So this week I was reading some comments from a priest I highly admire, Fr. George Rutler, who is pastor of the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in New York City, where at this time there are a lot of people in hospital, so many that the United States Navy sent a naval hospital called the Comfort to help out.  This ship was actually called in during the 9/11 disaster and Fr. Rutler remembered it well because his parish was near the epicenter of the disaster.  And as Fr. Rutler was looking out his rectory window at this naval hospital floating by, with memories of 9/11 flashing in his mind, he reflected on the current extraordinary situation of the closure of churches for reasons of public health during the current virus pandemic, and wrote this:

“With powerful shock this Lent, mortifications have been imposed by circumstances beyond human control and not chosen by the exercise of free will. Now the Passion will be more powerful, because the Gates of the Temple are closed.”

In the First Holy Week, “on the Mount of Olives, three of [the apostles] slept a depressed sleep, haunted by anxious confusion”.

And then, after Our Lord was betrayed and taken away and eventually crucified and buried all the “the holy apostles thought themselves deprived of the One they hoped might be the Messiah”.

In other words at the time the people of God felt abandoned.

He continued by saying:

“Varying circumstances in every generation have given the impression of being abandoned by the One who had promised to be with us always.”

And then Fr. Rutler closed his reflection with a quote from Blaise Pascal who said:

“Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world. We should not sleep during this entire time.”

I found this last statement particularly striking.  “We should not be sleep during this entire time”.

Indeed.

He was not talking about physical sleep, but of the dullness of mind that so often sets in when our priorities are in the wrong place.

As  I have said to people who have been coming here for confession throughout the past couple weeks, we need to look at this time of trial in a supernatural way.

God is permitting this.

There is not much we can do about it.  We therefore need to supernaturalize these circumstances and take advantage of them for our spiritual benefit.

Remember that Lent is a preparation, where we look to the death of Christ and His resurrection.  But our whole lives are in a sense a kind of Lent.   Because there will be a death as well, and after that death, if we are united to Christ, we can hope for a resurrection.  So we should look at our entire lives as a preparation, just as Lent is a preparation.

Again, Fr. Rutler says that “we should not sleep during this entire time”.  In other words, we should be alert.  We should be careful.  We should be keeping vigil.  Our senses should not be dulled to our first duty of prayer and penance during this time.   We should not be spending hours of our day on the internet, looking for the latest answers to our questions, constantly searching for the latest headlines, the latest controversies, the latest conspiracies.

My dear parishioners, the answers to your questions and to mine are found in Jesus Christ, they are not found on the internet!

You would perhaps spend much more productive time in God’s sight by focusing more attention on your life of prayer, on your sins and their consequences, on the duties of your present state of life.  Sending an email to Fr. Deprey at two in the morning is not a good sign!

The World Wide Web is well described – because it is a web, and on every web there is a spider, trying to catch you and suck the life out of you.

You need to be taking care of your spiritual life!  What are you doing with your day? What are we really doing with all this unexpected time God has given us to prepare for the great Feast of Easter? It would seem that most of us have more time on our hands these days, given the circumstances.

St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “it is now the hour for us to rise from sleep. For now our salvation is nearer than when we believed. The night is passed and the day is at hand.”

In the confusion and periodic panic of our current circumstances, we need to each set our priorities this week.   What will they be?  Have we perhaps taken Our Lord for granted?  It is so true that so often we don’t appreciate something until it is taken away from us.

We know that Holy Week is the most important week for us as Catholics and yet we find ourselves, in a sense, cast out, like the public penitents of the early church, who had to do public penance for their sins during Lent before being re-admitted to the Holy Temple.

Is this a message we understand?

This is indeed a time for mourning.  This is a time for true Penance.  Our sins have caused the wounds of Christ.  Our sins have nailed Him to the cross.  Our sins, are the cause of death and destruction and pandemic.

We must, as St. Ignatius of Loyola urges, make an effort to grow sad and lament because Christ goes to His death.  He hides Himself, He hides His divinity, desiring only to suffer in order to atone for each and every sin you and I have committed.  Now is the time for self-examination, now is the time to ask yourself the question:  If Christ died for me, what will I do for Christ?

I would like to share with you an act of contrition which one of our parishioners shared with me a few months ago.  I was quite taken by it as I had never heard it before.  I thought it was so beautiful and that you might find it to be of benefit as you seek this week to reflect over your life and bring yourself to true contrition and renewed repentance.  It is best read slowly:

Forgive me O Lord,

forgive my sins;

the sins of my youth,

the sins of my age,

the sins of my soul,

the sins of my body;

my idle sins,

my serious voluntary sins;

the sins I know,

the sins I do not know;

the sins I have concealed for so long,

and which are now hidden from my memory.

I am truly sorry for every sin, mortal and venial,

for all the sins of my childhood up to the present hour.

I know my sins have wounded Thy Tender Heart,

O My Saviour, let me be freed from the bonds of evil through

the most bitter Passion of My Redeemer.

Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned.  Amen.