Praise be to you, Lord Jesus!
We know this shore well,
where we sit before our empty boats;
you pass by, you see, you take the initiative.
Would we ever have dared to cast our nets after so many nights of toil,
of fruitless searching?
If you had not instilled in us your confidence in us,
your confidence in a future wide open before us?
Lord our God,
by raising Jesus, your Son, from the dead, you have opened a breach at the very heart of our impossibilities;
you have inscribed within our very being a orientation toward the dawn, where the future might rise for each of us.
The unheard-of has come to pass; the unthinkable has entered history.
You make each of us witnesses, bearers of life.
Through a thousand human mediations, the Gospel circulates and unfolds.
Faith enters into dialogue with all the questions of our time;
faith leads us to revisit all our sources of hope;
faith tells us that life is stronger than death
and that love always has the last word.
“Yes, what we have seen and heard,
we proclaim to you”—
so that our joy may be complete.
Lord,
we rejoice in celebrating Teresa, our Mother.
She is a sure guide on the journey in your footsteps,
for she is filled with the Holy Spirit;
He makes her a contemporary of the Church throughout the ages.
Today she would no doubt speak to us of synodality.
She who sought to bring together within her Carmelite communities
the uniqueness of each sister’s spiritual quest,
and the grounding and inspiring foundation of a beautiful communal life.
She wanted each sister’s journey to be supported and renewed by that of the others.
Eternal God, our Father,
we bless you for Mary, who welcomed the light of your grace.
We bless you for her who kept nothing for herself;
thus she became a mother, a sister who leads the way
for all pilgrims of the faith.
May we, like her, pass on the sparks of life
to those who cross our path,
and may we together be a light for our world, sources of blessing.
We pray this through Jesus, who is with us, wherever we
Receive, Lord Jesus, our trust that you hear every prayer,
that you hear even the questions hidden in our silences…
May your Spirit open our hearts to your answers,
even – and especially – if they challenge us,
and receive our thanksgiving,
certain that you are the mediator of every prayer,
you, our Brother, the Son of the Living God.
Praise be to you, Jesus, so very human, who asks your friends, ‘Who am I to you?’
Praise be to you for recognising that you, too,
need a relationship with others to find your own identity.
We too come to you this evening, with a question on our lips, an endless question:
‘Who are you, Lord? Who are we to you?
We live by this question, by answers that are never final,
which renew our quest.
Praise be to you, Lord, for gathering us together once again this evening in this quest, in this listening,
and already in gratitude for your Encounter.
Lord our God,
praise be to you for your creative Spirit, present in our lives today.
This evening we wish to offer you the abundant fruits that the Spirit has brought to maturity within us and in so many others:
acts of kindness and trust; the peace regained after overcoming resentment; hope and its
contagious energy that has lifted us up…
And we also wish to offer you that which cries out within us and asks to be healed: the experience of humiliation
suffered by so many victims of violence, the suffering of those living with the trauma of broken relationships,
the imbalances in our ecosystems, the pollution of water, air and farmland…
May your breath of Love give us new life, a new dawn,
through Jesus the Risen One, the Firstborn of your new creation.
Thank you, Lord, for the gifts we receive freely – the very things that give life its depth and its flavour:
a smile, flowers in a myriad of colours and scents.
Thank you for love that is always ready to spring forth, for the joy of forgiveness, and for the possibility of reconciliation.
We pray to you: raise the rainbow of your Tenderness above our darkness, that it may bind us to You and
to one another in an unbreakable brotherhood. We ask this through Jesus, our Brother and Friend.
