- Lord! We are truly afraid, and we don’t know how to pray. Maybe because of all the thoughts and news going around in our heads, we are locked in a tomb of confusion and understand nothing; every day there is something new…!
- Lord, it isn’t only fear: our worries are going to choke us, like the grain of wheat that fell among thorns by the roadside. We can’t see one another, or even the road; we have all become like the blind man of Jericho. We are torn between surrendering to your will and our own thoughts and dreams for the future, which we feel slipping away from us.
Some are weeping, some are in despair, some are grieving their losses, and some are wondering how they will eat and feed their children.
Lord, we have become like Peter who was afraid, like James who questioned, like Thomas who refused to believe anyone but you, and like John who was afraid to declare his faith in case his elders rejected him…! - How hard uncertainty is in life! The hardest thing is when a person stands at a crossroads of many paths and doesn’t know which way to go, with no confidence and no road, feeling suspended between earth and heaven.
- Lord, increase our faith this night… For you showed us the way, but we don’t want to believe it. When your disciple asked you, “We do not know the way,” you answered: “I am the way, the truth and the life; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness.” We don’t want to believe that today is ours but tomorrow is in your hands; we don’t want to believe that what we are missing today you had given us freely, and we didn’t know its value: not time, not freedom, not work, not speech, not even the value of other people’s presence in our lives. We built walls in our heads and barricades in our homes, and we turned our tongues into rifles and our words into bullets for criticizing and blaming, instead of prayer, glorification and praise.
Forgive us, Lord! Forgive us our sins, and help us understand the value of everything we have lost.
My dear friends, on this night, like the night when the Lord gave up his spirit, the disciples in their fear gathered around the Virgin in the Upper Room and made a little domestic church, praying with her with courage, trust and faith, until the Lord appeared to them, gave them peace and strengthened them in faith. Come, let us gather as a family and pray like the apostles around the image of the Virgin, praying with her in trust and faith: she knows the way, and she knows how to teach us to pray, until the light of the Lord dawns and lifts the darkness of this time from us.
13 April 2020
Fr. Esber Antoun
Pastor of the parish of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, Fatqa, Lebanon
