked to sign up for one hour of our choice. ‘It’s only one hour,’ he said and I thought, ‘Yeah, but it’s an hour I don’t have.’”
A second-grade teacher in the Souderton school district, she had just moved into the parish. “I had boxes up to my eyeballs to unpack. My daughter was a senior in high school and we had all these college visits coming up.”
By the time she got home after Mass she was so aggravated she told her husband, “I’m never going back to that church again. My first time there and all they do is ask me for an hour of time that I don’t have.”
Her husband said, “Suzette, it’s only one hour a week. It’s not such a big deal.”
She wholeheartedly disagreed.
But the tug of grace would not be so easily waylaid. The following night, they were watching Sixty Minutes and she could hardly believe it when Andy Rooney came on for the closing segment. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow! that hour sure went fast.’”
The next day she got a phone call from her twin sister and they talked for 45 minutes. “I said, ‘Suzanne! We’ve talked for 45 minutes already! How time flies!’”
Later in the week, when she tired of unpacking boxes, she told herself, “I’m going to sit down for thirty minutes and read a magazine. Before I knew it, an hour and a half had gone by. I was floored how quick the time went.”
At exactly that moment, her husband’s words came back to mind: “Suzette, it’s only one hour.”
“If I could spend an hour watching TV, talking on the phone, and reading a magazine, I could spend an hour with God. At that moment, I decided that I would sign up for an hour, but I wasn’t really committed to it. In the back of my mind I kept thinking that I would sign up and then back out when the time came to actually go.”
She signed up for an hour on Saturday morning, fully intending to back out when the coordinator called. When the phone call came, however, “She signed me up, I was on the schedule and that was that. There was no time to get out of it.”
Her first visit didn’t start out very well. “I was angry at myself because I was there. I kept thinking ‘I have so much to do.’ What was I doing there? I didn’t pick up a book. I didn’t say a rosary. I just sat there thinking about everything I had to do at home.”
Slowly, after about 15 or 20 minutes, while she was looking up at the altar, old memories of Forty Hours devotions from her childhood came to mind. She sat in quiet reflection until someone came in and her thoughts came back to the present. Her hour was over already.
“I went back the following week and now I knew what to expect. I didn’t pick up a book or a rosary. I just sat down and said, ‘So here I am. God, you know I’m here because I love you, but do you know what I have to do at home? I’m so worried about my daughter. She’s my only child and she’s leaving me next year. How will I get through this?” She went on and on, telling Him everything. When it was all out, she said a Hail Mary and sat back, feeling strangely quiet and relaxed. “Those last 10 minutes I was so happy,” she remembers.
 The following week she went back just to see if she liked it as much as she thought she had.
She did, and started to browse through the books kept in the chapel about prayer and the spiritual life. It was like a whole new world was opening up to her, a spiritual world that she had never known existed. “They are such wonderful books! I would write down the page number so I could continue reading where I left off the next week.”
She actually began to look forward to her weekly visit and found herself frequently slipping out to the chapel for a quick 20-minute visit during the week. “The most beautiful time is late at night and early morning. I could go to the chapel and just cry. There would be only one other person there and I really felt like I could just let it all out. I would just know this was where I had to be.”
Within six months, she decided to begin attending daily Mass. “I leave early every morning now and go to Mass at 6:30. I’ve been getting there at 6 and it’s my 30 minutes just to talk with God about what I want for the day, about what I’m doing as a wife and teacher.”
Her weekly hour is still special. “It’s like my date with God. In the seven years since the chapel opened, I think I only missed my holy hour 10 times.”
Her devotion to the hour has so impressed her friends that many of them have actually gone with her. “On a rainy Sunday, one of them will call and say, do you want to make a chapel run?” This might not sound too unusual, but it is when you realize that these friends aren’t even Catholic. “They’re Lutheran! Mennonite!”
She tells them not to expect to see or hear anything supernatural while they’re in the chapel — but they’ll sense Him, as she does. “I can sense that He’s there with me, looking at me. I may not see Him sitting on a chair as much as I sense that He’s in the room. I never had the sense before but I do now.”
She has discovered what the Church has been teaching for two millennia — that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. This distant dogma, which never seemed to matter in the overall scheme of things, has suddenly become a very real and transforming power in the life of an everyday person like Suzette Moyer.
Has it made her strange, unapproachable, holier-than-thou? Hardly. “My life is not perfect, but the way I deal with it now is so much better. Before, I was crazy and panicking and talking about it incessantly. I still have my problems, my worries; I’m still concerned about my husband’s job and my daughter’s future. My life is far from perfect — but you know what I’ve learned? How to take it to God … and He’s never failed me.”
In the process of this discovery, she has become what all of us wish to be. “Happy. I’m just so happy now.”

To find a chapel near you, contact Sue Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com