This is Holy Family School of Faith.

So let us begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And let's call to mind all those that we've promised to pray for.

Our first meditation, we've heard ad nauseum from pundits and health officials and politicians about the coronavirus.

But what does God have to say?

That is why Pope Francis stood alone in St. Peter Square last Friday in the rain, to tell us what God had to say, so that we might listen to God over all the other voices.

The Pope read from Mark Chapter 5, in which Jesus and the disciples were at sea and a terrible

storm raged raged and Jesus was asleep in the helm

of the ship.

When evening had come, Francis begins with, the Gospel passage we have just heard began like this.

For weeks now, it has been evening.

Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities.

It has taken over our lives,

filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void that stops everything

as it passes by. We feel it in the air. We notice it in people's gestures. Their glances give them away. We find ourselves

afraid and lost. Like the disciples in the Gospel, we were caught off guard by an unexpected turbulent storm.

We have realized that we are all on the same boat, fragile and disoriented.

Just like those disciples who spoke anxiously

with one voice saying, we are perishing.

It is easy to recognize ourselves in this story.

What is harder to understand is Jesus attitude.

While his disciples are quite naturally alarmed and desperate. He rests in the stern, in the part of the

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