‘A little taste of heaven:’ Eucharistic adoration ‘high point’ of SEEK event, attendees say

Salt Lake City, Utah, Jan 4, 2025 / 20:35 pm

Thousands of young people knelt, sat quietly, or lay prostrate during Eucharistic adoration Friday evening at the SEEK25 conference in Salt Lake City, transforming a spacious convention center ballroom into a solemn oasis of prayer that for many participants is a highlight of the otherwise buzzing multiday — and this year multisite — Catholic event.

“Just to be able to pray and praise with so many other people and have all of our eyes fixed on the Lord — it’s like, ’Lord, this is a little taste of heaven that we get to just enter into; thank you for that gift,’” regular SEEK attendee and religious sister Sister Tonia of the Heart of Jesus Borsellino of the Mercedarian Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament told CNA.

Two thousand miles away from the Salt Palace Convention Center, a similar scene of evening adoration unfolded in Washington, D.C., where an additional SEEK conference is taking place.

The two locations were united in listening to a pair of keynote speakers: Monsignor James Shea, president of the University of Mary in North Dakota, who spoke from Salt Lake City, and Sister Miriam James Heidland of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT), who was present in Washington. 

Sister Miriam helped attendees prepare for adoration by reflecting on what would happen. 

“He’s going to walk among us,” she said. “What is he going to do? He’s going to speak to you in a gaze, and intense love.”

In his keynote, Shea gave a poetic reflection on the gift of the paschal mystery. Shea said that God chose “humble condescension” that “forever changed the fortunes of the human race.” 

“He would take upon himself the whole destiny of the human race by joining himself to them and then doing what they themselves were unable to do, regaining their innocence, throwing off their oppressor, doing it for them as one of them,” Shea said. “He would take up human nature, corrupt and wounded, join it to himself and then offer it up in sacrifice.”

Organized by Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), SEEK brings together mostly college-age Catholics from across North America. This year’s registration hit a new record with 17,274 paid participants in Salt Lake City. The second site in Washington sold out with 3,355 registrants. SEEK also has a smaller conference in Cologne, Germany, this year with 486 registered attendees. The event, which is being livestreamed by EWTN, concludes Sunday.

Though SEEK annually features numerous notable speakers, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, who has gone to the conference about 10 times, told CNA that the time of Eucharistic adoration is “the high point of every SEEK conference.”

In Salt Lake City, addoration went until a little after 10 p.m.

The two locations of SEEK this year are also joined by a video portal where attendees can wave at others attending the conference — or even play rock, paper, scissors, as two attendees did.

On Saturday morning, participants ventured through Salt Lake City’s snowy sidewalks to attend Mass followed by breakout sessions. Speakers included Shea, who gave another talk titled “The Religion All Around Us,” and popular author and EWTN host Father Robert Spitzer, SJ, who spoke on “The New Scientific Evidence for Life After Death, an Intelligent Creator, and the Resurrection of Jesus.”

Saturday’s session in Salt Lake City was set to conclude with a keynote by theologian and speaker Edward Sri and licensed counselor and author Sister Josephine Garrett, a sister of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

After the talks, Christian singer-songwriter Forrest Frank was scheduled to perform.