Prayerful Concerns of Our Parish Community – 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

We post our Prayers of the Faithful each week from the weekend prior with the hope that you find them helpful in your own reflections and prayer life. This year, July 31, 2022 the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time is also the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), and the close of the Ignatian Year, which celebrated the 500th anniversary of the conversion of St. Ignatius.

God, you taught Ignatius that life and the whole universe is a gift from you, calling forth our wonder and gratefulness. We gather today in gratitude for the vision of Ignatius and for the community you call us to be in this parish and schools. We ask your blessing on us and on our brothers and sisters.

We pray for a deeper and more personal relationship with Christ, for a love for the church. Charge and enable us to be a community of welcome and forgiveness, a community that in word and deed seeks justice. We pray to the Lord.

We pray for the young. Protect them from violence and drugs that can steal their lives. Help us to recognize and take opportunities to walk with them and share with them the paths of hope in God’s kingdom that they might know God’s great dreams for them. We pray to the Lord.

For our elders, give comfort and hope to those who struggle with ill health or mourn friends and partners; give patience, love and strength for those caring for friends or family with physical or mental impairment, or those raising grandchildren; support for those elders who are suffering poverty and for a change in our nation’s policies, so that every older citizen has sufficient income to live in dignity; and, for our community, that we surround our elders with comfort and kindness. We pray to the Lord.

Awaken in each of us, God, a desire to know you more clearly and love you more dearly. May our parish and the Ignatian Partnership of Maine lead people to this deeper relationship with you. We pray to the Lord.

Sustain and deepen our efforts to walk alongside those who are excluded, poor or lonely, and in more ways than financial support. We pray to the Lord.

Call us to an active collaboration with others in protecting this fragile earth, our common home. In our lives as individuals, citizens, and as a parish inspire us to take action against the destruction of climate change. We pray to the Lord.

Welcome home to you our loved ones who have walked the path of this life. Grant them healing and joy. We especially entrust to you:
4:30 PM Robert S. Banks, Jr.
7:30 AM For The People of the Parish both Living & Deceased
9:30 AM Sally Green
5:00 PM For the People of Ukraine

We pray to the Lord.

Hear our prayers, Lord. Come to us, Lord of life, as you come to all your friends. Send us to console those around us who hurt. Come, and send us into this daily world to labor full of hope for the reign of God. Amen.