Our latest message May 2019
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Dear Friends, During a recent Sermon at St Paul’s Church I mentioned the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, a beautiful, short prayer, that may be learned and said as easily as the Jesus Prayer and Hail Mary. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he gave them what has become perhaps the most well known and often recited prayer in the world, the Our Father, or Lord’s Prayer. Prayer isn’t always easy, especially when life gets tough. If Christians can learn a few prayers then we will all have a resource to draw on when in greatest need - and the simpler the prayer the easier it is to say. Learning prayers is as important as learning other basic skills, like our times-tables at school, because we never know when we will need them. The Chaplet of Divine Mercy can be recited in a variety of ways - it is often said using the Rosary to help keep count, but it need not be. There are three basic sentences that can be prayed together to form a whole, or just learn one of them and use that: I tend to use the middle one: 1) Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. The Jesus Prayer is:"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This is much shorter and also much older, having first been used, we think, by 4th century hermits in the Egyptian desert. It is centred on the individual doing the praying, whereas the Divine Mercy Chaplet, coming out of 1930’s Poland, carries a concern for humanity as a whole. There may be other prayers we could recommend to one another. Whichever we learn, if through repetition they become a part of us, we will always feel close to God and will have something to say when we most need it. Fr Stephen Some Dates for your diaries
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