ARCHBISHOP VIGANÒ’S POWERFUL LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP: Eternal Struggle Between Good And Evil Playing Out Right Now

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò warns the president that the current crises over the coronavirus pandemic and the George Floyd riots are a part of the eternal spiritual struggle between the forces of good and evil. 

Sat Jun 6, 2020 - 11:59 am EST

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/archbishop-viganos-powerful-letter-to-president-trump-eternal-struggle-between-good-and-evil-playing-out-right-now

And on You Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnd4QWpWJPM&feature=youtu.be

Mr. President,

In recent months we have been witnessing the formation of two opposing sides that I would call Biblical: the children of light and the children of darkness. The children of light constitute the most conspicuous part of humanity, while the children of darkness represent an absolute minority. And yet the former are the object of a sort of discrimination which places them in a situation of moral inferiority with respect to their adversaries, who often hold strategic positions in government, in politics, in the economy and in the media. In an apparently inexplicable way, the good are held hostage by the wicked and by those who help them either out of self-interest or fearfulness.

These two sides, which have a Biblical nature, follow the clear separation between the offspring of the Woman and the offspring of the Serpent. On the one hand there are those who, although they have a thousand defects and weaknesses, are motivated by the desire to do good, to be honest, to raise a family, to engage in work, to give prosperity to their homeland, to help the needy, and, in obedience to the Law of God, to merit the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, there are those who serve themselves, who do not hold any moral principles, who want to demolish the family and the nation, exploit workers to make themselves unduly wealthy, foment internal divisions and wars, and accumulate power and money: for them the fallacious illusion of temporal well-being will one day – if they do not repent – yield to the terrible fate that awaits them, far from God, in eternal damnation.

In society, Mr. President, these two opposing realities co-exist as eternal enemies, just as God and Satan are eternal enemies. And it appears that the children of darkness – whom we may easily identify with the deep state which you wisely oppose and which is fiercely waging war against you in these days – have decided to show their cards, so to speak, by now revealing their plans. They seem to be so certain of already having everything under control that they have laid aside that circumspection that until now had at least partially concealed their true intentions. The investigations already under way will reveal the true responsibility of those who managed the Covid emergency not only in the area of health care but also in politics, the economy, and the media. We will probably find that in this colossal operation of social engineering there are people who have decided the fate of humanity, arrogating to themselves the right to act against the will of citizens and their representatives in the governments of nations.

June 7, 2020 Holy Trinity Sunday

We will also discover that the riots in these days were provoked by those who, seeing that the virus is inevitably fading and that the social alarm of the pandemic is waning, necessarily have had to provoke civil disturbances, because they would be followed by repression which, although legitimate, could be condemned as an unjustified aggression against the population. The same thing is also happening in Europe, in perfect synchrony. It is quite clear that the use of street protests is instrumental to the purposes of those who would like to see someone elected in the upcoming presidential elections who embodies the goals of the deep state and who expresses those goals faithfully and with conviction. It will not be surprising if, in a few months, we learn once again that hidden behind these acts of vandalism and violence there are those who hope to profit from the dissolution of the social order so as to build a world without freedom: Solve et Coagula, as the Masonic adage teaches.

Although it may seem disconcerting, the opposing alignments I have described are also found in religious circles. There are faithful Shepherds who care for the flock of Christ, but there are also mercenary infidels who seek to scatter the flock and hand the sheep over to be devoured by ravenous wolves. It is not surprising that these mercenaries are allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light: just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God. Thus the Invisible Enemy, whom good rulers fight against in public affairs, is also fought against by good shepherds in the ecclesiastical sphere. It is a spiritual battle, which I spoke about in my recent Appeal which was published on May 8.

For the first time, the United States has in you a President who courageously defends the right to life, who is not ashamed to denounce the persecution of Christians throughout the world, who speaks of Jesus Christ and the right of citizens to freedom of worship. Your participation in the March for Life, and more recently your proclamation of the month of April as National Child Abuse Prevention Month, are actions that confirm which side you wish to fight on. And I dare to believe that both of us are on the same side in this battle, albeit with different weapons.

For this reason, I believe that the attack to which you were subjected after your visit to the National Shrine of Saint John Paul II is part of the orchestrated media narrative which seeks not to fight racism and bring social order, but to aggravate dispositions; not to bring justice, but to legitimize violence and crime; not to serve the truth, but to favor one political faction. And it is disconcerting that there are Bishops – such as those whom I recently denounced – who, by their words, prove that they are aligned on the opposing side. They are subservient to the deep state, to globalism, to aligned thought, to the New World Order which they invoke ever more frequently in the name of a universal brotherhood which has nothing Christian about it, but which evokes the Masonic ideals of those want to dominate the world by driving God out of the courts, out of schools, out of families, and perhaps even out of churches.

