Saints' Prayers - Volunteer Work

Congratulations and Welcome! Cheesy

You are reading one of the missions you can do to help spread the writings and words of the saints throughout the world. This sort of work is work for Heaven, that lasts forever, unlike so much other work, this work leads to greater eternal happiness, and spreads it beauties throughout the world.

The work is very simple and very beneficial to the spiritual life. Each potential mission is both similar and different.. they all have to do with the writings of the saints in various ways.

Remember the motto of St. Benedict: Pray and work! But this sort of work is in many ways hardly work at all.

Please do as much or as little as you please, and collaborate as much or as little as you like. Enjoy the work.

Here we have a rather detailed explanation of a simple mission, Mission #1. If you find other ways to do the work than as suggested that you find easier, that is fine as long as the minimum criteria are fulfilled.

Saints' Prayers - Volunteer Work

Mission #1 flower

This mission is basically reading books and selecting prayers from them for others.

The first step is like this:

This work is very simple, you find prayers from the saints and from old religious devotionals and collect them in a Notepad or Wordpad file. This little scratch pad is where you spiff up the prayer by making certain there are no typographical errors.

You can collect these prayers from anywhere, but to really collect a good number it can be best to use a book by a saint or one of the old religious authors on Saints' Books and put them down steadily. Prayers are longer and more difficult to prepare than quotes as you will soon find out by the way! There are many books from Saints' Books that you can work from, and from other online book archives if you choose. I can also provide you with the plain text versions of these books, so you can easily copy and paste the quotes, just ask and I'll email it to you. Most of the PDF books are not copy/pasteable, but some are, for those that aren't, ask for text files!

You will need these if you do any more than a little work as it is much easier than retyping a whole prayer.

There is a hitch however. The reason I do not yet provide the plain text versions of the books is that they are often typo-filled and have spelling errors or format problems from where the scanning software couldn't tell one letter from another. One of the other missions is correcting these so we can put up the plain text books too. (Feel free to dive into this more difficult book mission too!)

Step two of the mission is as follows:

There is a special way you have to send the prayer in so it can be put straight into the computer software. If you just do the first step and send it to me that way, there is more work and so the work is done more slowly. So do the second step if you're a volunteer worker.

Prayers require special HTML codes to come out properly when put into the software. There are only a very few, to bold, italicize, add line breaks between paragraphs, and align the words. So it is easy to learn!

Each prayer must look like this when it is put into the software:

quote:<CENTER>An Offering of the Daily Intention My Lord, I stand before thee with all my powers, deeds and weaknesses; I offer them all to thee, receive them. Thou gavest them to me, I offer them all to thee: my entire being. I offer thee also the thoughts, words, and deeds that I shall perform this day. I offer them unto thy greater honor and glory. I desire to do everything with the most sincere intention of serving thee and of fulfilling thy most holy will in all things. I offer them also as an atonement for my sins, past and present. I accept from thy hand, O Lord, every adversity and suffering: let it all be unto thy greater glory and the good of my soul. O Christ, the true light, which enlightens and sanctifies all men who enter this world: let the light of thy glory be inscribed upon us, that through it we may see the unapproachable light; straighten our steps unto the fulfilment of thy commandments, through the prayers of thy most pure Mother, and of all thy Saints.
author:</CENTER>

Inside the random quote software file all the prayers look like these samples:

quote:<CENTER>Ancient Prayer to St. Joseph O St. Joseph whose protection is so great, so strong, so prompt before the Throne of God, I place in you all my interests and desires. O St. Joseph do assist me by your powerful intercession and obtain for me from your Divine Son all spiritual blessings through Jesus Christ, Our Lord; so that having engaged here below your Heavenly power I may offer my thanksgiving and homage to the most Loving of Fathers. O St. Joseph, I never weary of contemplating you and Jesus asleep in your arms. I dare not approach you while He reposes near your heart. Press him in my name and kiss His fine Head for me, and ask Him to return the kiss when I draw my dying breath. St. Joseph, Patron of departing souls, pray for us.
author:</CENTER>
quote:<CENTER>Angelic Trisagion Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, earth is full of Thy Glory. Glory be to the Father, Glory be to the Son, Glory be to the Holy Ghost. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus exercituum: Plena est terra gloria tua: Gloria Patri, Gloria Filio, Gloria Spiritui Sancto.
author:</CENTER>
quote:<CENTER>Angel of God Angele Dei Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Angele Dei, qui custos es mei, me, tibi commissum pietate superna, illumina, custodi, rege et guberna.
author:</CENTER>

And when the software finds a quote it pops them out looking like this:

An Offering of the Daily Intention

My Lord, I stand before thee with all my powers, deeds and weaknesses; I offer them all to thee, receive them. Thou gavest them to me, I offer them all to thee: my entire being. I offer thee also the thoughts, words, and deeds that I shall perform this day. I offer them unto thy greater honor and glory. I desire to do everything with the most sincere intention of serving thee and of fulfilling thy most holy will in all things. I offer them also as an atonement for my sins, past and present. I accept from thy hand, O Lord, every adversity and suffering: let it all be unto thy greater glory and the good of my soul.

O Christ, the true light, which enlightens and sanctifies all men who enter this world: let the light of thy glory be inscribed upon us, that through it we may see the unapproachable light; straighten our steps unto the fulfilment of thy commandments, through the prayers of thy most pure Mother, and of all thy Saints.

So when you gather the prayers and prepare them as the above it makes it very simple to enter into the generator, as long as you remember a few html codes to put in place.

These codes are:

 which creates a line break, you use two of these to put a nice space inbetween two paragraphs.

 and which tells the bold to begin and to end inbetween the two.
 and which tells the italics to begin and end between the two.

And <CENTER> and </CENTER> which centers aligns everything inbetween.

There it is simple. All the prayers follow very similar format, when you look at Saints' Prayers you can see this.

Bold title, italics extra information such as author, and then the main prayers in regular text. In the cases of litanies, the responses are normally indicated once by being put italics, and then not repeated in the text.

Now here are the criteria for prayers for the generator.

If they don't meet the criteria, they're still kept, and still enjoyable to receive, so that's OK! And they may have some future other uses too!

The prayer should be from a saint, blessed, venerable, or holy and respected catholic, or respect catholic source such as an old religious manual. Anonymous is OK if it's from an old Catholic book.

The prayers can be very short or very long.. so you can put in litanies, or tons of little invocations like, 'Jesus and Mary, save souls!' In fact I have been meaning to do this for Saints' Prayers for some time to help people who need to train out their short attention spans in regards to prayer. There is a great need! And it is easier to do the short ones! The long ones must not be forgotten however, they are often great works.

You'll find the key to doing a good deal of this work is pacing yourself. Taking breaks.. getting away from the computer then coming back.. doing short ones and then long ones.. so you see the work being accomplished.. If you look at a litany, it truly is a number of very short prayers one after the other!

Nearly all of the prayers already in Saints' Prayers are also on the 'Saints' Prayers Page', except for the Marian Psalter of St. Bonaventure.

When you have spiffied up the prayers and prepared it for the software, email it them me and I will prepare them for entry. Some prayers might not make it, some will! Cheesy

A final word on the philosophy and criteria for the prayers.

The prayers are meant to be holy, devout and beautiful. Not all prayers are meant for Saints' Prayers.. if the prayer is very generic such as a general petition to a saint, without anything else to it.. why anyone can think to say that without having one hundred prayers to one hundred different saints with just the name changed! So choose prayers that are a little special.

If the prayer has promises attached to it, that's fine and very good, as long as it is old and respected and at some time has been approved to be printed. I can find this out!

Pray the prayers you find and so benefit from them as you help others to!

Pray to do well and may the Lord, and the Lord with His saints and angels help you! All in the Lord's infinite splendor Heaven!