For when you are ready to hand it over — all of it — and want words that do not flinch. Five sentences by a soldier, written for the last day of a month's silence, and they give everything away before they ask for anything.
Suscipe
It lists what you have — liberty, memory, understanding, will — and gives it back. Not gives up. Gives back, on the grounds that it was never yours: thou hast given all to me. The logic is the Memorare's turned inside out. That one argues its way to a request; this one argues its way out of having any.
Then it asks for two things, and only two. Thy love and thy grace. And it says that is enough, which is the sentence most people cannot get through without stopping.
Ignatius of Loyola — a Basque soldier whose leg was broken by a cannonball in 1521 and who read lives of the saints in bed because there was nothing else in the house — wrote the Spiritual Exercises over the following decade, a month-long program of silence and meditation. This prayer is at the very end of it, in the exercise he called the Contemplation to Attain Love. It is the last thing a retreatant says. The Exercises were printed in 1548 with Paul III's approval, and the prayer has been in every edition since.
Every Jesuit has said it at the end of the long retreat for nearly five hundred years, and so have most people who have made the Exercises in any form. It was set to music as a hymn — Take, Lord, receive — in the 1970s and is sung at Jesuit funerals and final vows.
It is one of the few prayers on this site that a saint is known to have written, in those words, for that purpose. The aspirations are the short form of the same movement: My God and my all.