Repentance

² Even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;

¹³ Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God. For gracious and merciful is he, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and relenting in punishment.

¹⁴ Perhaps he will again relent and leave behind him a blessing, Offerings and libations for the LORD, your God.

¹⁵ Blow the trumpet in Zion! proclaim a fast, call an assembly;

¹⁶ Gather the people, notify the congregation; Assemble the elders, gather the children and the infants at the breast; Let the bridegroom quit his room
and the bride her chamber.

¹⁷ Between the porch and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep, And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people, and make not your heritage a reproach, with the nations ruling over them! Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”

¹⁸ Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land and took pity on his people.

When we heard this reading from the prophet Joel at Holy Mass on Ash Wednesday this year, we had absolutely no idea how literally it would be fulfilled by the third week of Lent!  On second thought, it is because we cannot fulfill all that we suffer the most.  We are forbidden to “gather the people, notify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children.  And so, even more do we and our priests weep before the altar, saying, “Spare O Lord your people…”  As in Old Testament times, when God had to afflict His people in order to bring them back to His ways, so now we suffer His just punishment for our sins.  We are mindful of the intense suffering of all around us:  the sick, the dying, the financially ruined, the fearful.  In the spirit of the Prophets, let us pray, bringing our 21^st century pain to the all merciful God:

O God, You are just and all Your ways are true.

We have sinned and transgressed Your covenant.

Our liturgies have been more entertainment than worship,

So now we have no Sacrifice.

Our communions have been thoughtless, faithless, even sacrilegious,

Now we have no communion.

We have profaned your Sabbaths with business and profit,

Now we are unemployed.

We have indulged our pleasures beyond Your law

Behold, now we are all monastics

And the vows have new names:

Poverty is called stock market crash,

Chastity is social distancing,

Obedience is executive order,

And Enclosure is quarantine.

Some of our clerics have been abusers,

Now all are suspended, innocent and guilty alike.

We have been indifferent to the filth of sin,

We wash our hands, over and over again,

But we do not sanitize our hearts.

We thought we controlled the universe,

Could even change our very nature,

Yet we cannot contain a virus.

We have murdered tiny babes in their mothers’ wombs

Now we panic before a microscopic foe.

But You, O God are a merciful God,

Slow to anger and rich in kindness.

You have said that even if our sins are like scarlet,

They can become white as snow.

Come back to us,

And turn us back to You,

That we may offer again true sacrifice on your altar.

Wash us in Your Precious Blood.

Give us this day our daily Bread,

Lest this desert journey be too long for us

And we perish on the way.