The American people are mature and have now understood how much the mainstream media does not want to spread the truth but seeks to silence and distort it, spreading the lie that is useful for the purposes of their masters. However, it is important that the good – who are the majority – wake up from their sluggishness and do not accept being deceived by a minority of dishonest people with unavowable purposes. It is necessary that the good, the children of light, come together and make their voices heard. What more effective way is there to do this, Mr. President, than by prayer, asking the Lord to protect you, the United States, and all of humanity from this enormous attack of the Enemy? Before the power of prayer, the deceptions of the children of darkness will collapse, their plots will be revealed, their betrayal will be shown, their frightening power will end in nothing, brought to light and exposed for what it is: an infernal deception.
Mr. President, my prayer is constantly turned to the beloved American nation, where I had the privilege and honor of being sent by Pope Benedict XVI as Apostolic Nuncio. In this dramatic and decisive hour for all of humanity, I am praying for you and also for all those who are at your side in the government of the United States. I trust that the American people are united with me and you in prayer to Almighty God.

United against the Invisible Enemy of all humanity, I bless you and the First Lady, the beloved American nation, and all men and women of good will.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò
Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana
Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

Miraculous prayer to the Holy Infant of Atocha

This particular devotion to the Child Jesus is known for its miraculous power.

Philip Kosloski

Christians in Spain and Mexico have a long history of devotion to the Child Jesus, often creating statues or images depicting Jesus during his childhood. One such image comes from Atocha, Spain, and shows Jesus as a child, dressed in traditional pilgrimage attire.

The Infant Jesus of Atocha eventually became associated with protecting travelers from danger, but also various other miracles. For example, in Mexico there is a story of a woman in jail who prayed to the Infant Jesus for consolation. The story is briefly recalled in a Novena Booklet.

[S]he prayed with faith in her heart to the sacred Child of Atocha, who kindly listened to her and took her out of that captivity. In all the time that she had lived there, there was nobody that would defend her until the Holy Child of Atocha, dressed as a young prince, visited her in that prison, and gave her some bread in the name of his mother, saying to her that same afternoon she would be taken in front of the judge who would release her from custody

For this and many other reasons, the Infant Jesus of Atocha is invoked around the world. Below is a popular prayer to the Child Jesus that can be prayed for any intention.

O, Miraculous Infant Jesus of Atocha,

Cast thy merciful look upon my troubled heart, so inclined to pity.

Be softened by my prayer and grant me the favor I now ardently implore of Thee.

(mention your petition here.)

Take from me all affliction and despair, all trial and misfortune with which I am laden.

For thy Sacred Infancy’s sake, send me now thy consolation and aid and grace.

That I may praise thee, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, forever. Amen.

O Divine Child of Atocha, hear my prayer and grant my petition!

https://aleteia.org/2020/03/31/miraculous-prayer-to-the-holy-infant-of-atocha/

Covid-19: Natural Disaster or Supernatural Sign?

William Kilpatrick

Whenever it began to thunder, my older brother and I, having reached a certain level of “sophistication,” liked to quip that “the gods must be angry.”  This was said in a knowing way and was meant to demonstrate our superiority to younger kids, and also to primitive people who didn’t realize that thunder could be completely explained by science.

Poor, benighted savages.  If only they knew a little science, they would have realized that the gods had nothing to do with it. Or so we thought. But, of course, we didn’t think very deeply about the matter. Science understood the mechanics of thunder and lightning, and that was all one needed to know. But never mind about the straw-man primitive gods that we airily dismissed; how about the God?  The God who created the heavens and the earth, the rain, the clouds, the ions and the atoms?  Having created the laws of nature, wouldn’t He be able to make natural processes serve His purposes?

These thoughts occurred to me while reading an address by Catholic historian Roberto de Mattei.  De Mattei points out that “God… has the power to arrange the mechanism of the forces and laws of nature in such a way as to produce a phenomenon according to the needs of his justice and mercy…Whoever has a supernatural spirit does not stop at the superficial level of things but seeks to understand the hidden design of God…”

Professor Mattei’s talk was, in part, a response to a statement by Cardinal Angelo Scola who denied that the coronavirus epidemic had anything to do with divine punishment for sin.  “One thing is certain,” said Scola, “this virus was not sent by God to punish sinful humanity. It is an effect of nature…”

Cardinal Scola was, in effect, rejecting the “primitive” view that “the gods must be angry.”  But does he think that God has nothing to do with Covid-19 or other natural catastrophes?  After all, even the dictionaries define a natural disaster—a hurricane, flood, or wildfire—as an “act of God,” and the term is still widely used in legal documents.  If natural disasters can have a supernatural dimension—if they are acts of God as well as acts of nature—what is His purpose in allowing them?

