The Fourteenth Station: Jesus Is Laid in the Tomb

​This photograph was taken by Joshua Irwandi for National Geographic on April 18, 2020 at a hospital in Indonesia. The body of a suspected COVID-19 victim has been sealed in some sort of cloth and plastic wrap turning it into a modern-day mummy awaiting the tomb.
 
We are approaching 550,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States and 3 million worldwide. For more than a year now we have been gripped in a sort-of perpetual Holy Saturday—we’re hidden away in the upper room with the doors locked and the curtains drawn. Our lives have been disrupted and devastated. We are mourning. We are afraid. We honestly don’t know if anything will ever be all right again.
 
And we have faith. And we have hope.   
 
Let us pray with the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama:
 
Jesus of the unexpected,
for at least some of your life
this was not how you imagined its end.
Yet even at the end,
you kept steady in your conviction.
Jesus, keep us steady.
Jesus, keep us steady.
Because, Jesus, keep us steady.
Amen.