In earlier generations, faith was woven naturally into everyday life. It was often enough to say, “This is how it’s done,” because the surrounding culture supported religious practice. Today, that context has largely disappeared. Faith no longer automatically shapes daily life. People now need time, and patient accompaniment to recognize God’s presence. In this new reality, a spirituality of offering can grow only if it is rooted in a lived encounter with the Lord’s love.
Many Christians grew up praying the daily offering prayer, which shaped the spirituality of the Apostleship of Prayer for generations. That prayer nourished the faith of countless families. Yet for many people in today’s world, whose worldview no longer presumes God as self-evident, those words may have lost their resonance. Pope Francis repeatedly reminds us, from Evangelii Gaudium to Dilexit nos, that Jesus loved us first, and that every Christian response is born from an encounter with that love that precedes us, accompanies us, and sustains us.
This explains the structure of the new prayer of offering. It does not begin with “I offer,” but with a simple and trusting confession: “Good Father, I know you are with me. Here I am on this new day.” The prayer opens not with action, but with presence. The first movements are movements of reception: “Place my heart once more next to the Heart of your Son Jesus, who is giving himself for me and who comes to me in the Eucharist.” Before the believer does anything, he or she is invited to receive, to draw near, to allow the Heart of Christ to come close.
The words that follow continue this same logic. “May your Holy Spirit make me his friend and apostle, available for his mission of compassion.” The prayer asks first to be formed, to be made, to be shaped by the Holy Spirit. Only then does the language of offering appear: “I place in your hands my joys and hopes, my works and sufferings, everything that I am and have.” The order is not accidental. It expresses a deep spiritual truth. Commitment is born of encounter. Only someone who knows they are loved can truly offer themselves.
This dynamic corresponds to the teaching of saints such as Saint Augustine, for whom the Heart of Christ is a place of personal encounter, and to the intuition of the theologian Adolphe Gesché, who affirms that human beings are, above all, “visited beings.” We are capable of offering ourselves because we are first recipients of love. The new prayer of offering expresses this conviction with delicacy and depth.
In a world marked by fragmentation, weariness, and suspicion, this prayer becomes an immense gift. It reminds us that God does not begin by asking anything of us, but by offering us everything. The Heart of Christ draws near to our fragility, precedes us in love, and gives birth within us to the desire to participate in his mission of compassion. In the words of Saint John, “We know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. So we too must lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 Jn 3:16). Thus, the prayer of offering becomes a renewed path of friendship with Jesus, of openness to the Spirit, and of participation in his mission.
Fr. Miguel Melo SJ
Vice Director
The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network