Commenting on Professor Mattei’s address, theologian Peter Kwasniewski observes:

This ‘hidden design’ includes God’s chastisement of human beings for sins, which pertain to all of us, since we are all implicated in the fall of Adam, and no man… can claim to be without personal sin.

Even if we have no serious sins, we are all under the same judgment because of our relation to Adam. And it’s likely that our sins may be more serious than we think. We may not bear direct responsibility for the sexualization of society or for corruption in the Church, but how much have we really done to stop it? Have we chosen to look the other way? Has cowardice kept us from speaking out?

Even if you have done your level best to right the wrongs in Church and society, there is another possibility to consider—the possibility that the situation has gotten so completely out of control that only a divine intervention can turn it around. Indeed, having seen just how desperate the situation has become, many Catholics have been praying for a divine intervention. But what did we expect it to look like? Firebolts from heaven targeted to consume only wicked cardinals, corrupt politicians, and porn industry magnates?

The possibility that Covid-19, besides being “an effect of nature,” is also a divine chastisement for the sins of many, raises some uncomfortable questions. Primarily, it makes us wonder if God is a good God.  But, as theologian Fr. Thomas Weinandy explains, it is precisely because God is good and because he wants us to be “holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1: 4-5), that his cures for what ails us are far from painless:

Because he is goodness itself and love itself, God loves all that is good, and therefore, by his very nature, he must hate what is evil…If God tolerated or excused evil, or if he thought it to be of little account, he would not be all-good and all-loving, for he would sanction and so participate in evil itself…

Many people, of course, will still balk at the possibility that an epidemic or an earthquake is a divine chastisement; but they may be open to the possibility that it is a divine reminder—that God is reminding us that we have strayed from the way that leads to eternal happiness.

But whether one thinks of the “act of God” as a punishment or a reminder, a question remains:  Why must it be so severe?  Couldn’t God show us that we have gone astray in more gentle ways—say, seven days of rainy weather accompanied by a bad cold?  Why does the reminder have to be a pandemic or a fire or a flood?

Here, we come to the question of our own nature and to the fact that we are all sinners.  Not only does our human nature incline us toward temptation, it also blinds us to the gravity of our sins.  In retrospect, we can sometimes see that our earlier sins were much more serious than we realized at the time.  But often, our present sins don’t seem that bad.  In fact, they often seem to us as mere misdemeanors– if we recognize them at all.

Fortunately, God understands this blindness. When Christ asked his Father to forgive his murderers “for they know not what they do,” he was speaking not only of Roman soldiers, but of all of us.

Since Christ died to atone for our sins, the manner of his death should tell us a lot about the awful consequences of sin.  But many are unfamiliar with the gospel story, and many who are familiar ignore it or dismiss it or forget it.  It stands to reason, then, that beyond the fact that God died for our sins, further shocks are sometimes needed to wake us up both to the goodness of God and to our own call to goodness.

Some Christian apologists maintain that God is a gentleman and, therefore, never forces us to be good against our will.  It’s true that God doesn’t overrule our free choice, but the idea needs qualification.  Although God doesn’t force us, it seems that he often provides strong inducements to help us choose the right path.  And many of these inducements can hardly be considered gentle.  After all, many conversions only come after the sinner has hit rock bottom.  It may be that Christ sometimes comes to us in the guise of the bouncer who tosses us onto the curb and then douses us with a bucket of cold water. Better to recall the Christ who threw the money changers out of the temple than to think of him as a well-mannered Victorian gentleman.

“They know not what they do” applies to people in all ages, because people in all ages are blind to the gravity of their sins, but it has special application to our own times.  It’s not so much that moderns reject God, but that they have become indifferent to Him. And having lost sight of God, they have a diminished sense of sin and salvation. In a recent article, Francis X Maier points out that, as the pace of secularization speeds up, “inherited religious certainties weaken, become irrelevant to many adults and incomprehensible to the young.”  The “woke” generation is awake to many things, but not to the one thing that matters.

In that light, the coronavirus can be seen as not simply an act of God, but as an act of God’s love.  Faced with financial ruin, with the possibility of our death or the death of a loved one, we are forced to think about the meaning and purpose of our lives—forced to see beyond the carefully cultivated distractions that cause us to drift away from God and our own eternal happiness.

