As we look to and plan for the future of Xavier University – and our own personal future – let us hand over to God the feelings that are deep within each of us, participants in the ongoing creative activity of God.
Holy Creator,
give us patience to trust in Your slow and constant
creative power.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that new creation is made by passing through
some stages of instability?
and that it may take a very long time.
Help us to be patient
and understand Your ideas mature gradually within us.
Enable us to let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Help us not to force the future
as though we could be today
what time, grace, and circumstances
will make of us tomorrow.
Only You can say what this new spirit,
Gradually forming within us, will be.
We give to You, Loving Creator, our faith
and trust that the benefit of our believing
is a deeper realization
that Your hand is leading us
when we accept the anxiety of felling ourselves
in suspense and incomplete,
waiting for Your plan to unfold in its own time,
We trust in Your creative power,
Source of all that is and all that will ever be.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.