15 Kingdom Comes

The boys are still in their winter break. School starts again next Monday. We've tried to go to daily mass as much as we could these days. "Blessed Sacrament " , a church in the University District in Seattle is the only church I know of that has daily mass in the afternoon, at 5:30pm. So what I've done these days is that I've started dinner preparations much earlier so that we can eat at around 4:30pm and then leave for church at 5pm. Today when we got there we saw the church empty (Tuesday is the one day of the week when there's no mass...oops) so I told the kids that we'll just go inside for a few minutes to pray and then we'll leave.

All of a sudden Benedict disappeared and I found him in the front of the church, on the right side, where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed praying on his knees. I stayed there a little with the kids and prayed and then when Alex started fussing and Cecilia started running around, I told the kids that we have to go. I gathered them all but Benedict wouldn't move and continued praying. I went to him and said "Let's go" and he whispered to me " I need to say two more Hail Mary's". After he finished praying he went closer to the tabernacle and prayed some more. I had to finally grab him and take him out of the church because we were starting to disturb the other people who were praying there.

When we got out of the church he explained to me that he said 15 Hail Mary's, 15 "King Kongs" (or "Kingdom Comes", which is what he calls the "Our Father's) and 15 "Angel of God" in the hope that Jesus would hear his prayers and come out of the tabernacle, so that he could see Him. I explained to him that even though Jesus is really present in the Blessed Sacrament we can not see Him.
We had a discussion about that a few days ago and he was very intrigued by the fact that Jesus is in that small golden box. "How can He fit in there? What happens if you open that box? Will Jesus come out?"
How do you explain to a 6 year old these things?

He is fascinated with the story of Blessed Imelda Lambertini, the young girl (patroness of first communicants) who had a vision of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. We have her story on tape (one of the "Glory Stories") and he wants to listen to it over and over again.

Just wanted to share...I thought it was a cute story.