The Lion’s Roar
Lord God, Your Majesty, you promised that you would be with Your Church to the end of the age. Please, God, restore her beauty. Restore her glory. Restore our hearts, both the masculine heart and the feminine. Restore our hope, and our vision for who we can be and who the Church can be. Restore our relationships with You and with each other. Teach us what redeemed femininity looks like. Teach us what redeemed masculinity looks like. Raise up great saints that stand in contradiction to the powers of the world and live in accordance with the truth of their sex as You have created it. Raise up saints that live in holy complementarity: men blessing women and women blessing men. For all the ways that women have hurt, violated, or failed to bring life to others, I ask your mercy. I entrust to Your justice all the instances of women suffering because of their sex, and all the ways their vulnerability is met with violence. May we be open and inviting. May Your love cast out all fear. May the Truth that is Your very self defeat the lies the Enemy has set against women. May we unveil Your beauty and reveal Your passionate heart for relationship. Teach us to be daughters, sisters, brides, and mothers.
Risen Christ, when You first revealed Yourself to Mary Magdalene, she thought You were the gardener. You know the weeds and the wheat, the good soil and the rocky soil, the flowers and the fruits in the gardens of our hearts. Come, teach us how we may grow. Come, that we may be united to the vine and bear thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. Women are called to be life-giving, but we cannot fulfill our vocation unless we are tapped into the infinite river of life that flows from Your heart. Lord God, I give you permission to create in me the life You died for. May every woman experience Your gaze of love, and know Your love to the very center of her heart. May we surrender ourselves that You might gift what you wish to the world through us. May every woman know she is delighted in by God the Father, pursued in love by God the Son, and animated by God the Spirit to be who she was made to be.
Bless the hearts of all the men You have called to the priesthood, and teach them to have fatherly love for the women they serve. You ministered to the heart of the woman at the well with such truth and tenderness; may Your priests follow Your example. Help them love their bride well. Sanctify the priesthood, these men who are conformed to Your heart so closely. Root out evil, violence, dominance, and lust from your priests. All the holy priests, bishops, and popes who are now saints before the throne of God, please pray with me.
St. Joseph, guard and defend us, the daughters of God. You who are called Terror of Demons, intercede for us against the attacks of the Enemy who despises femininity. In a world where so many women are demeaned, teach us to be sensitive to woman’s dignity and sacredness. Mary, Mama, I entrust myself to you. Teach me to love and trust Joseph your husband. Bring to birth Christ in me. Crush the serpents in my heart that seek to steal, kill, and destroy, and teach me who God is and who I am. Lend me your Immaculate Heart, that I may love with purity and courage.
I ask the intercession of the four women Doctors of the Church: Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, and Thérèse of Lisieux. You all lived into your feminine genius, but in vastly different and beautifully unique ways. May the heart, soul, mind, voice, and body of every woman be integrated. Help every woman follow the Holy Spirit with passionate delight. Help us approach God with open hearts, so we may receive all He wants to give us. Pray for us, and obtain for us a great love for the Eucharist, for Our Lady, for the priesthood, for Scripture, and for the Bride, the Church. May we pursue Jesus as you did. May we suffer with Christ Crucified. May we have valiant hearts, souls on fire, prophetic voices, wise minds, holy influence, and childlike trust.
I ask the intercession of St. John Paul II and St. Edith Stein. Both of you wrote beautifully on the identity and dignity of woman. Obtain for the Church, through your prayers, the wisdom to give women the place where they can best serve in love.
Lord God, you made woman beautiful and maternal. During Your Passion, the apostles fled, but the women stayed. They were the ones strong enough to be present in Your suffering. This world has lost Your Cross, and so has also lost the women at the foot of the Cross. Something beautiful has become broken—may we grieve it. Something precious has become wounded—may we accept the healing. Something tender has been lost in pride—may we trust in Your will wholeheartedly. You promised that evil will not prevail, and called us to hope, for You have overcome the world. Blessed Mary, Lady of Victory, pray for us.
For Zion’s sake we will not keep silent. After a season of calling “Veni”—“Come”—we find Him in our midst. We behold His glory as of the only Son of the Father. For Jerusalem’s sake we will not rest. Lord, we offer our restless hearts. We ask in Your name for the promise of the Father, that people might know that You came, that You are here, and that the time of fear, lies, and darkness is over. You came, born of woman’s courage, woman’s love, and woman’s receptivity. You died the redemptive death accompanied by women. You rose to life and first revealed Yourself to women, sending them as the first heralds of the dawn. Women, hear this, your heritage of faith. See the great cloud of witnesses that surround us: Judith, Esther, Deborah, Hannah, Elizabeth, Magdalene, and Mary our mother and queen. Take courage, for you are loved, and our God delights to collaborate with us in the healing of the world.
Rise, sister, and take the place prepared for you. Accept the mantle of your daughterhood; receive the power of your baptism; breathe in the life of the Spirit through Whom we call God Father. Rise, lioness, and understand your strength, a strength bestowed on you from above. Know your own beauty, intended and blessed by our Creator, through which He has willed to bring hell to its knees. Our Mother conquered by her beauty. Let us learn from her, seeing this charism not as a chance for self-aggrandizement, but as a revelation of Beauty Itself that the Lord has chosen to share with us that all may come to love Him.
The Spirit has spoken, and He does not speak in vain: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” Winter is passed. Our God has battled for our hearts and is victorious. Christ’s tomb is empty, and still many people do not know that they are loved completely, fiercely, and gently. So, sister: cultivate the fire in your heart, the peace in your soul, and the beauty in your mind. It is badly needed. You are the only one who can offer what it is you have to the world and to Jesus Who has already emptied Himself for our salvation. Take courage; God has promised that we shall see His glory in the land of the living, and He who promised is faithful. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “We are all between the paws of the one true Aslan.”
None of this means that the path ahead will be easy, for the Lord calls us to the narrow way. Discipleship has a cost. However, we can have both hope and courage, for Christ never calls us to a path that He has not already walked, or to any suffering that He has not already participated in. We are not alone. Our battle scars will be glorified in the light of Christ’s pierced hands and feet in the eternity when He shall make all things new.
Let us understand, finally, the words with which the Word announced His mission: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” As we await His coming, be His hands. Be His feet. Be His voice. Listen to the call gifted to us as women to love with the tenderness of His heart. The time is short, and His love is infinite. Let us prepare the Bride for the wedding feast. “Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.”
