Ten years ago this week, a small group of original Bridgefolk participants and leaders met together to talk, pray and discern. How should we follow through on our initial meeting in Pennsylvania in 1999? What kind of community are we becoming? How will participants know if they are “members?” Should we have a common discipline of prayer, the way religious orders do? What will bind our life together when we depart? It would be good to at least have a common prayer that would resonate equally with Mennonites and Catholics, they decided, but what might that be?
In the middle of the night, one of Bridgefolk’s co-founders found the following prayer taking shape, got up, and wrote it down. When he shared it with the others the next day, the group embraced it as a simple answer to many of our questions:
- If someone can pray this prayer with all their heart, he or she is Bridgefolk.
- Our rule would be to pray this prayer daily, and live accordingly.
On this 10th anniversary of the Bridgefolk prayer, therefore, we invite you to pray our common prayer today, to make or renew your commitment to pray it daily, and to live out the groanings we share for a Church of unity, nonviolence, and faithfulness to our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Prayer, Our Rule
As Bridgefolk of both the Catholic and Mennonite traditions, we are people who have found that we cannot do otherwise than to pray this prayer, together and daily, in words and silent groanings, in deeds, and in the very ordering of our lives:
O Lord our God,
eternally living and giving,
a Trinity of persons,
may all your Christian people
come to share in truth
the table of your Son Jesus Christ,
unified and peaceable,
joining in the communion of saints,
martyrs, apostles and bishops
who have beaten their swords into ploughshares.
Empowered by that very grace of your Holy Spirit
who unites the Trinity in mutual love
they have been a bridge to your coming Kingdom,
already present in our broken world.
By that same grace and love,
empower us then we pray –
empower us here today –
to be a bridge to that future
of unity and peace
which you ever yearn to give to your Church
yet ever give in earnest through your Church
as you set a table before us
making present the life and death,
body and blood,
faith, hope and love of your Son,
in whose name we pray,
Amen
March 25, 2001
Saint John’s Abbey, MN
Bridgefolk Planning Retreat