Weekly Peace Prayer
for December 9, 2025
prepared by
Sister Carmel Little, CSJP
Constitutions:
Our daily communal prayer embraces a variety of forms
including reflection on Scripture,
the seasons of the church year,
the needs of the world.
Our prayer is a response in faith
to God’s action in us and
a vital expression of our lives together. #31
Reading: A Time of Expectation
We are waiting. During this time before Christmas, we pause in our managing of life and wait. Our waiting is not idleness and boredom but joyful expectation and excited anticipation of what is to come. This pre-Christmas time is creative in the deepest, most wonderful and profound sense. During Advent we are all like Mary! We are all pregnant with the Christ Child. And Christ, too, waits. Christ is waiting to be born within us, to have a deeper relationship with us, to be with us always.
Christ is Coming, Theresa Cotter
Prayer:
Jesus the Christ, you are our peace, the source of our power.
Strengthen us, as we unite with you in this Advent time,
to work for a world of peace and justice where all people
and all creation can live in love and compassion as on one family,
sustained by your generosity and faithfulness. Amen
Quiet Reflection
Reading:
Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise. Every year we roll up all our needs and yearnings and faithful expectation into one word: “Come!”
And yet, what a strange prayer this is! After all, You have already come and pitched Your tent among us. You have already shared our life with its little joys, its long days of tedious routine, its bitter end. Could we invite You to anything more than this with our “Come”? Could You approach any nearer to us than You did when You became the “Son of Man,” when You adopted our ordinary little ways so thoroughly that it’s almost hard for us to distinguish You from the rest of our fellow humans?
In spite of all this we still pray: “Come.” And this word issues as much from the depth of our hearts as it did long ago from the hearts of our ancestors, the kings and prophets who saw Your day still far off in the distance, and fervently blessed its coming. Is it true, then, that we only “celebrate” this season, or is it still really Advent?
Are You the eternal Advent? Are You the One who is always still to come, but never arrives in such a way as to fulfill our expectations? Are You the infinitely distant One, who can never be reached?
Are You only the distant horizon surrounding the world of our deeds and sufferings, the horizon which, no matter where we roam, is always just as far away? Are You only the eternal Today, containing within itself all time and all change, equally near to everything, and thus also equally distant?. .
Behold, You come. And Your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfillment. Now it is still the one single hour of Your Advent, at the end of which we too shall have found out that You have really come.
Karl Rahner, SJ (excerpt - adapted)
Quiet Reflection
Prayer:
You keep us waiting, You, the God of all time,
want us to wait for the right time in which to discover
who we are, where we must go, who will be with us,
and what we must do.
And in all this, you keep us;
through hard questions with no easy answers:
through failing where we hoped to succeed
and making an impact when we felt we were useless;
Through the patience and the dreams
and the love of others, you keep us.
Thank you for keeping time now and forever. Amen
The Iona Community Prayer
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