Remember God
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” —Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
We must remember God in all we do,
And keep Him always in our hearts and thoughts.
Repent our sins and strive for what is true,
And thus survive all that the devil’s wrought.
Dark lies from hell have settled all around,
Demonic shadows have obscured the light.
Disasters now abound to take us down,
When we’ve forgotten everything that’s right.
It takes a will of diamond to stand tall
And keep our faith in God to guide our life,
To cleanse our souls, recover from our fall…
And put an end to all our moral strife.
The words of Solzhenitsyn* still ring true,
So let’s remember God in all we do.
*Solzhenitsyn’s speech “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag,” given upon receiving the Templeton Prize in 1983.
The following two sonnets by Margaret Coats are from her sequence “Mass in Time of Pestilence,” which meditate on English/Latin text that can be viewed here.
Offertory
Numbers 16:46-48
Between the living and the dead he stood,
The high priest, golden censer in his hand,
And made pure aromatic clouds expand
In sacrifice of gum from precious wood.
By sacred rite and prayers prescribed, he could
Appease the wrath of God sent on the band
Who raged all to be priests, as in the land
Where all were slaves in equal brotherhood.
His aim achieved, the guilty were released;
Their throes, inflicted by the Lord, soon ceased.
This present sacrifice, O Lord, accept:
Let it absolve us from our guilt profound,
And bring us forth, in soul and body sound,
From ill preparedness in which we slept.
Communion
Luke 6:17-19
A multitude of ailing, troubled folk
From cities, hills, and plains beside the sea
Had come to listen as the Master spoke,
But wanted healing more than prophecy.
To captives held in vile dependency
By demons of unclean intelligence,
His goodly nature granted clemency,
And rehabilitated sentiments
Of anger, hatred, lust, and insolence
Through nurture adequate to sweeten gall
Or cool infection’s fevered influence,
For virtue came from Him to heal them all.
O, free us too from terrors of thy wrath,
And in thy mercy make secure our path.
Thank you, both, for these strong and well articulated appeals to reason in times of mayhem.
Thank you, Damian, for recognizing that reason and faith speak with the same voice.
Thanks, Damian!
Communion reads like Holy Scripture.
“Offertory’ prompts thoughts of how ill prepared many of us are if sudden death catches us in the near future. May we at least pray someone, if we languish in purgatory, will think to find a Priest willing to offer a High Mass, with incense abounding, for the release of our souls detained there because of our own neglect.
Phyllis, these are certainly high compliments: likening a poet’s work to Scripture, and drawing a personal application from that work. Thank you!