A continued blessed and joyous Easter to all our readers, on this second day of eight days of solemnities, each day an ‘Easter Sunday’ – then another month of the Easter season, until Pentecost, and the great feasts that follow: Pentecost, Ascension, Corpus Christi, and the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
I was going to write about the lockdown in Ontario, called for right before Easter, wouldn’t you know, (taking effect Holy Saturday), just as the last one was called for at Christmas – but didn’t have the heart over the Triduum. One might think that whoever’s behind this doesn’t want us to go to Mass, but that might be ‘conspiratorial’. Where I live, attendance at any religious service is capped at 15%, which is better than a lot of other places (in Ireland, public liturgies are banned outright), and for that so many are grateful. I suppose we must thank God for blessings great and small, but be sure to thank God, and not our benighted leaders, who have no right to ‘give or take’ anything at all, least of the Liturgy and the Sacraments; everything God has created and given most definitely does not belong to them, and that includes our freedom, most of all the religious variety. What power do our political potentates have over the Pantocrator? None, none at all.
Lockdowns don’t work – the evidence seems overwhelming; places without them (Florida, Texas and so on) are thriving. It seems common sense that the best way to stave off the virus is lots of fresh air and sunshine – ultraviolet rays kill it – vitamin D, regular exercise, a healthy immune system, and so on. Being stuck alone indoors obviates just about all of these. It’s unhealthy and abnormal, and one wonders why they can’t see that; or, perhaps, they do.
Besides the physical debility, the psychological and societal distress these disproportionate Covidian measures are causing is becoming more and more evident. One friend of mine mentioned she was watching a film made in the 1940’s, and was surprised – just for an instant, mind you – that someone walked into a public establishment, and she thought, ‘hey, he’s not wearing a mask!’, and then thought, ‘wait a minute…’. And I look with nostalgia at old college videos and photos – and by ‘old’ is just over a year ago, but seeming aeons in the past – of people arm in arm, in groups, playing games, dancing, laughing, singing, frolicking and having fun…
And that is small cheese compared to what Paula Adamick points out in her article today, with children and young people in particular traumatized as they grow up in this milieu of masked and isolated madness, knowing nothing different, their education and formation in tatters, and with no end in sight. And now many even of our Church leaders are urging us all to get vaccinated, even the young who are not at risk, regardless of the deleterious consequences, evidence for which is piling up in Canada and across the globe. I for one am glad Canada is ‘falling behind’ in its vaccination program; this is one thing I hope fails infallibly.
Yet for those who are hot-to-trot for the prophylactic, placing their hopes therein, as one woman who said she would get it just so she could go back to seeing her Broadway shows, think that even universal vaccination will bring us back to normal, if what was pre-Covid, ‘normal’? Fauci – he of the triple-mask – is now claiming the vaccine may not even work, or work infallibly, and we will have to continue with the face-coverings and distancing, the lockdowns and isolation, the police checks and religious restrictions, the whole totalitarian regime, into the distant, distant future, since there are so many ‘variants’ of the virus, which we could – and he should – have predicted months ago. The abnormal will become, has become, the normal.
The justification is that we are going ‘kill someone’s grandmother’ by not wearing a mask, or keeping perpetually isolated and distant from each other. Besides the lack of evidence for such, and that they may well be giving said grandmothers a false sense of security as they handle cans of soup in the grocery store already handled by thirty other people; and that, regardless, we risk killing a lot more than grandmothers every time we get behind the wheel of a two-ton vehicle moving at 60 miles per hour – besides all that, what are we to say of the purported intention of our medical overlords, whose constantly ‘developing’ diktats have supplanted anything resembling ‘law’, or whoever is standing behind them, intended to ‘protect the lives’ of those few – those very, very few – who are at mortal risk from Covid, when, as a profession, they are up to their elbows in the blood of unborn children, and now the vulnerable elderly and sick. Yes, it may only be a minority who actually carry out the nefarious deeds of abortion and euthanasia, but a majority – and soon all, as they weed out anyone remotely ‘pro-life’ or even ‘conservative’ from med school – still refer for these procedures, and hence are morally implicated. In some ways, it’s worse, as being more cowardly and complaisant, ‘washing their hands’, like Pilate, while handing over the innocent.
Those with ‘eyes to see’ saw through this a while back, and we must all wake up – that is, become ‘woke’ in the true sense – before it’s too late, if it’s not already. We’re in the midst of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the world’s falling asleep, lulled by the droning ubiquitous propaganda of modern media, waking up zombified into the dark cave of obeisance and servility, unbecoming to what it means to be ‘human’. A deep and abiding fear is being inculcated into us, fear of a shape-shifting virus, yes, but also, and more apposite, fear of each other; and fear is not that far removed from hatred.
The only way past such inchoate, paralyzing fear is to walk through it, not just with courage, but more so with love. Perfect love casts out fear. For to ‘love’ means to will the good, and our true good can only be seen ‘sub specie aeternitatis‘, that is, ‘under the aspect of eternity’. We will never – I mean never – be free unless we can see who we really are, made not for this world, but the next, for life with God forever, and we have to ‘pass over’ the door of death to get there.
Hence, there is no true Life – that is life eternal – without suffering, which must be faced square-on. Overwhelming and irrational fear, a result of an inordinate ‘love of this life’, against which Saint Paul warns, is at the root of our current malaise. And ‘love of this life’ in practice means love of one’s own life, to eke out another day, keeping ‘safe’, regardless of what that means for others, even from the remote risk of risk, even if it means giving up every one of our freedoms, and crushing the future of our young people, inflicting trauma and mayhem for society, as we slide into the hellish abyss of Marxist socialism and totalitarianism. They’re not even coy about it anymore, as BLM and other nefarious groups gleefully sing its praises, along with the paradoxical need for revolution and violence; and all the while the government repeats in endless hushed, insistent, tones to ‘stay safe, stay safe, stay safe…’.
Quite the toxic stew, and one wonders where it’s all headed. Those resisting these draconian, disproportionate measures are not selfish and self-absorbed, and I’m rather tired of being accused of such by those who want us all to cuddle into the soft arms of the government taking over and controlling every aspect of our lives. Like a boa constrictor, this might seem innocuous at first, and not all that bad, even sort of comforting in a way; but would soon be much regretted.
Christ, through His Church, has the answer, which is to live each day on the brink of eternity, to see this life as a preparation for death, in freedom and courage, whether we be given length of days, or a brief time herein. A society that has lost that perspective, trapped within the confines of this temporal existence, is doomed to a perpetual living death of fear and despair.
Courage and hope, mes frères et souers, in the truth, which sets us free.