Peter Costello
Occasional Prayers for the School Year by Gráinne Delaney Messenger Publications, €12.95/£11.95
This is an interesting book, and one which parents as well as school chaplains will want to read. Gráine Delaney is Chaplain in Crescent College Comprehensive SJ for the last twenty years. A native of Dundalk she was educated in St Vincent’s Secondary School and later at Mater Dei Institute of Education.
Activities
Long ago, in her activities with students and community, she realised that while formal school prayers could be readily approached, there were increasingly those special occasions which needed something immediately relevant. What do you say to guide and assuage the fears of young people when one of their contemporaries takes their own life, a terrible disaster, a shooting, bombing accident involving mass casualties, one has only to open the news online or in print to see the sort of unparalleled things that now regularly happen. What, too, does one say in approaching the outbreak of an ongoing crisis such as the war in the Ukraine in which Ireland becomes involved by taking in refugees.
These prayers were collected or composed by Gráinne Delany to be used most frequently at the Friday Morning Prayers in the Crescent. She observes, “If you pray these prayers you will be in this weekly praying community. Daily the assembly prays the prayer of St Ignatius. Others are welcome to join in: echoes here surely of the familiar apostleship of prayer!”
To give some structure to the book she follows the arrangement not of the ecclesiastical year, but the School year starting in September, and breaking off for Christmas, Easter and Summer holiday. July is marked off for prayers for past pupils, the “great majority” of the school community; and August, when students will be most in contact with nature and the outdoors, brings an adaptation of Pope Francis’s message in Laudato Si’.
Simplicity
The compendium closes with the simplicity of the prayer of St Ignatius, which is perhaps worth closing this notice by bringing it once again before readers, perhaps less familiar with Ignatius in this important year in commemorating life and work.
Dearest Lord,
teach me to be generous;
teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labour and not to ask for reward
save that of knowing I am doing your will. Amen