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Prayer for the week

by
13 September 2013

Angela Ashwin prays for self-abandonment permeated by love

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Father,
I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all; I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures.
I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands I commend my soul.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands
without reserve and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.

Bl. Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916)

 

THIS seems like an impossible prayer. How can we say this to God without quailing at the implications of such total self-giving? Even Jesus struggled with his "Your will be done" in Gethsemane.

But that is the whole point. When Bl. Charles de Foucauld (right) wrote these stanzas, he was reflecting on Jesus's utter self-abandonment to God during his Passion, imagining what Jesus's final prayer might have been, and longing for all Christians to be able to say it, too.

For us, this extraordinary outpouring of love and trust needs to be grown into, as we seek God's grace to work in us when we ourselves have little to offer. We shall never arrive at the point of perfect surrender to God, but we can still use these words as an aspiration; I know of several people for whom this "Prayer of Abandon" has been a lifeline, especially when faith was tough for them.

De Foucauld was a successful officer in the French cavalry, before rejecting wealth and prestige to join a Trappist monastery in 1890. After some years in Nazareth, he felt called to be a hermit in Algeria, living among Tuareg Muslims at Tamanrasset in the Sahara.

Inspired by the early "hidden" life of Jesus, he sought to identify himself with the humblest of working people. He saw everyone as a child of God, and was as passionate in his desire to serve others as he was in his contemplative love of God.

If we persevere with these words about being "ready for all", we may find within ourselves new levels of trust, going deeper than the surface events and calamities that can seem so destructive. The sense of childlike confidence in God offers us a way of hanging on to the bigger picture, in which we are held eternally in the divine love, through and beyond the pain and insecurity of this life.

De Foucauld's determined thankfulness and acceptance of whatever happens could be difficult for us to swallow. But this is no spineless submission to the whims of a capricious deity. The prayer is permeated by love, which is the essential nature of God, and which makes such depths of trust possible, even in our own complicated lives.

Perhaps the best way to pray these words is to acknowledge our own lack of faith, and simply to let the prayer do its work in us, as our very ordinary devotions are taken up into the prayer of Christ himself.

De Foucauld was killed by a Tuareg robber in 1916, in a pointless act that could have made his life seem a failure. But subsequent events vindicated his "boundless confidence" in God. He had long hoped that others would join him in his austere life of prayer and participation in the work of local people, but he died alone. Some years later, however, Fr René Voillaume and others developed his vision into the communities of "Little Brothers and Sisters", which exist to this day.

Life under religious vows is not, of course, the only context in which we can place our lives in God's hands. De Foucauld constantly stressed the importance of loving God within ordinary, everyday situations, and we need never feel that our own circumstances are so mundane or messy that we cannot make a start in praying his prayer.

Angela Ashwin lives in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Her books include Faith in the Fool: Risk and delight in the Christian adventure (DLT, 2009).

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