O Lord,
I cry to you from the depths of my heart,
I feel the darkness surrounding me, paralysing me with fear.
The forces of darkness are great and they threaten me.
I feel abandoned and prone to despair.
Lord, I offer you the isolation experienced by countless people around the world.
This is the voice of the vulnerable isolated from the rest of their loved ones;
The voice of the grandparents yearning for the boisterous presence of their grandchildren;
The voice of the patients who are stigmatised because of their condition;
The voice of the dying patients unable to communicate with their doctors and nurses;
unable to feel the presence of their loved ones. Dying alone.
The voice of healthcare workers in a frantic race to save lives, risking theirs in the process;
The voice of families affected by the loss of jobs amid looming uncertainty;
The voice of the various people suffering physically and mentally;
The voice of the broken and abused;
The voice of those who are humiliated and cast aside;
The voice of the perpetrator of heinous, in need of redemption.
In my suffering I plead to you,
I become aware of myself, all in tatters,
I see a reflection of myself, in stark nakedness.
Where am I? O Lord, where are you?
Lord, I do not want to be asleep and oblivious to all that is happening around me.
I accompany you during your ordeal, aware that I am bent by the burden of my afflictions.
Yet, these afflictions seem to make me more aware of life itself. I want to be awake to the experience of my encounter with you.
In my suffering I can really feel the presence of your suffering and we feel peace. Your answer is the peace in my heart even in the midst of all this tumult tossing around. The isolation in Gethsemane at that night becomes the consolation to my isolation and its woes. This experience also dispels overwhelming fear in order to transmute it into something greater than myself, with your eternal accompaniment.
Your, experience, O Lord, is the embrace of God's love for humanity in its vulnerability. I realise that our vulnerability is a blessing; it makes us human and makes us see ourselves as we really are. Our vulnerability can be the platform of our innermost encounter with God. It is also the platform for solidarity. The pandemonium unleashed by the pandemic has also been an occasion for countless initiatives taken together by different nations.
I realise that God's kenotic love shines through the deepest abyss of fear. I feel empowered to bring about change because I let the Spirit of God work in me.
I want to bend down in total abandonment, not in sinking despair! Lord, give me the strength and the faith to look beyond that is solely visible. Grace me with the faith which rends the veil of my isolation in order to look at the beyond; at the stillness of your presence in my heart. Let me realise that I am already free if I look deeper into myself. I am free of any shackles because you reside in me. I am free not from my ordeals themselves but from the fear which paralysed me into inaction. I realise that faith is not the love of suffering. As you suffered, you continue suffering in the plight of humanity. Yet, faith gives me the strength to transfigure suffering as you, Lord, redeemed it on the cross.
The Gethsemane moment in my life should be a moment which propels me forward, through the many ordeals I have to face, towards the Resurrection. Just as you, Lord, submitted your will to that of the Father, and you proceeded towards the Passion and the Crucifixion, bearing and nailing our sins on the cross, forward towards the Resurrection. Give me the faith to look deeper than that which surrounds me, so that I can live life more fully, living the present, yet oriented towards the future, till the time when I am embraced by the fullness of glorious eternity and become subsumed by it. Give me the strength to let go of the my isolation; most importantly to remain fully awake and to commend myself to your will, to freely collaborate with you in your divine plan for the redemption of the cosmos.
Let your will be done.
