Prayer of St Bonaventure

Print or download the following prayer of St. Bonaventure.  It is especially fitting to pray this prayer after sacramental or spiritual communion, but it is a beautiful prayer to pray anytime.

Pierce the depths of my soul, O sweetest Lord Jesus, with the most delightful and most wholesome wound of your love, with true, serene, and most holy apostolic charity, that my soul may always languish and melt with love and longing for you. May it yearn for you and swoon for your courts, and long to be detached and be with you.

Grant that I may hunger for you, the bread of angels, the refreshing food of holy souls, our daily, life-sustaining bread, containing all sweetness and relish, and all delicate delight.

May I always hunger for you and feed on you–you on whom the angels desire to gaze. May the depths of my soul be filled with the sweetness of your taste.

May my heart always thirst for you, the flowing source of life, the fountain of wisdom and knowledge, the fountain of eternal light, the gushing stream of pleasure, the abundance of the house of God.

May my heart always desire you, seek you and find you. May I run to you and reach you; meditate on you, speak of you and do all things to the praise and glory of your name, with humility and discretion, with love and delight, with ease and affection, and with perseverance until the end.

May you always be my only hope, my complete assurance, my wealth, my delight, my pleasure, my joy, my rest and tranquility, my peace, my delicacy, my fragrance, my sweetness, my food, my refreshment, my refuge, my help, my wisdom, my inheritance, my possession and my treasure–in you, may my mind and heart be fixed and fastened and immovably rooted now and always. Amen.

To read more translations of St. Bonaventure’s prayer, visit Dr. Raul Nidoy’s blog.

For St. Bonaventure’s teaching on contemplative prayer, see Mystical Prayer in the Holy Spirit.