PRAYER SERVICE FOR VOCATIONS

Feast of the Presentation of our Lord

In the Hands of the Father

MOTIVATION

The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, February 2, has been declared by the Church: World Day of Consecrated Life. In this way the Church invites us to pray and become aware for a moment, of our life, especially as concerns our life as consecrated persons.

There was a law for the ancient people of God which prescribed that the first son or daughter born to the family should be presented and offered to the Lord. It was the sign by which was shown that this new human being belonged to God, was property of the Lord. Today the Church invites all of us, men and women religious, to become aware of the fact that we belong to the Lord, that we are his, as all that is created. By our baptism we have begun to form a conscious part of humanity which belongs to him.

However, there is something more; we have wished to respond to his invitation of love in a special way by responding with the offering of the only thing we have and that not even belongs to us: our life itself. We acknowledge him who "has seduced" us as the Father of mercy who always comes to meet us, however far we travel as prodigal and lost people. In him we have put our trust and therefore it does not matter that we have little to give. In the Father we put all our weakness, because to him we belong, to him we want to belong.

Let us prepare ourselves interiorly to celebrate together this time of prayer.

Exposition and hymn

First period: REMEMBERING

Reader: Our life is full of times like this: prayers, all kinds of celebrations. We pray for peace. for a good outcome of our undertakings, for vocations. A few times, however, we pray for our own vocation, for the history and the present reality of our life itself.

"When you renew in your heart your religious profession, you remember that interior inspiration of the Spirit at the beginning of your path. You remember how that inspiration came, how it became stronger, how perhaps it returned once more after a short time, until finally you recognized in it the clear voice of God and the force of the spousal love of the Lord calling.

Remember it gratefully, with renewed heart, to announce the mighty works of God. This inspiration of the Spirit cannot be extinguished. It must be kept alive and ripen, together with the religious vocation, throughout all your life." (John Paul II)

Guidelines for reflection:

Psalm 30 (all together)
I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up,
and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.
Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment;
his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
As for me, I said in my prosperity,
" I shall never be moved."
By your favor, O Lord,
you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face; I was dismayed.
To you, O Lord, I cried,
and to the Lord I made supplication:
You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.
 

Second period: I KNOW THE ONE IN WHOM I HAVE PUT MY TRUST

Hymn

Reading: 1 Tim 1: 12-16

"I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is true and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life."

Meditation:

"In this last year of preparation for the Jubilee of the year 2000 we are invited to look at life and at history as a pilgrimage towards the Father; we do not live for death, but for life, and this final destination is tied up with Someone who comes to meet us and guarantees our future as a covenant pact with him. Where one opens up to the Other, who visits us and makes us go out of our fear and our egoisms in order to live for others and with them, there spring up pacts of peace, new encounters, dialogues otherwise believed impossible. Life is traveling towards a promised land that comes to meet us as the holy Mystery to which to entrust ourselves and by which to let us arrive and be saved. After all, it is a question of thinking of the Father according to the image presented of him by the parable of mercy: respecting the freedom of the younger son even to suffering from love and waiting; hoping for the return of that same son and happy at this longed-for and desired return, without ever yet having interfered with the decisions; and ready for pardon and the new life without recriminations or regrets. All of us are invited to imitate the attitude of the lost son, "I will get up and go to my father". Getting up, going, means beginning again to live in hope. "We are poor beggars, that is the truth": the phrase (attributed to Luther dying) is not only the honest confession of one's experienced limit, but also the declaration of a life project what seeks outside of oneself, in the Other, in the Father-Mother, in love, the sense of life and of history. Let us go together then towards the Father to listen to the Word in whom he himself has revealed himself to us."

