Jennifer Geach a Parishioner, suggests that we should be doubling our prayer efforts for an end to the pandemic…
In the most recent lockdown, I have been virtually present with the Dominicans in Oxford. This community does something which ought not to be striking, but is. After the sermon, the celebrant
offers a prayer (the same one each day, not an extempore effort) asking God to ‘deliver us from the ‘pestilence which currently afflicts us.’ It seems to me that we should all be doing this, both in
our private prayer, and in public liturgy. This is not an exercise in superstition, but a true practice of our faith. We know that ‘Our God is in the heavens, and does whatever he wills’, and that ‘he hears the cry of the poor’. Such prayer is also an act of obedience to Our Lord; for he tells us to ask, to knock, even to be importunate, like the woman faced with the unjust judge. We lived such comfy lives before Covid that we may have had an illusion of independence, an illusion that we were masters of our fate, and that science and technology would provide an answer to all our problems. How utterly changed things are! We are being told that even after we are mostly vaccinated, the pandemic disease will continue to restrict our interactions with one another, our freedom of movement and perhaps even divine worship. And while technology provides us with substitutes for these things, so that lockdown is made more tolerable, nevertheless the pandemic has given us a forceful demonstration of how pitiably weak and helpless we are.
When I was quite young, I happened to overhear a woman praying before a statue of the Sacred Heart, saying over and over ‘Jesus, let me get another job!’. This pandemic should make us cry
out to God for our needs; like that woman, we should be simply and directly asking God to save us, and bring an end to this affliction. We might say: ‘Please God, free us from this pandemic.
Cure those who are sick; receive those who have died into your heavenly kingdom. Comfort those who mourn. Support those who are working in the health service, and those who labour to provide
us with essentials. Above all, O God, have mercy on us.’ For the present situation is a sharp reminder of how little control we have over our world, or even our own lives; a reminder that we
are utterly dependent on God, that absent from his merciful care we have nothing and can do nothing. I am not suggesting that we stop taking physical precautions; but that we should
allow God to speak to us through this present trouble. As C.S. Lewis put it “…pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our
pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” May our present agony rouse up a deeper faith, a greater love, and more willing service to God and our neighbour.
