The “Revival Session” on Friday evening during the National Eucharistic Congress offers pilgrims the opportunity to unite their own suffering with the wounds of Christ. “There will be prayers of healing and reparation,” said Benedictine Father Boniface Hicks.

Father Hicks has done similar kinds of guided meditations and prayers for healing. But,” he told the Register, “this is unique, composed for this occasion just in collaboration with the organizers of Eucharistic Congress.”

Ahead of the service, attendees will hear Sister Josephine Garrett of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth speak about our brokenness as people and as a Church, yet how Jesus is the Divine Physician who wants to heal and renew us.

Presenting all of our wounds to Jesus Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, Father Hicks will begin the prayer service, imploring Christ to bring healing and unity to us. 

“I see this as an opportunity for people to have a personal encounter with Christ in the Eucharist, especially in the areas of their own woundedness,” he told the Register.” The form will be “a litany that I composed for this purpose. The prayers with litany responses will help people to open their hearts to the healing power of Jesus and welcome him closer to them.”

What are some wounds that the faithful might be carrying? Father Hicks listed a few: “Feelings of being unloved, of being worthless; feeling rejected or having been abused.” From the particular prayers he will use, he added, “Doubting in the power of God’s love; struggling to trust; feeling alone, abandoned, misunderstood, forgotten; feeling let down by the Church; desperate, dejected.”

In terms of the section on repentance, among these petitions are “for times that I’ve used others; times that I’ve hardened my heart to persons in need; times that I’ve lied when someone needed me to tell the truth; times that I’ve closed my ears to the cries of the helpless; times that I’ve caused a scandal with my words or actions.”

Continuing to illustrate and share examples of what form the prayer session will take, Father Hicks said the litany has four sections, and four responses are part of each different sections. “The first response is: ‘Jesus, heal my heart with your love.’ The second response is: ‘Jesus, come close to me.’ The third response is: ‘Please forgive me, Jesus.’ And the fourth response is: ‘Jesus, help me to believe.’”

As the evening session runs from 7 to 10 p.m., the priest will also “come out with the Blessed Sacrament and will expose the Blessed Sacrament on the altar,” he said. “I’ll lead my part of it, this healing and repentance, and then I’ll have about a half an hour of carrying the Eucharist around the floor of the stadium.”

“We will see Jesus moving closer to people, especially on the floor of the stadium,” he explained. “I wanted to help people open their hearts to how they can invite Jesus not only physically closer, but also closer to those places where they carry insecurities and fears, tears and wounds from the past, as well as places where we have failed through our own sin. So there will be a dimension of repentance, asking for his forgiveness for areas that we have failed without our Catholic faith, recognizing that both the sins of others and our own sins are the places that caused our greatest woundedness.”

Father Hicks composed these prayers “knowing that all of us carry a lot of burdens. And this is a chance, especially in this context of being together, to welcome the right healing power into those burdened and wounded places of our hearts,” he said, adding, “And it’s also when we’re in a setting like this, we tend to become strong around each other. I’m hoping that some of the introduction that I’ll offer before I lead the prayers will help people to open their hearts, settle down a little bit, and welcome Jesus into some more vulnerable places within them. I think there’s a temptation to reduce these things to an intellectual exercise, and I think the design of the organizers, and certainly my desire, is to let it be a real personal encounter that reaches the heart.”

Because it is the Friday evening session, he again expects to see a full stadium with 40,000-50,000 people. “It’s a beautiful cross section, too,” he said. Sharing his experiences, he added, “I love the diversity, in the sense of different generations, different spiritualties, you might say, the wide variety of religious orders. I’m just walking past some Dominican sisters at the moment; a great number of priests and bishops.” After being at both the SEEK and the Encounter Conferences this year with thousands in attendance, he said, “This is like all of those crowds, plus even more of the Church at large. The diocesan groups and the United States Bishops’ Conference have just brought such a wide variety of people. It’s really such a great experience in the Church.”