A Beautiful Prayer

Dear Jesus,
help me to spread your fragrance wherever I go.
Flood my soul with your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly
that my life may only be a radiance of yours.
Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with
may feel your presence in my soul.

Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
Stay with me and then I will begin to shine as you shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.

The light, O Jesus, will be all from you; none of it will be mine.
It will be you, shining on others through me.
Let me thus praise you in the way which you love best,
by shining on those around me.
Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by example,
by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do,
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears for you. Amen.

--John Henry Newman (1901-1990)

 

 

John Henry Newman began his career as an Anglican churchman and scholar and ended it as a Roman Catholic cardinal. Newman was a leader in the Oxford Movement -   a High Church effort to return to the foundations of the faith--the sacraments, episcopal governance, and apostolic succession--and to affirm the Anglican Church's status as the via media, the middle ground between Roman Catholicism's claims to authority and infallibility and the Dissenter’s emphasis upon spiritual liberty and private judgment.