a beautiful prayer

The following was in the Magnificat on Wednesday. It is a prayer that resides in my heart (but it isn't quite so eloquent there!). My bishop's advice to me was correct: focus only on what God wants of you today. Last week, I decided to spend time every single day before the Blessed Sacrament (other than around Mass time). Many obstacles came my way to provide convenient excuses NOT to do it. When I figured out what was happening, I reminded myself that there are 24 hour adoration chapels everywhere I go: Blessed Sacrament Church, 2 blocks up from my work, St. John the Baptist, 5 minutes from my home, St. Columba, halfway between work (or anywhere else I go in St. Paul) and home, St. Charles Borromeo in Minneapolis when I'm over there for piano lessons. (If you live here, please know there are many more around, too...Epiphany in Coon Rapids, for one.) So, I said to myself, tell me again why you can't make it in for a mere 5 minutes (if you're THAT exhausted that you can't spend more time...) to thank God for all the blessings He has given you or ask what He has in mind for your work today? Truly, there was no excuse good enough. I started on Wednesday.

Anyway, here's the prayer. It's very beautiful.

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The Prayer of the Workers Hired Late
By Elisabeth Leseur (+1914), a French married laywoman whose cause for canonization is underway.

To love, to be unpretentious, to simplify my life--to go joyfully to God, seeking nothing for myself, in complete abandonment.

Never to lose sight of the intentions for which God wants me to pray, to suffer, and to act. In the midst of exterior activities and my obligations, to keep my inner attention fixed on God, to offer everything for those I love, for those Jesus desires, for the Church.

To be always ready to obey the inner call of this gentle Jesus to action or to suffering, or to eternity, too, when he wills, and to reply always with joy and generosity, "Here I am, Lord, ready to do your will." The day will come, will it not, O God, when it will be your will that I come to you, when the darkness and the sorrows shall vanish, and the burden of the body will no longer weigh on me, when my soul will fly at last, freely to your beauty, to plunge itself into your holiness, to drink in your love. When I have been delivered, I will love inexpressibly in you all those I will have rejoined, and those I will have left here below, when the true life will finally begin, to last forever. Blessed dawn of eternity, I greet you, not knowing whether from near or far! I must not hope for you because my only wish is to do God's will "in life or in death.' I know that I must first climb up to Calvary and hang upon the cross before knowing union with God; I know that I possess, and hope to possess still more here below, this union through the grace of God, in a great spirit of abandonment. I wait and, like the worker who does not know when he or she will receive the final reward, I want in the meantime to fulfill my responsibilities radiantly and peacefully solely for the love of him who has done everything for me.