“Every time I extend my arms in prayer to God, I feel that at the same time I am holding the entire world in my embrace.” – a solitary hermit in Chile

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“He’s got the whole world in His Hands…”

I wanted to share the following comment with you from Contemplatives and the World, Part I, sent from Sr. Irina:  “I remembered our novitiate classroom in the Mother House. We have a big World map on a wall too! Thank you, sister, for this reminding and beautiful thoughts about nun’s embrace.  P.S. Find Kazachstan on your map and pray for us too.”

Needless to say, we were thrilled to be united in prayer with this Sister all the way across the globe in Kazachstan – so far away and yet united in the Heart of Jesus!  And, for the record, we did indeed find Kazachstan on our map, marked it with a pin, and will pray for Sister and her Community.  Leave a comment on this blog if you’d like us to “Mark the Map” with your location.  We hope that our Novitiate map will be ‘pinned’ with prayer intentions from every state and every country!

“In one of his stories, Robert Hugh Benson tells of a ‘visionary’ coming upon a lonely chapel where a nun is praying.  He enters.  All at once he sees the whole world bound up and moving and organizing itself around that out-of-the-way spot, in tune with the intensity and inflection of the desires of that puny, praying figure.  The convent chapel had become the axis about which the earth revolved. The contemplative sensitized and animated all things because she believed . . .” (as quoted in Teach Us to Pray)

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“They pray for the world, and in that way provide the most telling proof of their friendship.” – St. John Chrysostom