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Radiating Christ

2 min

Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as Thou shinest: so to shine as to be a light to others. The light, O Jesus, will be all from Thee. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be Thou who shinest through me upon others. O let me thus praise Thee, in the way which Thou dost love best, by shining on all those around me. Give light to them as well as to me; light them with me, through me. Teach me to show forth Thy praise, Thy truth, Thy will. Make me preach Thee without preaching—not by words, but by my example and by the catching force, the sympathetic influence, of what I do—by my visible resemblance to Thy saints, and the evident fulness of the love which my heart bears to Thee.

About this prayer

St. John Henry Newman's prayer to shine with the light of Christ: to preach Him without preaching, by example and by the evident fullness of one's love.

History

These are Newman's own words, the third part of the meditation "Jesus the Light of the Soul" in his Meditations on Christian Doctrine, published after his death in Meditations and Devotions (1893). The prayer widely known as "Radiating Christ" ("Dear Jesus, help me to spread Thy fragrance everywhere I go…") is a later adaptation of this passage, prayed daily by St. Teresa of Calcutta and her Missionaries of Charity. This practice keeps Newman's original text.

How to pray it

Pray it in the morning, before going out among others, asking that the day's work and words let Christ be seen.

John Henry Newman, *Meditations and Devotions of the Late Cardinal Newman* (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893), Meditations on Christian Doctrine, VII "God with Us", 3 "Jesus the Light of the Soul", §3, pp. 500–501 ([archive.org scan](https://archive.org/details/a600404300newmuoft/page/500)).

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