Lamentations, Chapter 5

(1) Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach. (2) Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. (3) We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows. (4) We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. (5) Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest. (6) We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread. (7) Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities. (8) Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand. (9) We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness. (10) Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine. (11) They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah. (12) Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured. (13) They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood. (14) The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick. (15) The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning. (16) The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned! (17) For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim. (18) Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it. (19) Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation. (20) Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? (21) Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. (22) But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.

A Random Prayer...

St. Blase

O glorious Saint Blase, who by thy martyrdom has left to the Church a precious witness to the faith, obtain for us the grace to preserve within ourselves this divine gift, and to defend, without human respect, both by word and example, the truth of that same faith, which is so wickedly attacked and slandered in these our times. Thou who didst miraculously cure a little child when it was at the point of death by reason of an affliction of the throat, grant us thy powerful protection in like misfortunes; and, above all, obtain for us the grace of Christian mortification together with a faithful observance of the precepts of the Church, which may keep us from offending Almighty God. Amen.

more prayers...