Prayer

• 1 December 2023 – For opening of COP28

  As COP 28 gets underway, bless you for reminding us, along with Pope Francis, that the suffering of mankind and the earth are inextricably linked.

  Blessed are you for reminding us that we all have a share of responsibility, however small our gestures of conversion and sobriety;

  Blessed are you for reminding us that our horizons touch and that what happens far away has origins and repercussions in what we have set in motion here;

  Blessed are you for reminding us that thousands of brothers and sisters must flee a land that has become uninhabitable and that we have a duty to welcome them because we are responsible for what has ruined their economic balance, their land and their cultural know-how;

  Blessed are you for reminding us that neither the earth, nor the oceans, nor the forests belong to us and are not commodities that can be bought and sold for the benefit of the rich.

• 30 November 2023

  The fire still rages today, often in the midst of general indifference. You have said how blessed we are to be persecuted, but we who have suffered so little for your name’s sake, dare we praise you for them?
  They are robbed of their possessions and accept the conditions of pariah citizens. For their destitution and for their faith, be praised Lord.
  They lose their jobs and suffer discrimination and injustice. For their perseverance and for their faith, praise the Lord.
  Their places of worship are burnt down and they are forced to go underground to gather. For their courage and faith, Lord, be praised.
  They share in the mystery of your Cross and draw their hope from the victory of Easter. For their joy and for their faith, be praised Lord.
  For these sisters and brothers who honour your Name and carry us in the half-heartedness of our faith, we dare to call you Father.

• 7 October 2023 – Green Church Day

  Blessed are you Lord God
  For the immense beauty of your creation, in which everything is interconnected,
  from the blade of grass to the constellations.
  You have entrusted our mother earth to us
  And we never stop plundering and polluting her.
  From melting glaciers to disappearing animal species,
  we endanger her very survival.
  Forgive us for being so irresponsible.
  Don’t let us give up in the face of the immense task ahead.
  Help us in our efforts
  and encourage us all to “do whatever little we can”.

  Blessed are you Lord God
  Who from Genesis calls out to us: “Where is your brother?
  Jesus revealed our fundamental brotherhood to us
  And today everything is linked:
  The clamour of the earth and that of the poorest,
  Victims of climatic disasters or of our fratricidal wars,
  Rejected migrants, starving populations, discriminated minorities.
  Forgive us for so many injustices.
  Do not let us give up in the face of the conversions we must make.
  Help us to banish all individualism.
  Restore to us a sense of wonder before all others,
  the will to work for social justice
  And a taste for the relationships that alone give meaning to our lives in our common home.

  Blessed are you Lord God
  From clay and breath you created us
  And our secular, materialistic societies forget that everything is linked within us, the body and the being,
  And that there’s no point in running after ever more consumerism,
  to individual success, to appearances alone,
  if inside we’re suffocating.
  Don’t let us give up when we have to go against the tide,
  Give space to the invisible, to sobriety, to hope, to prayer
  That make us breathe wider than our little egos,
  And open us up to a life-giving relationship with you and with others.

  Blessed are you Lord God
  For everything is interconnected, and to take care of ourselves
  is to accept our radical interdependence
  because no one lives for himself.
  We have received our health, our strength and our gifts
  so that they may bear fruit in harmonious relationships of sharing, service and selflessness.
  Don’t let us give up in the face of today’s disorders
  which give rise to despair, multiple addictions and a mortifying self-centredness.
  Convert us to the tenderness with which you envelop all your creatures,
  from the flowers of the field to the birds of the air,
  and how much more, each and every one of the most fragile of human children, whom your Love entrusts to us.

• 30 September 2023

  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.

• 19 July 2023

  God, our Father, we come to pray, we come to the source.

  Because our world has dried up and we are dying, caught as we are between the consumerism of some – of which we are sometimes one – and the crying poverty of others.

  Because our world feeds its senseless wars and starves entire populations.

  We have come to pray, to listen to your Word above all, to remind ourselves that a Source exists and that it can spring up and spring up again, that deserts can bloom again.

  That there is a Way – a sacred path – that is never defiled, and that deep down in each one of us, in every living being, this Way has already been traced, that it is already being made.

  If we are willing to let you open our eyes, open our ears deafened by well-being, free our voices from indifference.

  So that the song of hope sung by the young woman Mary for the poor of her people may still spring forth in us and through us.A song that the Spirit knows how to revive, from age to age, as soon as it finds a passage in some good will.