(Carlo Maria Martini,
Return to the Father of all,
Pastoral letter 1998-1999, Milan)
"Jesus said, 'My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work' (Jn 4:34). With these words he reveals that the personal life project is written in a provident design of the Father. To discover it, one has to abandon a too earthly interpretation of life, and place in God the fundament and sense of one's own existence. Vocation is above all a gift of God: it is not to choose but to be chosen; it is a response to a love that precedes and accompanies. For him who makes himself docile to the will of the Lord, life becomes a received good, that by its nature tends to transform itself into offering and gift."
(John Paul II, Message for the 1999
World Day of Prayer for Vocations)
(During the meditation a short refrain might be sung)

Prayer (all together)

Father, who are in heaven,
also the earth is a heaven
and you are therefore on the earth.
You are in each of us,
and each of us is in you,
in abandonment, in grace, in help.
Awaken us,
O renovator of consciences,
inflame us with your fire,
consume us in your mercy.
Breathe in us, O God,
your deep breath,
expand yourself in us,
and break all bonds which in us obstruct
the manifestation of your freedom.
Kindle in us anew the flame of love in our hearts;
that flame that has blindfolded us to jump;
that flame thanks to which we have despised
the danger and have conquered it all.
Restore to us the hope
that one day goaded us to generosity.
May the immense peace of your Spirit
fill us in the joy of being those children
who have put all their needs
in the good hands of the Father.
(Giovanni Vannucci)

Third period: IN THE HANDS OF THE FATHER

Constitutions No. 35

"The life of oblation stirred up in our hearts by the freely-given love of the Lord conforms us to the oblation of Him, who, through love, is totally given to the Father and totally given to people.

This life leads us to search ever more faithfully with the poor and obedient Lord for the will of the Father for us and the world.

This life makes us attentive to the appeals He makes to us through small and great events, and in human expectations and achievements."

Reader: We have tried to retrace quickly the meaningful moments of our life. We only have tried to pause in order to contemplate that the mystery of our history has its beginning and its end in the mercy of the Father. Now in this third period of prayer we invite you to make of all that we have meditated upon an oblation that is agreeable to God.

(Different readers recite what follows,with a brief silence between one text and another. One can also accompany the texts with some plastic symbol which then is deposited on the altar. Or at every passage that is read one may add a little incense to the open thurible in front of the altar)

Reader 1: Let us offer all memories of our life and of our vocation as if they were incense to burn in front of the altar. All our remote past and that which is more recent. All our hopes frustrated by time, our disappointments and delusions. Let us offer all the small successes of our hands, the moments of trust and happiness. May all our life on the altar be the first-fruits of our oblation this evening. (brief silence)

Reader 2: Let us offer our future and our present. All the projects and illusions that fill our mind in these moments; the worries and problems that distress us; our plans, may they be in your hands of the Father offerings of sweet odor. (brief silence)

Reader 3: We have all come to realize our vocation in a community of brothers gathered by the spiritual intuition left us as a heritage by Father Dehon. Let us put all the Congregation in the hands of the Father. Let us put on the altar all our communities that are suffering persecution, violence, lack of material means; also those communities where there is a lack of communication, of authentic relationships; let us put on the altar the communities which are springing up and are our hope; but thus we are not forgetting to put on the altar all our communities which foresee death very near, which suffer from loneliness, from aging, all communities whose future is uncertain; let us put on the altar all religious in formation, our young men, the future and promise of our projects; let us put on the altar all the religious who are working hard for the Kingdom; also those who are performing the service of authority, without forgetting those who are working in the silence and in what is not seen.

May the offering of our whole Congregation rise up to you, Lord, as a victim agreeable to your eyes! You are the only one who knows what you wish with the Congregation. It is in your hands. Form it as you wish!

Hymn

Fourth period: YOU HAVE DONE MIGHTY DEEDS WITH US!

Reader: The other face of the oblation is its gratuitousness. The fact of feeling ourselves in the hands of the Father cannot but fill us with trust and gratitude. Let us give thanks to God for having looked upon us and overwhelmed our life with graces.

Magnificat (sung or recited)

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

Concluding prayer:

Father of mercy and God of consolation, you who have made yourself basic food of our lives with your Word and with the wonderful sacrament of your body and blood, grant that contemplating the wonders of your goodness and sharing in your Body, our hearts be ever more conformed to the Heart of your Son, so that we can be in the Spirit messengers of love and servants of reconciliation for the coming of your Kingdom.

We ask you this through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Blessing and concluding hymn