Praying with others is powerful. Don’t be afraid. This is not something reserved for people with a special gift.

A few tips:

• Ask God for help and ask them for a prayer request.
• Listen
• Thank
• Intercede
• Longer prayer – Silence is okay
• Close with communal prayer

Featured saint this episode is St. Alberto Hurtado.

Alberto Hurtado, SJ, served the poor in Chile. Born in Chile on January 22, 1901 and died in 1952.

He loved the poor and found his own organization for poor and abandoned young people, Hogar de Cristo.

Hurtado was beatified in 1994 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 23, 2005.

Quotes:

•  “Christ is without a home! Christ roams through our streets in the person of so many of the suffering poor, sick and dispossessed, and people thrown out of their miserable slums; Christ huddled under bridges, in the person of so many children who lack someone to call father, who have been deprived for many years without a mother’s kiss on their foreheads…Christ is without a home! Shouldn’t we want to give him one, those of us who have the joy of a comfortable home, plenty of good food, the means to educate and assure the future of our children? “What you do to the least of me, you do to me,” Jesus said.”
• “If we don’t see Christ in the person we rub elbows with every moment, that is because our faith is tepid and our love imperfect.”
• “I hold that every poor man, every vagrant, every beggar is Christ carrying his cross. And as Christ, we must love and help him. We must treat him as a brother, a human being like ourselves. If we were to start a campaign of love for the poor and homeless, we would, in a short time, do away with depressing scenes of begging, children sleeping in doorways and women with babies in their arms fainting in our streets.”
• “You ask how I manage to put some balance into my life. This is a question I ask myself, as each day I am swallowed up more by my work – letters, telephone calls, articles, visits: the wearing routine of business – congresses, study sessions, conferences agreed to out of weakness, because I could not say no, or because I did not want to miss an opportunity to do good; bills to be paid, decisions to be made in the stress of unforeseen circumstances. Then there is some pressing apostolate, the urgency to arrive before materialism gains a complete victory. So often I feel I am on a rock, battered from all sides by rising waves. The only escape route is heavenwards. For an hour or a day, I let the waves beat upon the rock; I stop looking out to the horizon and only look upwards towards God. . .”
• “In God I feel a hope that is almost boundless. My worries disappear. I let them go, and I let myself go completely into his hands. . . I belong to Him, and He takes care of me and of myself. At long last my soul can surface once more tranquil and serene. Yesterday’s worries, the thousand and one preoccupations about ‘Thy kingdom come,’ and even the dreadful torment I felt just now fearing the triumph of his enemies. . . everything gives way to calmness in God, the rock against which all waves break in vain, God, the perfect radiance marred by no shadow, God the all-conquering victor, dwells within me. I can reach him fully as the highest aim of my love. My whole soul is within him. And then, sweetly and surely, it is as if all life’s trails, all the insecurities and uncertainties, had left me completely. I am bathed in light. He fills me with his strength. He loves me.”

You can be a saint. You can be holy. Jesus loves you. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus today!