Paradoxically, the disease can also be the remedy. Let’s return to the possibility that the epidemic may be a divine intervention. As a surgeon intervenes to remove a cancerous tumor that is killing us, God may intervene in radical ways to remove a spiritual sickness that is killing souls. In “East Coker,” T.S. Eliot refers to Christ as the “wounded surgeon” who operates with “sharp compassion.” In lines that capture the paradoxical nature of the current pandemic, he suggests that the cure of our spiritual sickness may require that it first grow worse:

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse 

Cardinal Scola says that the virus was not sent by God to punish sinful humanity, but Jesus told his disciples quite clearly that sinners who do not repent face eternal punishment. Why is it so difficult to entertain the possibility that God might send punishments/remedies on earth to save us from a far worse punishment in eternity? He would be remiss as a father if he saw us drifting into danger and did nothing about it.

https://turningpointproject.com/covid-19-natural-disaster-or-supernatural-sign/

Pictured above: 17th Century Plague Doctor

Photo credit: Pixabay

Forces of Nature: Reflections on COVID-19, My Mother, and Life

Kate Deddens

If you’re feeling threatened by disease, I want you to know that many people the world over have felt that way for many centuries and they nonetheless held fast, carried on as best they were able, and rejoiced whenever they could. So, here’s what I think of the current COVID-19 situation: Be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually prepared.

I’ve had more vaccinations for more virulent diseases than most people—from Smallpox to Yellow Fever to an experimental vaccine against Rabies.

I was born and grew up primarily in the Middle East, India, and Africa—surrounded by dysentery, Cholera, Tuberculosis, Typhoid, Hepatitis, and more.

I’ve had life-threatening pneumonia, suffered more gastrointestinal issues than I can count—including parasites—and when I was living in East Africa I nearly died of what the doctor called one of the most severe cases of Malaria she’d ever seen.

Even as I was taking Quinine daily and using mosquito netting to combat contracting Malaria, I was infected after spending time at a particularly infested beach along the coast of the Indian Ocean; from what I’ve been told, it was only after massive doses of Quinine that I survived.

I don’t remember anything from those malarial days except suddenly feeling increasingly drowsy one afternoon, drifting into oblivion, and then experiencing the wild hallucinations that extremely high fevers bring . . . some of those, I recall with a mixture of wonder and in a strange way, yearning—the colors were so vibrant, the images so vivid.

I’ve had so many vaccinations, and been exposed to so many diseases, that sometimes I’m surprised I survived my youth. For example, apart from the diseases I myself have had, I’ve known people who had TB, Tetanus, Cholera, and dangerous parasitical infections like Bilharzia.

It’s not surprising that as an adult I battle autoimmune issues. My immune system, as well as my mental and emotional states, have been put through their paces.

*

I’ve also lived through what might be viewed as several forms of restrictive social isolation. I grew up in Iran, surrounded by walls that shut me in and kept everybody else out. That was the norm.

My breath was taken away the first time I noticed that homes in America were not surrounded by walls and high fences, and that it really was okay if a stranger walked across your front lawn.

I wasn’t allowed on a street alone. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house and yard without an adult. Well into my teens I was utterly dependent upon others to go anywhere or do anything. My whole world essentially consisted of going to school and staying at home, with some exceptions to visit with friends.

There are a few, rare memories of going “out” with family to restaurants, to the local market up on the corner, to the bustling downtown Tehran bazaar, browsing a bookstore . . . but mostly, I remember being at home.

Until I was much older and in the U.S., I have zero memories of riding a bike down a residential street, going to the movies just with friends, or walking comfortably around a neighborhood as though I belonged to it.

My first exposure to the freedom of leaving a building and simply going where I wanted to go was when I attended a boarding school in northern India. I was blown away by that liberty. The concept of just taking off and going out to buy something or to grab something to eat floored me.

Yet even there, our community was essentially confined to a mountainous school campus and a small Indian town set high in the Himalayas; a few shops, some restaurants, and a movie theater that featured Indian films were my whole world.

During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, I was also seriously confined. When my family went anywhere, different routes were taken and we’d check our vehicle every time we used it to avoid ambush attacks and to detect explosives.

Most of the time, I remained at home where my parents felt I’d be safest.

There was a curfew. The electricity was turned off every night. No lights. No TV (which was minimal to begin with). Radio use was limited to conserve battery power. Without lights, for weeks on end we spent hours playing games like Scrabble by candlelight.

