NOVENA TO ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA - JULY 30, 2015 - NINTH DAY

OPENING PRAYER:         Lord, teach us to be generous. Teach us to love you and serve you as you deserve. To give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labour and not to look for reward, save that of knowing that we do your most holy will.

Tomorrow, we will celebrate the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits. For the last eight days, we have been praying that through his intercession we might obtain various graces to live more fully our own lives as individuals and as a community. Today, on the last day of the Novena, we make our own, the prayer of Fr. Pedro Arrupe, himself a former General of the Society of Jesus: 

“Lord, meditating on ‘our way of proceeding’, I have discovered that the ideal way of acting is your way of acting. Give me that sensus Christi that I may feel with your feelings, with the sentiments of your heart, which basically are love for your Father and love for all men and women. Teach me how to be compassionate to the suffering, the poor, the blind, the lame and lepers.  Teach us your way so that it becomes our way today, so that we may come closer to the great ideal of St. Ignatius; to be companions of Jesus, collaborators in the work of redemption.”

Through the intercession of St. Ignatius, we pray for the grace to make Jesus’ way of proceeding our way of proceeding, his way of acting our way of acting. Amen.

CLOSING PRAYER: Take Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will. You have given them to me, to you I return them. Give me only your love and your grace that is enough for me.