I wish I had included this petition in my intercessions on Friday, November 13th. I do from time to time.
Maybe we all should, every day. Sadly, there is not a day when that prayer would not envelope someone.
Yesterday, it would have enveloped over a hundred people in Paris. And maybe the prayer would have allowed those who had prayed it a deeper sense of communion with the suffering that unfolded in the city.
Thank you, Teresa! This prayer, and others like it, are timeless treasures that we only realize when the affliction they pray about is thrust in our faces. I am very distressed about what happened in Paris.
“A subitanea et improvisa morte, libera nos, Domine;
from a sudden and unprovided death, deliver us O Lord”.
Imagine *
Voices now are raised,
in calls for retribution,
tears are shed where blood
has stained mid-evening
streets, long broken tears
of shattered glass.
Cries caught across the night,
of those lifted by medics
on their way to hospital
in this European city.
Countless times, the normality of life
has been fractured in other places, in
Market squares, in streets, on buses,
at the gates of embassies, in mosques.
But this?
A city in the West, haphazard terror
on a Friday in November.
*A pianist arrived on Saturday afternoon
outside the Bataclan Concert Hall in Paris
and played John Lennon’s song Imagine.
Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord and let your perpetual light shine upon those gone ahead of us.
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