Despite the machine gun battles that raged outside our home—tracers visible in the night sky, conflicts that at times drove us to take cover—my memories of the endless Scrabble games with my parents and family friends are some of my most precious ones.

*

I was raised by Depression-era parents. My father was deployed in WWII. My mother was a war bride, married in a simple ceremony before my father left.

There were a few formal photographs, with my father in his military uniform. My mother once told me that the brief reception consisted of lemonade and cucumber sandwiches. It was a far cry from most weddings in America today.

My parents moved to Iran in the early 1950s and stayed there over thirty years.

My childhood was strongly influenced by the experiences they had growing up during economic devastation, through war, and living in a country in which material goods were minimal and medical care could be scarce and somewhat unreliable . . . one of my older brothers died as a toddler in a Tehran hospital, of pneumonia.

In our house, we saved every scrap of wrapping paper and ironed it over and over again each Christmas until it was no longer usable. We scraped the bottom of every pan, my mother not wanting to waste the least bit of food. As a child I was encouraged to use the smallest amounts of toilet paper I could manage, and I cannot recall a time, ever, when we had tissues in our home.

One of the first luxuries I allowed myself when I moved to the U.S., on a meagre paycheck as a college student, was to buy a box of Kleenex.

I can recall washing my hair with bar soap, because there was no shampoo. It was sometimes a treat to wash hair with egg yolks and rinse with lemon juice. Those were pretty much the extent of hair products in our household.

We rarely bought anything new; I wore hand-me-downs for most of my elementary years—and considering I was the youngest sibling of several brothers, that meant my outfits had belonged to my brothers . . . and to a few of them in sequence; it was not the most feminine, or becoming, of attires.

After leaving Iran, my family lived on a shoestring for a short time in the United States; my parents’ entire careers, and all they had built over thirty years in Iran, had virtually gone up in smoke.

I lived through a cold winter with my mother, before my father returned from Iran, in a cabin in the mountains of Arizona. We had a single fireplace for heat.

She taught herself how to drive (she had never learned overseas), and then she taught me. We lived on hominy soup and Grape-Nut cereal.

Single-handedly, she repaneled most of the cabin. I remember coming home from school and seeing her precariously balanced on a ladder, holding pine ceiling boards up with her head while she hammered. Saw dust was everywhere.

For entertainment we had a small black and white TV that inadequately received one or two channels with an antenna.

When we moved to Tanzania, we experienced firsthand the effects of socialism. What we here in America consider basics (toilet paper, toothpaste, food staples) were difficult to come by; there was a thriving black market to supply these things to those who could afford them.

I can remember learning that a single egg cost about 60 cents. The flour one could buy was so infested with weevils that we baked it in the oven to kill the larvae before we used it in cooking. Even though the larvae were killed, they left a definite, unpleasant taste in whatever the flour was used to make.

We would purchase expensive raw milk (it was difficult to raise milk cows, which often died of pestilence) and pasteurize it ourselves, conserving the cream as though it was gold to make butter or use on special occasions.

*

I’ve also been lost more than a few times in my life. As a young child in Iran, my father lost track of me at the airport. I was found, sitting in the bed of a truck, chatting in Farsi with some local sheiks. My life would definitely have taken a very different turn had I not been discovered.

When I was in fourth grade, a best friend and I who were chaffing against our limited mobility and freedom decided to take a walk in downtown Tehran. We packed some snacks and water and took off, her younger brother in tow.

Of course, we got lost. I can’t remember who tracked us down and found us, but my mother was so angry that she forbade me to have any contact with my best friend again.

At fourteen, I found myself stranded in New Delhi, India with no real adult supervision, waiting for a flight to Tehran. The year had ended at my boarding school and up until the last minute I had no idea where or when I was to go; for weeks there had been no communication from my parents, who were in Iran in the midst of the revolution.

I wandered the city in rickshaws and through the street-side bazaars. I connected with a friend who was in the area, but other than that, I was pretty much on my own until I was picked up and delivered to the airport to catch a flight to Tehran.

Most of that time in New Delhi I was essentially lost, relying on the rickshaw and taxi drivers to take me where I told them I wanted to be.

To my knowledge, I flew alone—I’ve no recollection of any adult accompanying me from India into the upheaval of revolution in Iran.

When my flight landed and I deplaned, the first thing my mother did was to throw a chador (a head and body covering) over me. Since I had been there last, a handful of months earlier during the height of the revolution, it had become anathema and dangerous for a woman to be in public without one.

