PRAYERS TO OUR LADY

Poem Composed by St. Thomas Aquinas Seminarian

Paschal Victory

Remember, Lord, what is come upon us;
See our reproach and seeing take pity.
You brought us out of the land of Egypt,
And You established a covenant with us forever.
But we turned from Your paths.
Our fathers sinned and we tread firmly in their footsteps.
They abandoned us for corrupt living.
Our mothers are dishonored, like widows knowing no end of tears.
Our virgins and matrons have been brought to wantonness;
All are enslaved by lustful passion; we know not the sound of Your voice.
Thirsty we have become and weary in the shadows.
You have turned upon us in anger, visiting us with Your justice.
Joy, vital life of the city, is gone.
Only sorrow and mourning reign between the gates
Greedy wolves ravage the bones of our kings.
The citadel is a waste, desolate in misery,
A desert ruin, far from the eye of God.
Will He forget us forever? Will He abandon us to our misery?

In the beginning of the flowing
Of the present to the future,
Lord, You set us in a garden
And proposed to us a test;
Not a passing trifle,
Useless in the pageant of events,
But a test involving
The choice of life or death.
We failed, O Lord, and into chaos were reduced.
But before the darkness closed about us,
We heard the consoling echo
Of Your prophesying voice:
Tomorrow, I will come.

Now tomorrow is here
In all its cosmic fullness
And You have sent the Brightness of Your Glory
To save us from our folly.
He came to be with us,
He came to be of us.
He came to call us back
To the kingdom of His love.
We did not want to hear Him.
We thought we ruined His plan,
But God’s ways are not our ways,
In defeat He marches on to victory,
And His is the redeeming power
Of crucified love.

O mystery divine!
The greatest expression of His love
Is accomplished through death,
For in death alone
Can love express itself.
Only by the crucifying way
Of true loving in the dying
Could we at last learn
To live and love by death.
For on the cross and in the tomb
Christ laid down frail mortality
And early on that Easter morning
He rose again, victorious in triumph.
By His assuming immortality
Our frailty is vanquished.
And now by faith we learn
To live again for Him.

Son of man, tell me what it is you see.

I see dead corpses walking around like living men.
I see silver fountains of living water.
I see men shining as they rise up in spiritual rebirth.

The earth was dead and the soil parched of life,
But winter was passing and the great thaw upon us.
Spring surprised us, coming over the Rockies.

Spring is a season of regeneration,
A season of life returning to desiccated soil,
A season of expectation for the future harvest.

It was springtime, a holy spring,
When Christ was on the cross for us.
His blood was the seed of a mystical kingdom,
Built on a firm and everlasting foundation.

Bride of the Godhead,
Mother of those He saved,
You call out to us,
You invite us,
To your children you say:
Do penance, for the Kingdom of Heaven is upon you!
The time for the yearly Easter preparation has returned.

Christ suffered and He died,
And was buried in order to rise again.
And He calls us every year
To join Him through His Church
In a mystic dying and a mystic rebirth.

The Word was alone in the desert,
And the world went not out to see the Word,
Nor to hear Him speak.
The Word was the center of all things,
But the world sought rather the things
Than their sustaining center.
The Word remains in the desert,
And we, abandoning the world,
Go out into the desert
To see the Word
And enter into the spirit of His season:

A season of death, and a season of life,
A season of entrance into Christ’s passion.
A season, not of morbid isolation,
But of participation and of mystic regeneration,
A season of consummation
In the death which Christ died for us,
And in the life which now He lives for us
In glory.

This is the goal, the focus of our life:
For us to be born again
From the fount of living waters.
We will fast and abstain for forty days,
So that on the Paschal night
Our new birth will be real
To a higher sphere of existence.
Our human life will be absorbed in the divine.
is His

You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised.
You stoop down to us, but without compromise to Your truth.
You raise us up, but without violence to our liberty.
We are free to serve You, O Lord,
But our sufficiency is all from You.
You have made us for Yourself, O Lord.
And our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Redeeming Lamb!
Paschal Victim!
Make us die

So that we might live.

This poem was composed by one of the seminarians on the VERBUM team.

Poem Composed by St. Thomas Aquinas Seminarian

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