A JESUS PRAYER

A Child, a Man and then a Spirit, come
In all Your loveliness. Unless You shine
Upon my life, it is a loss to You,
And what is loss to You is also mine.

I cannot calculate why I am here
Except for this: I know that I have come
to seek You here and find You. In Your life
You show the way to my eternal home.

A child, a man and then a spirit. So
I follow in the way You show to me
That I may come at last to be like You.
What but Your likeness would I want to be?

There is a silence where You speak to me
And give me words of love to say for You
To those You send to me . And I am blessed
Because in them I see You shining through.

There is no gratitude that I can give
For such a gift. The light around Your head
Must speak for me, for I am dumb beside
Your gentle hand with which my soul is led.

I take Your gift in holy hands, for You
Have blessed them with Your own. Come, brothers, see
How like to Christ am I, and I to you
Whom He has blessed and holds as one with me.

A perfect picture of what I can be
You show to me, that I might help renew
Your brothers' failing sight. As they look up
Let them not look on me, but only You.

For those of you who don't know the poem, let me also mention that the poem begins with the phrase: "A Child, a Man, and then a Spirit"—which refers to Jesus and his life. Two stanzas down, the same phrase appears, but now it refers to us—again with the hope that we would become like him. And the lines at the very end of the poem are based upon the prayer of Cardinal Newman, a famous 19th-century convert to Catholicism, in which he basically said what is echoed here. His prayer was that as people would look on him, they would not see him, but only Jesus. It is with that prayer that this poem ends. From Rules for Decision Part XIII Excerpts from Rule 7 & Conclusion