http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08-rGphFxzY
created for the National Youth Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, 2013
Text:
Image on screen of a pair of hands holding a strip of cloth. The following is slow, reflective and slightly mysterious.
Prayer is so much more than words.
You now have a strip of cloth. Hold it in your hands. Feel its texture. Look at its colour: even a white piece of cloth has variation.
Each of these ragged cloths are different, they each have a different history and a different story to tell, just like you.
In the warp and weft of their making, they are the unique work of an individual, just like you.
Cloth can be used as a bandage, to protect an injury, or a rag to wipe a sweaty, fevered brow. It can be the raw material of a book or a banknote, or used to fasten something which should not be loose.
It was a larger cloth that held the Lord after his death, and was placed aside in the tomb, it was a cloth which wiped his tortured brow.
As you hold this cloth in your hand, pause for a moment in quietness. As you feel the texture in your hand, pass your prayers onto, and into the cloth.
Think about the events happening in the world: war and conflict, famine and inequality, oppression and injustice.
Quietly tie a knot in your strip of cloth as you call them to mind as you remember them.
Think about the places you are from: your home, your family, those in your school.
Quietly tie a knot in your strip of cloth as you call them to mind as you remember them.
Think about those who are sick, those who we love and see no longer.
Quietly tie a knot in your strip of cloth as you call them to mind as you remember them.
Think of those things we have to be thankful for: the many blessings poured out upon us, the people who surround us and make a difference to our lives: may we make a difference to the lives of others.
Quietly tie a knot in your strip of cloth as you call them to mind as you remember them.
We do not pray alone, and our knotted cloths are joined with all those of the angels and saints, Our blessed Lady of Walsingham and each other.
Tie your cloth to another, tie those cloths to those of your group, and quickly yet quietly, let us form a chain of prayer, linked across this whole sacred space: individual yet joined.
As all of our prayers are linked, let us bring them forward to lay them around this holy altar…
The priest then summarises our offerings