open up within me the gate to awareness of you

O name of Jesus,

key to all gifts,

open up for me the great door to your treasurehouse

so that I may enter and praise you

with the praise that comes the heart

in return for your mercies

which I have experienced in latter days;

for you came and renewed me

with an awareness of the New World…

Gather my mind into the silence of prayer,

so that all my wandering thoughts

may be silenced within me

during that luminous converse

of supplication and mystery-filled wonder.

O Sun of righteousness

by which the righteous beheld their own selves

and became a mirror for their generations,

open up within me 

the gate to awareness of you.

~Isaac of Nineveh, †late 7^th century

as published in Magnificat magazine,

May 2015

Vol. 17, No. 3, pp262-3

[Photos: top, Mont-Sainte Michel, France;

bottom, Mission La Purísima Concepción, California

all photos © Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda]