Grant, O merciful God, that I may ardently desire, prudently examine, truthfully acknowledge,

and perfectly accomplish what is pleasing to thee for the praise and glory of thy name. Amen.

And the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. So you see at the top of that, that this is a prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, his prayer for a well-ordered life.

And so I thought it was kind of a nice prayer to begin with this week, and I gave it to you so you can stick it in your prayer book and pray.

I gave you the Latin there just to prove you how much of a nerd I am.

Also, it's the language that St. Thomas wrote lots of prayers actually and lots of liturgical texts.

So like the Feast of Corpus Christi, he composed a lot of those texts, taking things from scripture and the tradition.

But he was certainly one who would compose these things, the Adorote devote, the tantum ergo, these sorts of things that are kind of part of Catholic life are compositions by St. Thomas.

And also shows that he wasn't just like egghead writing big books in his office.

He was also a sort of poet kind of charismatic.

This is like 13th century praise and worship music, you know, the Tantamarigo.

And so to kind of get into his genius, you have to kind of see all those things.

You can't just read the suma and think you know St. Thomas. You have to kind of get the whole thing here. So if you're interested

in this stuff, you have to kind of do it all that way. Also, I thought this prayer kind of sums up a lot of the

work I think we want to try and do this talk about the virtue of prudence, and particularly

if this thing's being run by the vocations office, that prudence is not just kind of like what

kinds of stuff you're going to buy at CVS, right, which we'll talk about in a bit, but it's also

has to do with like how you're going to live your life and how you're going to live your life

in Christ and how you're going to live, you know, kind of the big decisions of your life, especially kind of the mode of life you're going to live

and how you're going to do that. And so to do that kind of in the presence of God as Catholics,

and as people were interested in St. Thomas, I thought this was a helpful prayer. And of course,

it's maybe unsurprising. It kind of gives this nice little delineation of the virtues you need to do this well, right? And something that's going to come up a little later, just to notice that he says,

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