Ancient poetry and piety depicted You, Lord, as a pelican who pierces its breast with its beak to nourish its young. We are just such unfeathered chicks, gathering around the cross from which You pour forth the life-giving stream of blood. We drink so that we do not die. Our thirst urges us, Your love calls us, which wants nothing more than to give itself.
Over the lands, a desert wind has unleashed and with unparalleled ferocity, hatred blows. Nations – different families of a single humanity – line up against each other with a furious will to destroy one another. The science that was to enlighten us serves the bloodshed and prepares the weapons for it. Life is obsessed with universal destruction, and the future, instead of enticing, terrifies like an empty abyss. It seems to us that we are dying: amidst the explosions of threats, in the quarrel of false prophets who outsmart each other while turning their backs on the gospel.
Help us! Return! We are currently experiencing in body and heart the proof that without You we are just chaff tossed by the wind. Make our land – every land – a nation proclaiming Your blood of reconciliation and peace so that we may be an oasis of spiritual life in a shattered world. Bind together all nations to our love and solidarity and gather them around Your altar like the tribes of Israel around the one Ark of the Covenant. Free us from this burden of fear and extermination passion, this frenzy for human blood, this greed and cursed thirst by again extending the reach of Your redemptive work through Your blood.
Crowned heart of thorns, lift our spirit, crushed by the aggression of the senses. Be the one heart of the world. Extend to us Your hand nailed by the spike: for, as You see, we are sinking.
In our despondency, we will cling to Your cross. Crucify us with You, for when the man of hatred and guilt, who hides in our innermost being, is slain, we will rise with You from the dead – renewed, willing to make of our lives a dwelling place for Your peaceful presence. Cross of Christ, save us, Blood of the Lord, heal us, hide us in Your wounds, wash away our filth from us.
Adapted from: The Blood of Christ (Igino Giordani, 1937)
