COMMon PRAYER
IN THE YEAR OF MERCY
March 12, 2016
1. 1. Hymn (may be sung).
2. Opening Prayer
Presider: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
R.: Amen.
Presider: Our sinfulness and our need for divine mercy, makes us aware of how much we need God’s presence and the loving gaze of the Father who deeply loves each one of us. Let us now take a moment to examine our conscience.
3. Examination of Conscience
· Have I always believed in God’s love for me in every circumstance of life?
· Have I always followed God’s will in every situation, place and relationship?
· In what way have I acted against God’s will?
· Have I seen Jesus in every person I met?
· Is my love realized in concrete actions?
· Do I know how to forgive, to share and to help my neighbor?
· Have I done something that has broken communion in my family, community, with relatives and friends?
· Have I always done all that is possible to create communion with all?
· Have I lived every trial in life with love?
· Do I search to live the Word of God in every moment?
· Do I share these fruits with someone or do I keep it all for me?
· Do I love the Church? Do I offer make myself available to serve the Church?
· Do I work toward achieving unity and communion among all people?
· Have I searched to improve my life as a Christian layperson or religious?
· Have I made progressive steps forward in my life?
Presider: Lord, have mercy
All: Lord, have mercy.
Presider: Christ, have mercy
All: Christ, have mercy.
Presider: Lord, have mercy.
All: Lord, have mercy.
May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.
Amen.
4. Psalm 85 (antiphonally).
Ant.Give joy to your servant, Lord; to you I lift up my heart.
Psalm 85
Turn your ear, O Lord, and give answer
for I am poor and needy.
Preserve my life, for I am faithful:
save the servant who trusts in you.
You are my God, have mercy on me, Lord,
for I cry to you all the day long.
Give joy to your servant, O Lord,
for to you I lift up my soul.
O Lord, you are good and forgiving,
full of love to all who call.
Give heed, O Lord, to my prayer
and attend to the sound of my voice.
In the day of distress I will call
and surely you will reply.
Among the gods there is none like you, O Lord;
nor work to compare with yours.
All the nations shall come to adore you
and glorify your name, O Lord:
for you are great and do marvelous deeds,
you who alone are God.
Show me, Lord, your way
so that I may walk in your truth.
Guide my heart to fear your name.
I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart
and glorify your name for ever;
for your love to me has been great:
you have saved me from the depths of the grave.
The proud have risen against me;
ruthless men seek my life;
to you they pay no heed.
But you, God of mercy and compassion,
slow to anger, O Lord,
abounding in love and truth,
turn and take pity on me.
O give your strength to your servant
and save your handmaid’s son.
Show me the sign of your favor
that my foes may see to their shame
that you console me and give me your help.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.
Ant.Give joy to your servant, Lord; to you I lift up my heart.
5. In a prayerful way, each person is invited to repeat a word, or verse, that touched his or her heart during the recitation of the psalm.
6. A reading from St. Augustine
(three readers).
St. Augustine’s Sermon 29/A, 2
Reader 1. The Lord is good and merciful. So let us confess to the Lord since he is good, since his mercy is for ever. Let us say to the Lord our God, How wonderful are your works, in wisdom you have made them all (Ps 104:24). How just are your judgments, because of iniquity you have disciplined man (Ps 39:11). Before I was humbled, I did wrong (Ps 119:67). Let us say these things in confession, because if things happen to us contrary to the entreaties we make in this mortal life, he all the same brings good out of them, since he is good. And if we are corrected with pains and penalties, he will not be wroth to the end, nor be angry for ever (Ps 103:9), since his mercy is for ever. What could be as good as our God? People blaspheme, and not only are they not humbled.
Reader 2. they even grow proud of their misdeeds. And yet he makes his sun rise on the good and the bad, and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Mt 5:45). What could be as merciful as our God? People persist in their vices and villainies, and yet he never stops inviting them to turn back to him. What could be as good as our God, from whom even in affliction we receive so many consolations? What could be as merciful as our God, whose future sentence upon us we can even change by changing ourselves? Let us confess to the Lord since he is good, since his mercy is for ever. It isn't everything of which the praises can be called confessions, but only the praises of the Lord our God.
Reader 3. If it is true to say, How good is the God of Israel to the upright of heart (Ps 73:1), then it would seem to follow that he is regarded as bad by the crooked of heart. There is no one who wasn't first crooked before being made straight, and so as one both convicted and convinced he could begin to praise what he had previously found fault with, and to admire what he used previously to despise. In this way he confesses to the Lord, since he is good to him now that he is straight and upright, though he had seemed bad to him when he was crooked and bent. And because, while it was his own ill-will that bent him, it was God's grace that straightened him out, he should also confess to him, since his mercy is for ever. We are bad, he is good; we get our goodness from him, our badness from ourselves. He is good to us when we are good, he is good to us when we are bad. We are savage against ourselves, he is merciful toward us. He invites us to turn back to him; he waits for us until we turn back to him; he pardons us if we turn back to him; he gives us the winner's crown if we don't turn away from him.
