Coming Home to the Eucharist
For Brian Wilson of Lewiston, nothing compares to spending time before the Lord present in the Blessed Sacrament.
“It’s just that feeling of being bathed in the rays of love and of our souls being filled with the light of His presence,” he says. “It’s not just a good feeling that I am here. It’s actually His presence coming into my heart.”
Brian has been an adorer at the Rivier Chapel in Lewiston since 2016. He says the time he has spent before Christ in the Blessed Sacrament has changed his life.
“I found the truth that is Jesus Christ, and I found that narrow gate that only He can bring us to. To get to heaven and to know His father in heaven, you have to come through Him. And there He is in that narrow gate on the altar in the monstrance,” Brian says. “He has shown me the way.”
Brian says that from eucharistic adoration, a desire to serve the Church began to grow within him, leading to his becoming a sacristan and an altar server, which have both given him an even greater opportunity to be close to the Lord.
“I’m now a sacristan. I’m an adult altar server. So, basically, I’m a big child, but you’re supposed to come to Jesus with a childlike faith. Every time I put on the cassock and surplice, I’m back to my childhood in my faith and wanting to come before Jesus. In serving Jesus, especially at the altar, I’m setting the table for Jesus, and I am as close as a layperson can be to the Eucharist and the consecration. I also get to ring the bells at the elevation, and all that stems from adoration. The eucharistic life is within me every day,” he says.
While Brian now can’t imagine his life without the Eucharist in it, there was a period in life when he questioned the faith of his childhood. He says the reports of sexual abuse by clergy that surfaced in the early 2000s left him and his family shaken and him confused, wondering how it could have happened.
“There was a lot of family angst and division over that and what to do,” he says. “It shook my faith.”
His family stopped going to Mass and began attending services at a Baptist church. Still wanting to share Christ’s word, and as a parent of four young children, he started teaching Sunday School, which led him to read the Bible more and to a search for knowledge and understanding.
“Jesus was in my heart the whole time, but my journey was discovering the difference between the Catholic faith and the Protestant one,” he says.
His journey included tuning in to The Journey Home, hosted by Marcus Grodi on EWTN; listening to Father Larry Richards on the radio; watching episodes of Life Is Worth Living, Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s TV series from the 1950s; and signing up for feeds from The Catholic Company, which included the daily Mass readings and a saint of the day.
“I started reading and trying to understand because I didn’t know my Catholic faith well enough to understand what was going on in the Church,” he says.
Never completely letting go of Catholicism, in 2015, he began attending daily Mass by himself, while continuing to go to Protestant services with his family. He also received an invitation from The Catholic Company to participate in St. Louis de Montfort’s consecration to Jesus through Mary. Brian says he had no idea what it was but thinking it would be a good way to pray, he decided to do it.
“I was praying it every day,” he says. “It came to my inbox every day for 33 days, actually a little longer than 33 days, and at the end of it, it said go to confession. Do not delay. And I said, ‘What?’ But I listened. So, Mary brought me back to the faith. It was really Mary and the Eucharist.”
He says what he learned through his journey was that what was missing from the Baptist church he was attending and from his life was the Eucharist.
“They have a communion service, but it’s not the sacrifice. It’s just a remembrance. It is remembering the Last Supper, but it’s not Jesus. It’s not the sacrifice of the Mass,” he says. “I don’t think I fully understood that until I started reading and finding that out from all the different resources that are out there, looking at Protestant resources and books and looking at Catholic resources.”
He says he heard about eucharistic adoration by listening to Father Larry Richards, and then was introduced to it in Prince of Peace Parish by Margaret Marcotte and Connie Cabatingan, who were then leading the adoration program. Facing a lot of difficulties in his home life at the time, he says he felt drawn to it.
“I came to eucharistic adoration because I was broken,” he says. “I was drawn to adoration and the Eucharist and just being able to go there and open up my heart and my soul and just lay it all out before Jesus. Sometimes that was tearful, sometimes it was in silence, and sometimes it was in prayer, in prayer for my kids and my family.”
He says he felt touched by God’s mercy.
“I was consoled by Jesus. In that heartbreak, I was healed, and my soul was restored. I found comfort and His love and mercy,” Brian says. “I was just pouring out my heart, and He filled my empty heart with His love.”
Brian says through adoration, his belief in the Eucharist was cemented.
“It was being bathed in His presence that got rid of the confusion, and it was through Mary and through reading the spiritual journeys of others and books on the Eucharist that I came to realize what it really is,” he says. “As I left the faith, I was quite confused, but I came to realize that without the Catholic Church, there is no priesthood. There is no Mass. There is no Eucharist.”
As sacristan, he was given keys to the basilica, which he describes as being like getting the keys to heaven. He says he often arrives early or stays after daily Mass to spend time in prayer and reflection before the tabernacle.
“Jesus is in there. I see the light is lit, and oftentimes, I get to relight that. It’s a eucharistic life that I’ve learned to live every single day,” he says. “Sometimes, I stay for hours. If I’m there for many hours, I’ll bring my book and I’ll bring my prayers, but I always have my silent time as well.”
As Brian’s love for the Eucharist intensified, so did his parish involvement.
“I plunged in and kept running. I kept saying yes,” he says.
He attended “Lord, Teach Me to Pray,” a three-part prayer series rooted in Ignatian Spirituality, which resulted in him facilitating a program for men at the parish.
“It’s imaginative prayer, just imagining when you are reading the Gospels that you are there with Jesus. Which person are you? Are you Mary? Are you John?” he explains. “I often put myself at the foot of the cross. What a great way to pray and to enter into prayer with our whole being.”