At sixteen, I took a trip via Ethiopia to Greece. Although I was supposed to stay with a friend, unexpected events—she neglected to let me know she was moving back to Sweden—led to me spending most of that time alone. By myself, I took tours of sites such as the Agora, Acropolis, and Parthenon, Delphi, and Mycenae.

I made my hotel reservations, searching out the cheapest places, and lived on Greek salad, bread, and feta cheese.

I got stuck in a storm in the Aegean traveling back from the islands to the port of Piraeus and nearly missed my flight from Athens, via Addis Ababa, to Tanzania—a connection only made once a week.

I had no money left and knew not a single soul in Athens at that time.

I recall an intense night of very little sleep in Addis Ababa on that trip listening to the occupant of the room next to mine rant and rave in loud, violent drunkenness.

Later that same year, a friend and I got lost one night on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, somewhere between about 10,000- and 14,000-feet above sea level. We waited too long to head back to camp and in the deep African darkness, with no ambient light, for several hours we had no idea where we were or which direction we should be heading. As all wild places can, Kilimanjaro became ominous and threatening in the night.

It was only by the grace of God, to be honest, that I was found in that pick-up truck; that I was discovered wandering downtown Tehran; that I ever made it back to Tehran from New Delhi or to Tanzania from Athens; it was only by the grace of God that my friend and I heard the distant sounds of someone cooking over a fire and found our way back to camp that night on Mount Kilimanjaro.

*

My mother used to say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

She knew from her own life that this was a powerful truth.

She was raised by a single mother through the Great Depression. Her father, a doctor who had served as an army field surgeon in WWI, came down with appendicitis on a family vacation to Atlantic City, New Jersey two weeks before my mother was born. He died.

As a girl, her home did not have electricity. Nor did her home have indoor plumbing. Eventually, these were installed, but her earliest memories were of gas lighting, outhouses, and an ice man who came to deliver for the “ice box” in the basement.

My mother watched her grandmother die of the flu in an upstairs bedroom of her childhood home.

My mother lived through the World War II.

As a young, college-educated wife and mother she moved to Iran, thousands of miles away from her country and family. She carved out a life for herself and her own family. She learned the Persian language fluently. She loved the customs and the cuisine and the people.

She labored hard. She had six children.

I remember her washing the family laundry in our bathtub, putting the clothes through a wringer, then hanging them outside to dry.

In Africa, we did have a washing machine—something she’d insisted on taking with us—but every single item of clothing hung outside to dry had to be ironed with a hot iron to kill the larvae of the mango flies. If you did not iron, the larvae could burrow into your skin to feed on your tissue until the insects emerged.

I can recall the huge pots of food she would make to feed us all as well as the frequent guests she had at her table.

I can still see her on her knees on the hard, cold stone floors, scrubbing dirt out of the grout.

I can picture her spending hours tending her garden.

She was a music teacher, and I’ll never forget watching her tirelessly prepare to work with her students—the hours she spent dedicated to rehearsing for choir concerts and musicals, and the countless efforts she expended on the first music curriculum for the International Baccalaureate.

She lived through several miscarriages and the deaths of two sons.

She survived two revolutions in Iran, the White Revolution in the 1950s and the Islamic Revolution in the 1970s.

She had Hepatitis that so severely debilitated her she was told she would never walk again. She defied these prognostications, as she defied so many others in her life through many trials and illnesses.

My mother nursed her children through more diseases and injuries than I can count. She followed her husband into mission work, supported him in establishing what is now a worldwide educational curriculum, and cared for him when he had cholera.

She almost died from childbirth fever.

That’s just scratching the surface of what she went through.

*

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Much as I didn’t appreciate what sometimes seemed to me a dismissive remark, she was right: Most of what we encounter, just like most of what I experienced growing up, toughens us.

Yes, it causes stress. Yes, for several years after the revolution in Iran I would flinch—and sometimes dive for cover—when I heard a loud bang because of the mines that so often had exploded near our home in Tehran.

Yes, the habits of caution and isolation I was ingrained with growing up came with a mental, emotional, and physical price.

But in the end, those experiences prepared me for what life would bring—for sicknesses; for financial uncertainties; for isolation and cultural alienation; for challenging work situations; for loss, miscarriages, and deaths; for buckling down and squaring my shoulders and battling the stings of fortune . . . for service to others in my family and in my communities.

My mother knew how to be prepared. When a revolutionary threw a Molotov Cocktail through her classroom window in Tehran in 1979, she was ready. She threw it right back out the window.

Whenever I was sick, she knew when to tell me to suck it up and when it was warranted to take me to a doctor. One thing she almost always did was isolate me right away—off to my room into bed, even when I mostly felt fine. There I would read books, daydream, and read some more books.

