For love of Jesus
…Jesus, like Your dear friend Peter, I can betray You and Your love, yet amid my flaws and selfishness, the yearning tenderness of my heart pleads before the Father for You.
I pray for Your courage in the torment of Gethsemane and its terrible aftermath. I pray for divine and human support in Your burdened, bruised weakness on Calvary’s path, and for alleviation of Your anguish in those last terrible hours.
Contemplating Your lonely suffering for people still proud, stubborn insensitive, and worldly, I pray for our reciprocal generosity of faith, endurance, and love. I pray for our gratitude towards Your gifts of reconciliation and healing. I ask for our appreciation and communion in the highest gift of Creation, that only acceptable offering, of You in Eucharistic sacrifice.
I desire to deliver myself unreservedly in offering with You, as I listen to Your heart within my heart—knowing that though King of kings, you lived and died for me, to make me child of your own Father. Awed at such unfathomable love I pray on concerning Your earthly life…
For Your secret depths of pain, I gaze into Your eyes. Although we both know that I cannot comprehend the grief of redeeming-God-made-man, there is healing in the sincere caring of one who loves You.
For Your heartache and tears, I gently touch Your cheek, which at the end is horribly disfigured and bruised—and contritely offer my own repentance and sorrow.
For each convulsion of agony, I tenderly hold You near—and reach for my own cross.
For times You need to be restored, against my heart I cradle Your head, which had no pillow of rest upon, earth—only the thorned piercing of humankind’s unholy thoughts (and my own). Therefore, I pray to serve Your will wholeheartedly and faithfully.
For Your times of discouragement, rejection and loneliness, I put my arms around You—and invite You to claim my being to remould in holy unity with Yourself.
For the lashes of our sinful acts, I ask of the Father, healing oil in my prayer, penance, obedience and charity. Above all, I offer the ointment of my frail love for You, to salve Your wounds.
For times that Your message is ignored or misunderstood, I kiss You softly, and listen as carefully as my sinfulness and limited comprehension allows.
For the harsh and false, blasphemous and reviling thoughts, words and acts directed against You in life and for all time—I speak love and praise, and to others proclaim Your gospel by word and deed.
Compassionately, I behold Your human limitations, along with Your natural human sorrow before the restrictions imposed upon Your action in others’ souls by their free will. I behold the painful helplessness of Your Mother during Your public life and in the seeming disgrace and failure of Your death. For these, I lovingly pray that the kingdom of God will reign with love and power and glory in each person.
Knowing that Your suffering continues in all who take up their cross to follow You, I pray imploringly for each as I do for You. I pray for each suffering soul, for every Christian, for every believer of all faiths, for my loved ones and those whom I ought to love. I pray for Your priests, through whom Your Eucharistic offering is renewed in all ages. I pray for overflowing grace for Your continuing ministry in apostles consecrated into priesthood with You.
In Your plan of salvation, You permit our sharing in the suffering that You bore for our sins…in order to awaken repentance…in reparation for anyone’s offences…or to sanctify through affliction. Yet I entreat that sufferers may not endure an instant longer or of a degree more intense than needed. Where mine or another’s prayer and love can attain what is required, by calling upon the vast treasury of saints and martyrs, the intercession of angels, and Your own infinite merit—then Jesus I implore You to allow this.
You promise that no one will be burdened beyond endurance. Yet what extreme of sorrow can be endured beneath this limit! Pain is always relevant and a tormented moment may seem an eternity, as You the supreme sufferer know so well! Therefore, except where Your purpose is endangered, spare us the cup of suffering and allow mine and others’ salvation be wrought through divine grace, in prayer, in humble trust and generous love rather through anguish.
Yet, not as we desire, but Your divine will be accomplished! If this is to be fulfilled through suffering—for how can we in our sinfulness hope to escape what You in Your innocence do not—then please grant us perseverance in our privileged sharing in Your sacrifice. United with You let us trustingly give all, so that sanctified in You, our lives serve the highest purpose of divine will. Lead us, with peace and spiritual joy, to penetrate the mysteries of this redemptive suffering shared in You, our God and brother!
Jesus, as I pray thus, You look down into me—a sinful but hopeful scrap of humanity—with deep enigmatic love. Through the wall of my faults and negligence, You surely see the tiny spurting of love and compassion—for Your dear Self, for all those who struggle to live in You, and for all souls. You see my repentance for my faults, the fragility of my love, and the frailty of my faith. You see my lack of constancy, of self-denial and prayerfulness—as I cling to Your breast with childlike hope and tenderness, pleading for love to equal Yours. If You comply, then my suffering may be proportionately deep as Yours. I shall not refuse, for Your bleeding heart beats to my awareness with blazing love for a world starved of Your life. In this heart and in Your arms, I seek all mercy, grace and strength!
It is probably only for me. I am sorry when I do intrude too much with my thoughts. Often I think I do.