O Lord Jesus Christ, who in the garden didst look for one that would grieve together with Thee, and foundest none: look Thou upon me, and have mercy on me; for I am alone and poor.
I am become as a sparrow all alone upon the housetop, and the night is long. Thou knowest the hours I keep. Thou seest the door that no man knocketh at. Thou hearest the words I had thought to say this day, and knowest to whom I would have said them.
Yet Thou hast promised: I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you. Come then, O Lord, and be my company. And if it please Thee to send me a friend, let me not fail to be one.
Teach me that my solitude is not a punishment but a place, and that Thou art in it before me. Let me not grow bitter, nor cold, nor fond of mine own sorrow. Give me work to do, and someone to do it for.
And when my father and my mother have left me, and every voice is gone quiet, take Thou me up: who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.
This prayer is not from the tradition. It was written for Domus Dei, and it is set here among the prayers of the Church with that said plainly, because the reader has a right to know which is which. The Suscipe is St. Ignatius’. The Salve Regina is the Church’s. This one is ours, and carries no authority beyond the Scripture it is made of.
It was written because of a gap that could be measured. Someone searching this treasury for the word lonely found nothing — not because the Church has nothing to say to the lonely, but because what she says is scattered through psalms rather than gathered into a prayer under that name.
So it is built the way the Church’s own prayers were mostly built: as a cento, woven from verses rather than invented. Every petition rests on a text of Scripture, and each is given below in the Douay-Rheims:
The first line is Our Lord’s own loneliness in Gethsemane — “And I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none: and for one that would comfort me, and I found none” (Ps. 68:21) — joined to the plainest cry in the psalter, “Look thou upon me, and have mercy on me; for I am alone and poor” (Ps. 24:16). The second takes the psalmist’s image of the sleepless bird, “I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop” (Ps. 101:8). The third is Our Lord’s promise at the Last Supper, “I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you” (John 14:18). The last is the verse that answers the whole prayer: “For my father and my mother have left me: but the Lord hath taken me up” (Ps. 26:10).
One petition is not from Scripture and is the point of the prayer: Give me work to do, and someone to do it for. Loneliness is not usually cured by being told to be less lonely. The older spiritual writers treat it as the ground where acedia grows, and they prescribe not sentiment but occupation and charity — something to do, and somebody to do it for.
There is no Latin column on this page. Composing a Latin text for a prayer written in English this year, and setting it beside the Latin of the Roman Canon, would suggest an age it does not have.
O Lord Jesus Christ, who in the garden didst look for one that would grieve together with Thee, and foundest none: look Thou upon me, and have mercy on me; for I am alone and poor.
I am become as a sparrow all alone upon the housetop, and the night is long. Thou knowest the hours I keep. Thou seest the door that no man knocketh at. Thou hearest the words I had thought to say this day, and knowest to whom I would have said them.
Yet Thou hast promised: I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you. Come then, O Lord, and be my company. And if it please Thee to send me a friend, let me not fail to be one.
Teach me that my solitude is not a punishment but a place, and that Thou art in it before me. Let me not grow bitter, nor cold, nor fond of mine own sorrow. Give me work to do, and someone to do it for.
And when my father and my mother have left me, and every voice is gone quiet, take Thou me up: who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.
O Lord Jesus Christ, who in the garden didst look for one that would grieve together with Thee, and foundest none: look Thou upon me, and have mercy on me; for I am alone and poor.
I am become as a sparrow all alone upon the housetop, and the night is long. Thou knowest the hours I keep. Thou seest the door that no man knocketh at. Thou hearest the words I had thought to say this day, and knowest to whom I would have said them.
Yet Thou hast promised: I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you. Come then, O Lord, and be my company. And if it please Thee to send me a friend, let me not fail to be one.
Teach me that my solitude is not a punishment but a place, and that Thou art in it before me. Let me not grow bitter, nor cold, nor fond of mine own sorrow. Give me work to do, and someone to do it for.
And when my father and my mother have left me, and every voice is gone quiet, take Thou me up: who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.