Prayer 7 from Therese of Lisieux
[Prayer to Jesus in the Tabernacle]
https://www.archives-carmel-lisieux.fr/english/carmel/index.php/pri-7#sigProGalleria408ca58c4e
[original manuscript lost]
Jesus +
July 16, 1895
O God hidden in the prison of the tabernacle! I come with joy to you each evening to thank you for the graces you have given me. I ask pardon for the faults I committed today, which has just slipped away like a dream....
O Jesus! how happy I would be if I had been faithful, but alas! often in the evening I am sad because I feel I could have corresponded better with your graces.... If I were more united to You, more charitable with my sisters, more humble and more mortified, 10 I would feel less sorrow when I talk with you in prayer. And yet, O my God, very far from becoming discouraged at the sight of my miseries, I come to you with confidence, recalling that "those who are well do not need a doctor but the sick do." I beg you, then, to 15 cure me and to pardon me. I will keep in mind, Lord, "that the soul to whom you have forgiven more should also love you more than the others"!... I offer you every beat of my heart as so many acts of love and reparation and I unite them to your infinite merits. I beg you, O my 20 Divine Bridegroom, to be the Restorer of my soul, to act in me despite my resistance; and lastly, I wish to have no other will but yours. Tomorrow, with the help of your grace, I will begin a new life in which each moment will be an act of love and denunciation.
Thus, after coming each evening to the foot of your Altar, I will finally reach the last evening of my life. Then will begin for me the unending day of eternity when I will place in your Divine Heart the struggles of 30 exile!
Amen.
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