LSM’s Monthly Prayer Guide
This resource is a guide for our movement members to use collectively or individually every month. Each month this prayer guide brings reflections and testimonies from different members of our global movement to inspire you to pray, contemplate, reflect, and act for creation. This month’s edition was prepared by Veronica Coraddu and Rosa Pandolfino from Italy, with the support of Suzana Moreira, from Brazil, and the strategic work by Guada García Corigliano from Argentina, design work by Marco Vargas from Ecuador, as well as work from others of the Communications team spread across the Americas and translators spread across the world.
If you prefer, you can download this resource in PDF format by clicking here.
How to use this prayer guide for an encounter
This year we are making some changes to this guide so it can better support you and your community. Here are a few tips for you to use this guide as the structure of an encounter:
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- Read the full guide to familiarize yourself with the content and plan how you will use it in the encounter.
- Hold the encounter through the three steps: Hear Creation’s Song, Creation’s Cry, and Creation’s Call, making sure to prioritize time for common prayer, contemplative silence, and personal and shared reflection.
- After the encounter, remember to thank the participants and start planning for the next one, as well as continue to pray throughout the month with the month’s intention and prayer.
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Hear Creation’s Song
Pope’s prayer intention for this month: For the cry of the Earth.
Let us pray that each of us listen with our hearts to the cry of the Earth and of the victims of environmental disasters and the climate crisis, making a personal commitment to care for the world we inhabit.
“Hope would have us recognize that there is always a way out, that we can always redirect our steps, that we can always do something to solve our problems.” (LS 61)
Oasis of contemplation, first stage of the Laudato sì path in Ecolandia Park
Prayer of the month: Season of Creation 2024 Prayer
Triune God, Creator of all,
We praise you for your goodness, visible in all the diversity that you have created, making us a cosmic family living in a common home. Through the Earth you created, we experience love and nourishment, home and protection.
We confess that we do not relate to the Earth as a Mothering gift from you, our Creator. Our selfishness, greed, neglect, and abuse have caused the climate crisis, loss of biodiversity, human suffering as well as the suffering of all our fellow creatures. We confess that we have failed to listen to the groans of the Earth, the groans of all creatures, and the groans of the Spirit of hope and justice that lives within us.
May your Creator Spirit help us in our weakness, so that we may know the redeeming power of Christ and the hope found in him. May the groans of the Spirit birth in us a willingness to serve you faithfully, so that we may hear and heal Creation, to hope and act together with her, so that the firstfruits of hope may blossom.
Loving and Creator God, we pray that you will make us sensitive to these groans and enable us to have the same compassion as that of Jesus, the redeeming Lord. Grant us a fresh vision of our relationship with Earth, and with one another, as creatures that are made in your image.
In the name of the one who came to proclaim the good news to all Creation, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
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Hear Creation’s Cry
Monthly reflection to deepen our eco-conversion
Trampling on dreams forbidden!
Rosa Pandolfino, Animator of Animators and LS Circle facilitator, Reggio Calabria, Italy
My name is Rosa Pandolfino and I have been an LS Animator since July 2020. I came to the LS Movement during a work experience at Ecolandia, the Technological Environmental Playground that covers 10 hectares in Arghillà, a northern suburb of Reggio Calabria. I was in charge of a Project, called precisely Laudato si’, a seven-stage experiential path addressed to schools in the rural areas and hill and mountain villages of the “Lands of Fata Morgana” with the intention of helping to build an integral ecological consciousness and new individual and collective lifestyles through the dissemination of good practices. In the period from July 2019 to June 2020, some 150 high school classes at all levels participated in the project with more than 2,400 students for a total of more than 3,000 people involved.
My call to Action was clearly felt during the LS Animators’ course, when Father Carlos Acácio Gonçalves Ferreira, Rector pro tempore of the Sanctuary of the Despoilment of Assisi, invited us to go beyond mere ecological actions. “To extract an impetus towards change from Laudato si’,” said Brother Carlos, “it is not enough to do something for Creation, but we must learn to listen, to contemplate, to stop, to be amazed and to marvel; and it is from this amazement that love and com-passion towards Creation are born; that is why our environmental actions are only a consequence of our ecological conversion.”
Motivated by this intention, in November 2020 I started the LS Reggio Calabria Circle at Ecolandia Park together with the parish priest of Arghillà and other volunteers, including a representative of the Social and Labor Pastoral of the diocese of Reggio-Bova. Talking about integral ecology in the neighborhood “of the invisible” was not at all simple. One acts on a community taking into account the environment in which it is located, working to propose ecosystemic approaches with the person at the center. But approaching a periphery to understand it means walking through it, breathing deeply, inhabiting it, as Professor Andrea Zampetti reminded us during a conference at the Joint Diploma in Integral Ecology promoted by the Pontifical Universities, or “entering into communion” with the people who live there, as the parish priest of Arghillà asked us to do. It is only by listening deeply, in fact, that one is able to see resources even where there do not seem to be any.
On Friday, May 24, 2024, after four preparatory events, the Local Meeting of the Network for the Care of Creation, animated by the LS Circle in collaboration with the Office for Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue, was held at the House of the Montfortian Missionaries of Reggio Calabria and attended by numerous civic groups, associations and representatives of the International Evangelical Christian Baptist Church and the Waldensian Church of Reggio Calabria. I make my own the wish of a volunteer of the LS Circle addressed to the subjects of the Network so that they may fully live the Season of Creation: “may you enjoy the persevering patience of the strong, committed to an arduous task; may you enjoy the joy of the objectives achieved with the contribution and commitment of the many people involved and conscious.” And, don’t forget…” TRAMPLING ON DREAMS IS FORBIDDEN!
First stage of the Laudato sì path in Ecolandia Park and one of the highlights of the Network gathering
Questions for reflection
- How does Rosa’s personal commitment to care for creation inspire your own commitment?
- What are your dreams for a future of hope for creation? Think about concrete steps you and your community can take to achieve your dreams.
- If you haven’t planned yet how you will be hoping and acting with creation during this Season of Creation, take a moment to find out about the global and local events that you can participate in. If you have already planned it, take a moment to share with others and invite them to join you.
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Hearing Creation’s Call
This month’s call to action: Participate in Season of Creation and FFNPT Day of Action 21 September
Join the Fossil Fuels Day of Action by organizing a concrete action with your community. Take guidance from the free resources available on the Season of Creation website. We suggest you look at the advocacy resources in particular.
Coming up: Feast of St. Francis
To conclude the Season of Creation together, join the prayer service for Feast of St. Francis, on October 4. It will be led by the Ecumenical Youth Committee.
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