In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here,

that you see me, that you hear me.

I adore you with profound reverence.

I ask your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this

time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my

guardian angel, and to seed for me.

Using a prayerful insight of Pope Benedict the 16th, we want to, in addition to contemplating Jesus' life through the Gospels,

we want to contemplate Jesus' life through his saints

because the church has infallibly declared

that this particular saint is a role model in following our Lord,

and that individual has allowed Christ to grow in such a way that he or she can say it is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives

in me. And the particular saint, we are going to contemplate in this time of prayer

with the expressed purpose of seeing Jesus and following Jesus more

closely.

And I would say one of the greatest saints of the history of the church, very contemporary,

the one and only St. John Paul.

As I've mentioned in other meditations, I was honored and privileged to have lived

in Rome under some of his pontificate.

I witnessed his election, or I wasn't at the conclave, obviously, but when he came out for the first time.

And people intuited that he was a special person.

And perhaps way before he left this world an actual saint.

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