Christ to Bless ~ A Morning Prayer

The Blessing of Christ ~ Hans Hemling (1481)

Christ to bless my mind and the thoughts of this new day.

Christ to bless my heart and its rhythmic beating.

Christ to bless my heart again and all its feeling.

Christ to bless my eyes and all their viewing.

Christ to bless my ears and their sensitive listening.

Christ to bless my nose and each life-breath inhaled.

Christ to bless my hands and every thing they give or receive.

Christ to bless my mouth and every word spoken.

Christ to bless my feet and the path they walk.

Christ to bless the work I undertake.

Christ to bless the prayers I pray.

Christ to bless my setting out and my returning.

Christ to bless my advances and my setbacks.

Christ to bless these friends of mine.

Christ to bless my family in its complexity.

Christ to bless my discipleship.

Christ to bless those I've failed or offended.

Christ to bless the days remaining. 

Fr. Stephen Morris

Intercessions ~ Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

We pray for the people of Ukraine, who Pope Francis has called a "martyred people."/ May we not grow accustomed to this terrible,/ costly war/ as we live in our own distracted,/ fast-paced./ short-memoried culture./ We pray to the Lord.

Monday is the Feast of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist,/ who is called, the Friend of Jesus./ We pray for sufferers around the world,/ in particular praying for Christians who are arrested,/ tortured,/ exiled,/ punished,/ imprisoned/ and even murdered for being the contemporary friends of Jesus./ We pray to the Lord.

Some students have already returned to school and begun a new academic year./ We pray the blessings of safety,/ friendship and an honest pursuit of learning./ We pray for teachers,/ school administrators and staff./ We pray as well for the young people who have no school to go to, / for girls who are prevented from attending school,/ for the young people whose education is disrupted by war./ We pray to the Lord.

The plight of Catholic Christians in Nigeria and Nicaragua has intensified./ A bishop and priests have been arrested,/ religious sisters have been kidnapped./ We pray for them and Christians in many places who are living in dangerous,/ even life-threatening situations./ May we not take our religious freedoms for granted./ We pray to the Lord.

May we learn well the message of Thomas Merton who wrote:/ "We should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in the part of humanity that is most remote from our own."/ We pray to the Lord.

Again and again we pray for those places around the world where there is drought,/ fire,/ floods and other disasters./ For those who fight fires,/ who step into danger to save or assist others,/ who have lost everything./ For the healing of bodies,/ broken hearts and memories./ We pray to the Lord.

God's Grandeur

 

Someone reported that while leaving the state of Maine this week he could detect the first whiff of autumn in the air. Then I stumbled on this picture of a lightly frosted red leaf. Let us pray for autumn rain as the ground is dry, the rivers, aquifers and reservoirs need re-filling after this extraordinarily hot and dry summer. 

I have always had an appreciation for plants and animals. I planted seeds with my mother as a very young boy and had a vegetable garden carved out of a corner of the backyard. When I was a new priest I had a pretty big garden behind the parish school and escaped there mid-afternoon for an hour or so. One teacher said to me, "All the kids in this school know of you is that you're the gardener priest." She wasn't being kind. Licking my wound someone said to me, "Not bad, better being thought of as a gardener priest than the alcoholic priest or the high-living fancy car priest or the abuser priest."  Now I take care of a public garden by the train station and the low walled garden in an old church cemetery. 

George Harrison said, "Everyone should have themselves regularly overwhelmed by nature." Pope Benedict said at World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia in 2008  "It is as though one catches glimpses of the Genesis story — light and darkness, the sun and the moon, the waters, the earth, and living creatures, all of which are 'good' in God's eyes. Immersed in such beauty, who could not echo the words of the Psalmist, in praise of the Creator, 'How majestic is your name in all the earth.'"

So ready or not, autumn is coming — a uniquely lovely season. All the seasons say, "We can change" And we do need to change, don't we? Now they are selling child sized (real) guns. I could despair, but I saw Monarchs on the verbena and zinnias this week, and a goldfinch teasing seeds out of the coneflower, and the hundreds of bees and wasps continue to forage on the mountain mint. And a young mother brings her little boy to the garden every morning so he can kiss the cement "bunny" garden ornament. How dear is that?!

This is St. Paul's good advice, and his time was as crazy in it own right as ours:

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things."  Philippians 4:8