Holy Hour for Peace

We hope you can join us on Wednesday, February 4 at 7:30pm as we come together in prayerful community for a Holy Hour for Peace. We pray for courage in answering God’s call to partner with God in building a more justice and gentle world, and we pray for peace and healing within each of our hearts, our neighborhoods and communities, our nation and world.

“Honest prayer washes us clean of the illusion of self-sufficiency and so also of despair. It opens us again to the voice and the presence of the One who is beyond us, among us, within us. God refuses to give up on our broken and aching world and hearts, and also refuses to impose salvation without our consent, and so continues to labor. Christ weeps with us, even knowing, as the ultimate guarantor, that love and life will triumph. He commands us unequivocally to love- love one another, love our enemies, love the stranger until he and she are revealed as neighbors. “Love and more love,”- St. Raphaela’s conviction; God’s name and God’s way. Nothing can stop it.

This Sunday we will hear words of promise and of blessing in the beatitudes. Let us allow ourselves to be schooled again and again in this logic of mercy, justice, true humility, deep freedom and love. Let us fulfill our sacred duty to nurture hope in this Love, so much more contagious and persistent than hatred or despair. As we labor, pray, cry, bridge, accompany, advocate, rest and celebrate, let it be in faithful response to the God who loves us all to the end and who calls us to partner in the work of reparation, until all recognize and rejoice in the divine imprint in each and every other.”

- Catherine Kirwan-Avila, aci