Two Weeks Away: Prayers and Requests

My flight to Paris is a little over two weeks away.  I fly from Portland to Paris on the morning of Tuesday June 17.  From Paris, Ed and I will take the train to Toul where our journey will begin.  If you missed it in the first post of this blog, here is a Google map of our route (roughly): Google Map of the Path to Rome.  In the meantime, I am making my preparations.  I am pretty confident in the way of physical preparation and supplies, but I am the least confident in my language skills, which I have failed to practice for the last several weeks.  Ed is already in Europe, currently in London if I'm not mistaken.  He'll be in Paris before me, so he'll have to fare on his own language-wise until I get there.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, prayer will be an important aspect of the pilgrimage.  As such, I have acquired a little journal/notebook in which to write Ed's and my prayer intentions as well as the intentions of others.  Because many of you will not be able to see us personally before we leave, I have created an e-mail address for the purpose of enabling others to send us prayer requests.  Any prayer requests sent to this e-mail address will be prayed for by Ed and me for the duration of our pilgrimage, and any time we stop in a church, we will make a point to pray for the intentions in our booklet.

The e-mail address for prayer requests is: pathtoromeprayers@gmail.com

Also, I have designed my holy card and am waiting on a few leads as to where I might get them printed.  I actually had a student give me a graduation party invite on a card made at Walgreen's comparable to what I'd like to have done for our holy cards.  Maybe it will be as simple as that.  I've decided that Sts. Peter and Paul will be the saints featured on our holy card.  The picture on the right is the one I've chosen.

In the meantime, here is the prayer that I composed to be on the back of the holy card.  It is designed as a prayer specifically for us.  I drew from various sources, but I wanted to have a prayer for this specific trip.  Here is the text:

Lord, you who called your servant Abraham out of Ur 

and who watched over him during all his wanderings, 

you who guided your people through the desert 

in their journey to the Promised Land, 

you who sent the Archangel Raphael to guide the youth Tobias, 

you who guided the Holy Family on their flight to Egypt, 

we ask you to watch over your servants Edward and Luke, 

who for your greater honor and glory, make a pilgrimage to Rome.  

Be for them a companion on their journey, 

a help as they go forward, a respite in fatigue, 

a shadow in the heat, a shelter from the rain and the cold, 

a light in the darkness, a consolation in the midst of dejection,

 and a joy in the midst of sorrow, 

so that, as they follow the way to their journey’s end, 

they may also be led to the path to holiness they so earnestly seek to follow, 

and that, under your guidance, they may reach safely the end of their pilgrimage 

with a fervent hope in reaching their final destination with you in heaven.   

We ask this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Holy Mary, Mother of the Church, and Protector of Christians, pray for us.

St. Joseph, our guide and guardian, pray for us.
Sts. Peter and Paul, pray for us.

I intend to translate the prayer into French, German, and Italian so that we can give the holy cards to those we meet along the way.  I'll have to run it by those more well versed in these languages once I translate them.

I should be posting a little bit more in the weeks to come.  Some people have asked for more information on my friend Ed since they don't know him, so I'll have to enlighten people in this arena.  Also, some people have requested to receive e-mail updates when I make a post.  In the sidebar above my picture, there is now a place where you can enter your e-mail address to receive a notification when my blog us updated.  While you wait for the next update in the meantime, please send your prayer requests to pathtoromeprayers@gmail.com so I can get them down in the prayer journal.

Sts. Peter and Paul, pray for us!