Aquinas’s Prayer before Study

I’ll admit that sometimes my studying can feel detached from my devotional life (probably because I’m usually tempted to skip prayer to get to reading, which is never a good thing), but this week, I ran across a delightful resource to help with that. I started a new class (The Major Works of Augustine) and the professor read this prayer before we started:

Creator of all things,
true source of light and wisdom,
lofty origin of all being,
graciously let a ray of your brilliance
penetrate the darkness of my understanding
and take from me the double darkness
into which I was born:
an obscurity of both sin and ignorance.

Give me a sharp sense of understanding,
a retentive memory,
and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally.
Grant me the talent of being exact in my explanations,
and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm.

Instruct my beginning
direct my progress,
and set your seal upon the finished work.

Through Christ our Lord,
Amen.

-Thomas Aquinas

There’s different versions of this prayer posted all over the internet, so if there’s bits in this one that you don’t like, feel free to shop around. I just thought it was a lovely way of weaving two strands together that are so often pulled apart: study and devotion.