When you live surrounded by some of nature’s most lethal darts and arrows, you learn that the first line of defense is not to spread calamity.

In the sixth grade, I accidentally cut my wrist open when I put my hand through a glass door at school. It was because my mother raised me that I was able to walk, alone, down three flights of steps, cross an alley, and wander over my school compound to the nurse—all the while holding my hand high above me as the blood pumped exuberantly out of my veins.

The nurse gave me a tourniquet. My father took me to the hospital where they stopped the bleeding. They stitched me up without waiting for anesthetics.

I went back to school and sat in class for the rest of the day.

I don’t recall anyone giving me any painkillers. Once the shock wore off, it hurt like nothing I’d ever felt before.

I don’t think I saw my mother until the end of the day.

It was hard. It was painful. I didn’t feel especially nurtured in the midst of my personal drama and pain. But it didn’t kill me. And it did make me stronger.

*

My mother knew how to stock her home with essentials. She knew how to stretch those essentials. She knew how to keep us safe and provided for, to the best of her abilities.

I remember as a kid helping her clean the vegetables and fruits we’d purchased at the market by soaking them in huge sinks filled with a solution of bleach water . . . and then rinsing, and rinsing, and rinsing. Yes, the bleach wasn’t good for us, but it was a far cry better than getting dysentery.

When she unexpectedly had extra people to feed, she always had the staples at home to cook not only a large, but a nutritious, meal.

I helped her pluck chickens; shell walnuts; meticulously peel oranges so that not a speck of the white could be seen to be used in delicious Persian food; cook the apple cores and apple peels in order to make jelly.

Among other things, she made homemade breads, jams and relishes, cheeses, and yes, even homemade wine.

My mother also knew the value of things and all through my childhood I watched her purchase items that she knew would last.

At one point, I remember lobbying to buy a small overnight case for travel. It wasn’t cheap, at least not for our family’s tight budget. Finally, she agreed, but told me that the purchase should last me a lifetime. And it did—I had that Samsonite overnight case for more than thirty years and it traveled much of the world with me.

We never made a big deal out of birthdays—a cake and a favorite meal, usually. At Christmas, stockings were filled with nuts and oranges, not toys and candy. Even Christmas presents were sometimes rare, and most often were books. Trips to shopping centers, movie theaters, or other entertainments were minimal. If we did go anywhere, it was probably to a concert, a play, or a museum.

The idea that I would one day pay about $5 for a cup of coffee from Starbucks would have, and quite honestly did, appall my Depression era, war bride, missionary mother.

*

Here in the United States, for the most part I’ve trained myself out of the frugality, cautions, and remnants of the fears of my childhood. For the most part, I’ve trained myself out of the anxiety over once again being lost.

The idea that I can simply go out and replace something that’s a little worn, or that I’m a little tired of, has never really taken root in my life.

The idea that I could simply pick up and walk out of my house without feeling somewhat nervous about disease, crime, or simply losing my way irretrievably, is a novel one—even after several decades.

Because of the shortage of supply of medications as I was growing up, the idea that I should automatically take a pill for whatever is ailing me has always been a strange thought.

I was expected by a strong and toughened mother to ride it out, to make do, to be realistic about my situation.

That’s one of the reasons I think I survived being lost and alone, especially when I moved continents into new cultures, knowing no one, understanding very little, and feeling like I might as well be from Mars.

My mother’s unrelenting message to me was: Keep your head, keep your feet planted on the ground, muster courage in the face of the ambiguous and the unknown, do what is in front of you, and by all means possible take care of your responsibilities.

That has prepared me for an adult life of self-employment; for caring for relatives in our home through illness, hospice care, and death; for home educating my children before it was really “acceptable” to homeschool; for living in isolating and limiting conditions; for making do with less.

*

So, here’s what I think of the current COVID-19 situation: Be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually prepared.

Be prepared for disruption—and the causes of disruption are probably going to be many.

Be prepared to take care of yourself and your family whether it be through sickness, through fearfulness, or through economic hardship.

Be prepared to help your neighbors.

Be prepared to be frugal and make sacrifices.

Be prepared to not feel particularly healthy or particularly happy.

Be prepared to get a handle on being outside your comfort zone.

Be prepared to face a force of nature with the equal force of your best human nature.

I don’t know if the Coronavirus situation is as dire as it seems. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know how tough we’ll need to be. But I do know that whatever the reasons and whatever the situation, I want to be prepared.

Preparing is not panicking.

