Thomas Merton's Prayer

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

From Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude. © Abbey of Gethsemani.
•   •   •

The Romero Prayer*

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. 
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God's work. 
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said. 
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

* Although often attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero who was martyred in El Salvador, this prayer was actually composed by Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan, in a homily written for Cardinal John Dearden of Detroit commemorating the death of Archbishop Romero.

•   •   •

Carlo Carretto's Prayer for the Church

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you! 
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! 
I would like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. 
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is. 
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and yet I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. 
How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms. 
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, though not completely. And besides, where would I go? Would I establish another? I would not be able to establish it without the same faults, for they are the same faults I carry in me. And if I did establish another, it would be my Church, not the Church of Christ. I am old enough to know that I am no better than anyone else....
The Church has the power to make me holy but it is made up, from the first to the last, only of sinners. And what sinners! 
It has the omnipotent and invincible power to renew the Miracle of the Eucharist, but is made up of men who are stumbling in the dark, who fight every day against the temptation of losing their faith. 
It brings a message of pure transparency but it is incarnated in slime, such is the substance of the world. 
It speaks of the sweetness of its Master, of its non-violence, but there was a time in history when it sent out its armies to disembowel the infidels and torture the heretics. 
It proclaims the message of evangelical poverty, and yet it does nothing but look for money and alliances with the powerful. 
Those who dream of something different from this are wasting their time and have to rethink it all. And this proves that they do not understand humanity. Because this is humanity, made visible by the Church, with all its flaws and its invincible courage, with the Faith that Christ has given it and with the love that Christ showers on it. 
When I was young, I did not understand why Jesus chose Peter as his successor, the first Pope, even though he abandoned Him. Now I am no longer surprised and I understand that by founding his church on the tomb of a traitor....  He was warning each of us to remain humble, by making us aware of our fragility.... 
And that is where the mystery lies. This mixture of good and bad, of greatness and misery, of holiness and sin that makes up the church…this in reality am I....

Carlo Carretto (1910-1988) was a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a religious order inspired by the spirituality of Charles de Foucauld. Like Foucauld, he spent many spiritually formative years as a hermit in the Sahara desert.  HisLetters from the Desert, published in 1972, was the first of many popular books on spirituality.

Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Poem About the Slow Work of God

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
-- that is to say, grace --
and circumstances
-- acting on your own good will --
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser. Amen.

Henri Nouwen's Prayer for Hope

Dear God,I am full of wishes,
full of desires,
full of expectations.
Some of them may be realized, many may not,
but in the midst of all my satisfactions
and disappointments,
I hope in you.
I know that you will never leave me alone
and will fulfill your divine promises.
Even when it seems that things are not going my way,
I know that they are going your way
and that in the end your way is the
best way for me.
O Lord, strengthen my hope,
especially when my many wishes are not fulfilled.
Let me never forget that your name is Love.
Amen.

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[Last Update: 11.03.23]