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Holy Father,

You exist as one God in three persons. Yours is the perfect spirit of friendship. We rejoice to know you and be known by you.

Draw your people together into this holy spirit of friendship so that we might fellowship face-to-face and shoulder-to-shoulder, feasting and working alike, in joyful bonds of covenant love.

We confess that we are fractured souls in a fractured society in a fractured world. Our fault lines run deep, and we separate ourselves from one another in so many ways.

Through these fault lines, shine your slivers of light. In our weakness, bring us friends to love us, and give us friends to love. Through the example and presence of Christ, draw us out of our depressing selfishness and into the freedom of self-giving kindness.

Make us eager to love and be loved; help us to know and be known.

Turn us from our screens and refocus our gaze on human eyes and human needs and human joys.

Help us cross the street and shake hands with our neighbors.

Lead us to feast on friendship more than ambition, until friendship becomes our ambition.

Leave us not alone when we demand to be alone, and guide our footsteps into all the warmth and sanctifying grace of true community.

Make us instinctively hopeful about others, and saddened when we must be suspicious.

Turn our introversion into thoughtful charity.

Turn our extroversion into abundant love.

Make us friendly bosses and kind co-workers and happy subordinates.

Help us form true friendships with our spouses, children, parents, and siblings.

Cause us

• to judge less and love more,
• to demand less and serve more,
• to take less and give more,
• to wait less and initiate more,

Help us to be

• the first to smile,
• the first to serve,
• the first to give,
• the first to reconcile,
• the first to cross the divides that separate us.

Teach us to live well the one-another’s we know so well, until we know them from within, from the worn paths of disciplined experience.

Thank you for sending your Christ who came to make enemies friends. Thank you for sending your Spirit who came to seal holy bonds of love. Thank you for your written Word which reveals the path to trinitarian friendship, and for your living Word who came to reconcile us to you and to one another through the redemption found in his blood.

Make us friends, we pray, until the new creation dawns and we feast together at the great table of friendship which awaits us.

Through Christ, our Lord and friend,

Amen.