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Caroline Thompson is Head of Heritage and Spirituality with Mercy International Association. She shares a reflection on Catherine's Prayer - The Suscipe:
A Suscipe is a short prayer popularised by Saint Ignatius of Loyola when it was incorporated into his Spiritual Exercises in the early sixteenth century. It has roots to earlier forms of monastic prayer and elements of the Catholic Mass.
Catherine McAuley’s Suscipe is one of the most revered and well-known of her prayers. It is a prayer that captures the essence of her spirituality – her complete and unwavering trust in God. It is also a prayer which gives us a glimpse of Catherine’s fears and the personal toll of the pressures of her life and work.
As Mary C Sullivan rsm suggests: Catherine never said or wrote that 1837 – with its five deaths, fatiguing travels, human separations, and several clerical controversies – was one of the hardest years of her life. But one may hazard a guess that it was. Was it then that she began, privately, to compose her Suscipe …? (The Path of Mercy, 2012 p216).
Mary Reynolds rsm writes of Catherine’s anxiety: Sometimes we may pray the Suscipe without pausing to reflect on the reality that Catherine was often anxious. In one of her letters to Frances Warde with whom she often shared very personal confidences, she confided: "I have suffered more than usual with my old pain of sorrow and anxiety. And she added a detail about how anxiety affected her: My stomach has been very ill." (2010. www.mercyworld.org/ spirituality).
The Suscipe
My God, I am yours for all eternity.
Teach me to cast my whole self
into the arms of your Providence
with the most lively, unlimited confidence in your compassionate, tender pity.
Grant, O most merciful Redeemer,
that whatever you ordain or permit may always be acceptable to me.
Take from my heart all painful anxiety;
suffer nothing to afflict me but sin,
nothing to delight me, but the hope of coming to the possession of You
my God, in your own everlasting kingdom.
Amen.
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This beautifully illustrated copy of the Suscipe can be seen at The House of Mercy where it is on display in the Chapel.
ENDS