Or you can choose a shorter reading
(one reader).
St. Augustine’s Sermon 87, 11
So don't put things off, don't shut in your own face a door that stands open. Look, the granter of pardon is opening a door for you; why do you hold back? You would presumably be delighted if ever you were knocking at it and he opened it; now you haven't knocked, and he opens it, and do you stay outside? So don't put things off. About the works of mercy it says somewhere in scripture:Do not say, Go away and come back, tomorrow I will give you something; since you can, do good immediately(Prv 3:28); because you do not know what may happen the following day. You've heard this commandment not to put off a kindness to someone else, and are you going to be cruel to yourself by putting things off? You mustn't put off giving a loaf of bread, and you happily put off receiving a pardon. If you don't put another person off in showing kindness, be kind to your own soul too by pleasing God.Give alms to your own soul also. I don't mean that you should give it yourself, only don't push away the hand that is offering it.
7. Moment of silence and reflection.
8. Song and Symbol
During the chant, "Misericordias Domini” three people can place incense in a thurible. This gesture represents our prayer, the sweet scent of good works and our consecration to the Lord.
9. Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for Lent 2016.
Reader 1. God’s mercy transforms human hearts; it enables us, through the experience of a faithful love, to become merciful in turn. In an ever new miracle, divine mercy shines forth in our lives, inspiring each of us to love our neighbour and to devote ourselves to what the Church’s tradition calls the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. These works remind us that faith finds expression in concrete everyday actions meant to help our neighbours in body and spirit: by feeding, visiting, comforting and instructing them. On such things will we be judged. For this reason, I expressed my hope that “the Christian people may reflect on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; this will be a way to reawaken our conscience, too often grown dull in the face of poverty, and to enter more deeply into the heart of the Gospel where the poor have a special experience of God’s mercy” (ibid., 15). For in the poor, the flesh of Christ “becomes visible in the flesh of the tortured, the crushed, the scourged, the malnourished, and the exiled… to be acknowledged, touched, and cared for by us” (ibid.). It is the unprecedented and scandalous mystery of the extension in time of the suffering of the Innocent Lamb, the burning bush of gratuitous love. Before this love, we can, like Moses, take off our sandals (cf. Ex 3:5), especially when the poor are our brothers or sisters in Christ who are suffering for their faith.
Reader 2. In the light of this love, which is strong as death (cf. Song 8:6), the real poor are revealed as those who refuse to see themselves as such. They consider themselves rich, but they are actually the poorest of the poor. This is because they are slaves to sin, which leads them to use wealth and power not for the service of God and others, but to stifle within their hearts the profound sense that they too are only poor beggars. The greater their power and wealth, the more this blindness and deception can grow. It can even reach the point of being blind to Lazarus begging at their doorstep (cf. Lk 16:20-21). Lazarus, the poor man, is a figure of Christ, who through the poor pleads for our conversion. As such, he represents the possibility of conversion which God offers us and which we may well fail to see. Such blindness is often accompanied by the proud illusion of our own omnipotence, which reflects in a sinister way the diabolical “you will be like God” (Gen 3:5) which is the root of all sin. Let us not waste this season of Lent, so favourable a time for conversion!
10. Silence: Let us examine our life and those challenges from the Gospel that we have received to change our attitudes or behaviors. Each one is invited to choose a concrete act of personal conversion in order to make one’s own life to be more in tune with the Gospel.
11. Our Father (may be sung).
Let us now turn to God, our Father, who is rich in Mercy: Our Father...
12. Prayer of Pope Francis for the Jubilee (recited together).
Lord Jesus Christ,
you have taught us to be merciful like the heavenly Father,
and have told us that whoever sees you sees Him.
Show us your face and we will be saved.
Your loving gaze freed Zacchaeus and Matthew from being enslaved by money;
the adulteress and Magdalene from seeking happiness only in created things;
made Peter weep after his betrayal,
and assured Paradise to the repentant thief.
Let us hear, as if addressed to each one of us, the words that you spoke to the Samaritan woman:
“If you knew the gift of God!”
You are the visible face of the invisible Father,
of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy:
let the Church be your visible face in the world, its Lord risen and glorified.
You willed that your ministers would also be clothed in weakness
in order that they may feel compassion for those in ignorance and error:
let everyone who approaches them feel sought after, loved, and forgiven by God.
Send your Spirit and consecrate every one of us with His anointing,
so that the Jubilee of Mercy may be a year of grace from the Lord,
and your Church, with renewed enthusiasm, may bring good news to the poor,
proclaim liberty to captives and the oppressed,
and restore sight to the blind.
We ask this of you, Lord Jesus, through the intercession of Mary, Mother of
Mercy; you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and
ever.
Amen.
13. Final Blessing and Dismissal.
The Lord be with you.
R. And with your spirit.
May almighty God bless you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
R. Amen.
Let us go in Peace.
R. Thanks be to God.
14. Hymn to the Blessed Mother.
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