Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Everyday Prayers: Morning Offering, Part 1

There really is only one good way to start the day, and that is by offering it to God along with everything we are and everything we do, think, and say. A morning offering prayer helps us focus on God from the first moments of a new day, immerse ourselves in His love, and step out on the path of practicing His presence.

There are many different morning offering prayers, some formal and some spontaneous, but the following prayer is particularly good for covering all the bases of a morning offering:

O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer You my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world. I offer them for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart: the salvation of souls, reparation for sin, the union of all Christians. I offer them for the intentions of our Bishops and of all Apostles of Prayer, and in particular for those recommended by our Holy Father this month. Amen.

1. O Jesus – We direct our offering to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As both God and Man, He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity and yet so very close to us. He knows all our pleasures and difficulties, all our hopes and fears, all our virtues and vices. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and He longs for us to give ourselves entirely to Him. Our morning offering helps us do just that.

2. through the Immaculate Heart of Mary – Mary is both our Mother and our Mediatrix. She lovingly accepts all our prayers, strengthens them by adding prayers of her own, and presents them to her divine Son. Mary is especially good at this because of her Immaculate Heart. Mary's heart is totally pure, for she was conceived without original sin (i.e., with the divine presence already dwelling in her soul), and she never once committed any personal sin to weaken or destroy her relationship with God. As the Immaculate Mother of Jesus, she is closer to Him than any other human being, and she loves to meet Him constantly with our prayers in her hands.

3. I offer You my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day – Here we offer God everything we have and everything we are. We offer Him our prayers, directing them all to Him in love, whether they are spoken, thought, felt, or even performed (actions can, after all, be prayers, too). We offer Him our works, all that we do throughout the day, little things and big things, actions that are very important and actions that seem insignificant. They can all have spiritual meaning when we offer them to God. We offer Him our joys, those moments when wonderful things happen or when we are simply happy to be alive. We offer Him our sufferings, for these too have immense value even though they are painful and difficult to understand. When presented to God in loving trust, all of our words, actions, prayers, thoughts, emotions, and trials are raised to a higher level, a spiritual level, and can be effective in helping to spread and apply God's grace to ourselves and others through a process theologians call subjective redemption.

4. in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world – In humility, we are well aware of how small we are and how small all our actions and thoughts and words are in the great scheme of things. This is why we join our little offerings with the greatest offering, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Yes, the Mass truly is a sacrifice. It is a re-presentation of Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross. Jesus died once for all on the Cross to save us from our sins and open the gates of Heaven for us, but that sacrifice, having been accomplished by Someone divine as well as human, now stands outside of time. It can be and is made present for us on the altar at every single Mass throughout all time and in all places that we may share in that sacrifice, offer our sacrifices along with it, and have its great redemptive graces applied to our lives.

We will continue our reflections on this morning offering prayer in the next post, but in the meantime, let's get in the habit of presenting ourselves and our whole day to God every morning with this prayer or something similar. Again, let us pray:

O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer You my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world. I offer them for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart: the salvation of souls, reparation for sin, the union of all Christians. I offer them for the intentions of our Bishops and of all Apostles of Prayer, and in particular for those recommended by our Holy Father this month. Amen.

No comments:

Post a Comment