Blessed are you, Lord our God, for the joy of journeying together as a people! This evening we want to graft our prayer onto the one that rises up to you from Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, where sisters and brothers in Christ have gathered from all over the world. On them, as on all of us, we call your Holy Spirit, Counsellor and Guide.
On the brothers of Taizé who are at the origin of this gathering, on the young people who have come to join them, on the members of the Synodal Assembly of the Catholic Church, on the leaders and delegates of the different Churches and Christian Communities, on the multitude of other people throughout the world who, like us, are in prayer this evening.
With all these people, we give you thanks, God, Source of all gifts, for the steps already taken along the synodal path since its opening in 2021.
Thanks be to you for the journey towards Christian Unity, a Unity that is already very real, experienced in so many places, and which allows us to hope that theological reflection will also follow.
Thanks be to you for helping us to discover that the other is a gift, that those whom we see as marginalised, in society and in the Church, truly help us to widen the space of the tent.
Thanks be to you for all those who create peace around them, for the witnesses who, in the midst of our wars or in the midst of an exodus, live and act as sons and daughters of God, inhabited by the Peace of the Risen Christ.
Thanks be to you for the gift of Creation and for those who commit body and soul to caring for our Common Home.
Receive as our evening offering, God our Father, our hearts filled with gratitude, our willingness to walk together and unite our voices in prayer, our hope that one day all your people will come together as one.
For we are all different faces of the same humanity that you love, always and forever.