Loving others
God, through Your Spirit, please let me respond to others with Your sensitivity and compassion. Help me to listen, so that I hear both what is spoken and what it conceals of others’ needs. Help me to recognise others’ unique personality and value. I want to present to others the gift of themselves as You create and perceive them, so that they may come to see themselves in beautiful, humble trust, as cherished gifts of Your love.
I do not wish to curtail Your blessings to others through doubt, insensitivity or selfishness. Please grant others all the graces and support that You require for them. Despite my infidelities let me be Your love, blessing and response made sacramentally present to everyone in my life, whether I understand or not!
I cannot fathom Your vision of my life and theirs, but although my heart is sometimes bleak, I honour Your love and wisdom. Please mercifully complete what You have begun, granting us grace to submit, trustingly, contritely and joyfully to Your loving creative will. In all my prayers, contacts and dealings let Your Spirit speak and respond in me to You. Thank You, God who loves us all.
Appreciating others
Jesus, I bless others for their goodness. Yet, help me to share Your compassion, respect and delight in those who seem (to themselves or others)to reflect Your face poorly. Grant me the gift of conveying to each person, the beautiful, glimpsed vision of self, as You love him or her, a fallible human with entwined faults and virtues.
One sometimes glimpses another’s discouraged self-judgement, for he fears that Your plan of salvation builds upon some unlikely ‘ideal self’. He perhaps hopes that to others, only the good is evident. He fears that were others to sense the extent of his unworthiness, they may reject him—as indeed he fears You may.
Jesus, please extend Your hand to him through those who see his efforts and who have faith in the secret, unique miracle of him. Let him know that You love him as he is, and that You plan his holiness around his actual self. You fulfil Your dream of him and serve others through his flawed personality with its abilities, gifts and virtues, along with its faults and scars. Assure him that his efforts to live the Gospel are more precious because of his temptations and flaws, so that he is encouraged to faith and self-acceptance.
God let me see and share Your beautiful, unique, creative vision of each brother and sister, regardless of ‘apparent’ flaws. In my warm acceptance of him grant to each person that restoring, blossoming fruitfulness of love—which the image of him cherished and accepted as he really is—produces in the most barren and bleak heart. 1982
My brother, “Do not be afraid, you will not be put to shame.” [Isaiah 54:4]
