We extend special words of recognition and gratitude to doctors, nurses, all hospital and medical personnel, first-responders and all civil services. We are inspired by your dedication and heroic self-sacrifice. Christ the Healer works through you to save lives, including ours. We are uplifted by the steadfast service of priests and the exemplary responsibility of the faithful. We thank our clergy and all the baptized for their creative responses to the challenges faced by our Church in the United States. “We give thanks to God always for you all, constantly mentioning you in our prayers, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Th 1:2-3).

We are inspired by the resolve and resourcefulness of teachers, small entrepreneurs and business leaders, grand-parents, and parents along with our beautiful children. All of us have been called to adjust our daily lives to unprecedented circumstances. The entire globe, together and all at once, has lived in consciousness of real danger. It was more than danger: there was death. We all know somebody who was taken away from us by COVID-19. Among our ten active and retired bishops in the US, Metropolitan Stephen Sulyk of blessed memory was infected and called to the Lord. Two others endured a grievous bout with the ubiquitous disease and, gratefully, survived. We express our condolences, solidarity in loss, and sense of pain to those who had no chance properly to say good-bye.

And yet, our fundamental and overriding sentiment is that of hope. We celebrated the Resurrection and the Ascension of the Lord with His body. We rejoice in the Holy Spirit who descends in a special way when life is hard to where it really hurts — to the core of human suffering and tragedy.

Seven decades ago, our brothers and sisters in Christ, members of our Church in Ukraine, were enduring death-dealing persecution: all our bishops had been killed or imprisoned, the religious and priests with their families had been deported to Siberia. For Stalin, God was dead, and Christians were to disappear in death also. In 1947, from a gulag prison camp, the head of our Church, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, wrote an amazing letter for the Feast of Pentecost to his faithful, in fact to all of us. A handwritten copy arrived in western Ukraine from Siberia and was found in 2003, more than a half-century later, in a capsule, cemented into a wall in the Studite monastery in Univ. This epistle is the voice of a true shepherd who shares the sufferings of his flock yet yearns to offer a word of hope. Hope in the Holy Spirit.