Brian also began going to spiritual direction with Father Daniel Greenleaf, pastor of Prince of Peace, to discern where the Lord might be calling him. While family remained an important part of his life, his marriage ended in divorce and annulment, leaving the possibility of a religious vocation open to him. He says during a Thursday night Holy Hour for vocations, which he leads, he found himself not only praying for priestly vocations but for his own.
“Am I staying single? Am I looking to be married? Is the diaconate an option? Is priesthood an option, because technically it was,” says Brian.
Brian, however, would meet and later marry someone who shared his passion for the Lord and the Eucharist, Ethna Farrell.
Like Brian, Ethna had been away from the church for a number of years. Raised Catholic in Ireland, she says, although she went to Mass, it was not an integral part of her life.
“I always had Jesus in my heart. He was always, always with me, but I just treated Him like a neighbor whom I would wave to every now and again,” she says.
Ethna says, at the time, she didn’t understand the Mass, so didn’t get a lot out of it. She says she tried everything from yoga to Transcendental Meditation in search of peace.
“I was on my own searching journey and ultimately found my way back to our own Catholic faith. Your treasure is in your own backyard, as they say,” she says. “What brought me back was a 54-day novena that a friend of mine in New York introduced me to. That was the beginning of it all, and then the consecration to St. Joseph, and my own yearning to come back to the Church.”
After moving to Lewiston about three and a half years ago, Ethna began attending daily Mass, responding to a Lenten invitation from Father Greenleaf.
“I was going to Mass every Sunday, but I wanted more. It wasn’t enough for me,” she says.
She saw a request in the parish bulletin seeking guardians for eucharistic adoration and decided to respond to it, even though she didn’t really know what it was. She met Doris Belanger who explained it to her and who accompanied her to the chapel where they spent an hour in adoration together. Ethna says she instantly felt changed by the experience.
“When I went to adoration for the first time and kneeled down, I could feel my nervous system, my whole nervous system from the top of my head to the tip of my toes just relax. I don’t know how it happened, but I just had that feeling of complete relaxation. My body stopped being nervous and anxious,” she says. “I would go every Friday and have my date with Jesus. It’s just peace. I felt like I had Jesus to myself.”
While she enjoyed her date with Jesus, she was experiencing feelings of loneliness in her life and prayed that she would meet a holy, Catholic man with whom she could have a relationship. She says Brian was the answer to that prayer.
“He is such a good man. Everybody loved him. There was never anything bad said about him,” she says.
Ethna and Brian first met when he was participating in a 40 Days for Life prayer vigil. She could see the vigil from the window in her office and went out to thank the participants.
“She came and thanked me for being on the sidewalk and being out there, and of course, nobody ever thanks you. Normally, it’s quite the opposite,” says Brian.
At the time, she didn’t realize that he was a member of Prince of Peace Parish, but then she started seeing him serving at the altar.
“I was always curious about him. ‘Why are you up there? Isn’t that for teenage boys?’” she says.
Some of the daily Mass goers frequently go to breakfast together on Saturday mornings, but one week, nobody was available except for Brian and Ethna. Attracted to him, Ethna gave the other sacristan her phone number to give to Brian. After praying about it, he decided to call, and the two ended up not only going to breakfast but spending the entire day together, sitting and talking.
“We started in the morning, and he didn’t leave until eight o’clock that night,” says Ethna. “We were enjoying each other’s company so much, and it was just so easy to talk with him.”
Afterwards, Ethna waited to hear from Brian, but that call didn’t immediately come. He was still discerning whether the priesthood might be an option. Brian says it was Father Greenleaf who helped him find his way.
“He said that it is not a decision of right or wrong or good or bad when you are discerning your vocation,” says Brian. “He said God is opening up graces no matter what you choose. Use your gifts for the life in which God thinks you will best flourish.”
The two began a relationship and got married on New Year’s Eve 2022, beginning a new life together with Jesus at the heart of it. During their marriage vows, they both kissed a crucifix, which now hangs on a wall in their home.
“It’s a reminder of our vows and of what love really is. Love is sacrifice,” says Brian. “Jesus’ sacrifice is the image of love.”
“We wanted everyone to know that Jesus is in our life, that this marriage is as much His as it is ours,” says Ethna. “We pray together. It’s really the center of our marriage.”
“We do night prayer together. And we have my favorite picture of Jesus in the master bedroom. It’s the Sacred Heart image with the Eucharist,” says Brian. “We have a red candle before it, so from our bed, we look straight ahead, and we can see Him.”
The two remain active at Prince of Peace Parish, now doing many things together.
“We participate in the life of the church, the rhythm of the seasons of the Church, the liturgical seasons,” says Brian.
“I am so a part of this community now, “ says Ethna. “Just like Jesus talks about, it is about community.”
In addition to being a sacristan and an altar server, Brian trains new servers, is a Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) coordinator ,and is a member of the Knights of Columbus. He is also pursuing a master’s degree in pastoral theology at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, for which he recently received a Lay Continuing Education and Formation Grant from the Diocese of Portland.
Ethna is a reader at Mass, joined the Full of Grace women’s group, and is a member of the Seven Sisters Apostolate. Every day, one of the women in the group prays for a priest of the parish so that prayers are offered for him on each day of the week.
In addition, Brian, who is a grandfather, helped to establish the Catholic Grandparents Association ministry at the parish, which Ethna helps to lead. The group meets the first Tuesday of every month.
The two also continue to embrace eucharistic adoration, which Brian sees as the most powerful thing we can do on this earth.
“Nothing can do more to change the world, to bring about peace, to convert hearts, to make reparation for the many evils committed,” he says. “It’s to come to be in the presence of God and to build your relationship and allow your heart to be bathed in His presence. Whether in good times or in bad times, He’ll take you as you are, and out of that comes joy.”
