The GFWC - Coral Springs Woman's Club
Collect
The Collect was written as a personal prayer in Longmont, Colorado, when Mary Stewart was just out of college and was entering her first job as a high school principal. The first printing was an obscure paragraph in Delineator magazine. A local printer in Longmont made copies for a local club. The first organization to use the Collect or to print it in its yearbook was the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. It has since been reprinted in many forms, in many lands and has been set to music. Stewart said she offered the prayer for publication as a club woman’s Collect because she felt, "Women working together for large ends was something new." The Collect was not intended to be a creed; every line is a petition, a prayer, that is, a Collect.
Inspirational Collect for Clubwomen:
Keep us, O God, from pettiness; let us be large in thought, in word, in deed. Let us be done with fault-finding and leave off self-seeking. May we put away all pretense and meet each other face-to-face, without self-pity and without prejudice. May we never be hasty in judgment and always be generous. Let us take time for all things; make us to grow calm, serene, gentle. Teach us to put into action our better impulse, straightforward and unafraid. Grant that we may realize it is the little things that create differences; that in the big things of life we are at one. And may we strive to touch and know the great, common human heart of us all. And, O God, let us forget not to be kind.
Mary Stewart
Longmont, Colorado
1904