To make it easier to (remember and to) recite the short prayer each day, every pilgrim might wish to print it out, post it to the refrigerator in the kitchen, leave it at one’s night table next to the bed, tape it to the mirror in the bathroom … Ok, you get the point.
Bear in mind that praying it is an audible & mnemonic sign that you have already begun the pilgrimage, uniting with fellow pilgrims: each preparing to converge at the Lake of the Blessed Sacrament (aka “Lake George”) in New France — more recently known as “New York State”!
A watch-word of pilgrimage is “nobody makes pilgrimage alone”. And since prayer & penance are the heart & soul of pilgrimage, you get a ‘transfusion’ of grace from fellow pilgrims when you unite your prayers with theirs already on The Way.
Pilgrimage Chaplain, Canon Andreas Hellmann, has asked each pilgrim to recite with devotion every day the sublime prayer of St. Nicholas of Flüe, and in that way to commit it to memory:
My Lord and my God,
take from me whatever keeps me from Thee.My Lord and my God,
grant me whatever brings me to Thee.My Lord and my God,
take my self, to live wholly in Thee.
St. Nicholas of Flüe, 1447-1487
