A Blogger's Prayer

I had come across this prayer last year. It was written by Fr. Stephen Cuyos, a Filipino priest of the Missionary of the Sacred Heart. Fr. Stephen wrote this prayer for the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards. Why was I reminded of it? Well, Fr. Stephen wrote the prayer in English, and it was just recently translated to Tagalog. For those of you who can read Tagalog, click here and have a read. I will admit my reading comprehension of Tagalog is extremely limited, but at least when I saw the title: Panalangin ng isang Blogger, I was able to figure out it was a prayer of some sort. Then it dawned on me that it must be a translation of that wonderful prayer Fr. Stephen wrote last year.

It's worth sharing. Here is the entire prayer, in English.

So compassionate, so faithful, so loving You are Our Father.

We ask You to increase our faith and our love for You that we may use blogging as an instrument to fulfill Your purposes. May we become bloggers of truth and promoters of peace.

Help us to be steadfast in our Christian commitment that visitors may find in our blogs a source of encouragement and inspiration. Give us strength to proclaim Your word, that we may play our part in breaking down the walls of hostility in the world and use our blogs to strengthen the bonds of friendship, solidarity and love.

Make our hearts meek and humble that we may treat our readers as friends, not as unique hits, that we may strive to change ourselves for the better more often than we pimp our site templates, that we may find more time to ease the pain of someone in our own home than to reply to comments left by strangers, that we may interact with our next door neighbors as often as we chat with our blogrolled friends, that we may be more concerned about helping the less privileged than about the number of subscribers to our RSS feeds.

Deliver us, Father, from spams and viruses, from pride and selfishness, and from the temptation to replicate images without permission and copy ideas without crediting the original authors.

May we always be united as a network of bloggers and friends working together in Your name. May our blogs lead us closer to You.

We ask all these through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

Fr. Stephen is currently travelling, spending time in Colombia, and then from there will be spending some time in Illinois and California, before returning to the Philippines. I, for one, will be sending my prayers that he have a good and fulfilling trip, and that when he returns home, that his trip home be made safely. Thank you, Fr. Stephen, for a wonderful prayer.