*

For much of my later growing up years and for much of my adult life, perhaps, I’ve at times resented how strong my mother was and expected me to be. As I admired her tough resilience, I simultaneously wished many times that she’d been softer.

My mother passed away about two years ago. She was in her nineties.

Many people wrote tributes to her. One recalled how fiercely she had lived.

Someone wrote that she was a force of nature.

I did not speak at her memorial service. This moment, however, with a very real force of nature bearing down upon us seems a fitting time for tribute.

I’ve tried to be a somewhat softer mother, a softer person, because I saw how tough being tough can be on a person and on those around them.

Yet I always remember that I had the luxury to be softer, raising my family in the U.S. in a society filled with so much to meet every need in comfort and safety and which required—all things considered—little sacrifice from me.

I’ve had hard times. I know that most—though not all—have not been as hard as my mother’s times. And though I’ve often wished through my life that she’d been less tough, and less tough on me, I’m also grateful to her for having equipped me to be prepared.

In this moment, as COVID-19 spreads over the world, I’m grateful to reflect on my Mom, to lean into the memories of her strength and endurance.

I wish she were still here, so that I might thank her.

I can just hear her telling me, “Put a brick under your chin, kid.”

*

If you’re feeling threatened by disease, if the thought of social distancing—perhaps even quarantine and isolation—makes you anxious, if you’re feeling a little lost because our bubble of safety seems to have been breached, I want you to know that many people the world over have felt that way for many centuries and they nonetheless held fast, carried on as best they were able, and rejoiced whenever they could.

Because they did so, we’ve been able to be here to live our lives, resting on their hard work and the fruits of their strength.

My husband often has said to me, “Take your triumphs where you may”; our spirits flourish in being steadfast in the face of dangers, trials, and fears.

When I was growing up, it meant weeks waiting for a letter to bring news of loved ones and friends. You didn’t make a phone call unless someone had a baby or died. It was either wonderful, or terrible, news.

Now, social distancing can be overcome by instantaneously reaching out to family, friends, and neighbors and we have never before lived in a time in which we could reach out to one another to give and receive comfort and encouragement—and even more tangible things like food—more easily.

And in all the times that I’ve been lost—whether literally as in the cases I described above or in the ways in which I felt about my circumstances—I’ve invariably been comforted, and in some cases saved, by people who have been kind, helpful, generous, and sacrificial.

Someone told my father a little blonde, blue-eyed girl was conversing with sheiks in a pick-up truck at an airport in a faraway desert long ago.

Someone went looking for me, my best friend, and her little brother, when we went upon our ill-advised adventure through Tehran.

All the rickshaw drivers, the shop keepers, the manager of the hotel I was staying in, and all those who saw me home to Tehran from New Delhi looked after my welfare in their own ways.

When I was terrified I had missed my flight from Greece to Tanzania via Ethiopia—once I had managed to explain my situation through broken Greek, scattered English, and various frantic charades—my cab driver in Athens eschewed picking up other passengers (at financial cost to himself) and ran red lights for me as he sped me to the airport.

Ethiopian Airline personnel went out of their way to make sure I did in fact make my international flight—which for some inexplicable reason was still on the airport tarmac—by waiving all security protocols and rushing me out to the plane on a baggage cart.

I was the last person to board that plane, over an hour after it was supposed to have taken off.

I’d prayed unceasingly for five hours, all the way to Piraeus through the storm on the Aegean, for a miracle.

It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that my prayers were answered.

We have strength in our common human bonds. So many of us can, do, and will help each other whenever we are able.

The fact that we exist is a tribute to our ancestors who were strong, tough, and yes, often hard; they were prepared.

Like my mother, they were magnificent.

As the Latin saying goes, nanos gigantum humeris insidente: We stand on the shoulders of giants.

No matter the darkness and trials which are in the world, the triumphs of the good so often overshadow them.

In the face of disease, isolation, and uncertainty, have faith in those bonds: We all, to some degree, know illness, loneliness, and insecurity—though we often go to great lengths to hide it.

Above all, have faith in God who wants us to look to Him for all our daily needs and who wants us to love our neighbors.

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/forces-nature-reflections-covid-19-kate-deddens.html

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The featured image is “Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo” and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

About the Author: Kate Deddens

Kate Deddens attended International Baccalaureate schools in Iran, India, and East Africa, and received a BA in the Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and a MA in Mental Health therapy from Western Kentucky University. She married her college sweetheart and fellow St. John’s graduate, Ted, and for nearly three decades they have nurtured each other, a family, a home school, and a home-based business. They have four children and have home-educated classically for over twenty years.