'The Trial of Separation' - Charles Journet

 

                 'The Trial of Separation'

                     - Charles Journet

 

When death comes to take away a child there is heartbreak. But when the mother can have pride in her son, when she hears that he died in a desperate attack or for a noble cause, she finds consolation in the praises that wreathe his memory.  Her sorrow is not an unmixed grieving.

     But if with her own eyes she sees her son mocked, beaten, spit upon, what is there that can lighten her suffering? In such a moment she will ask one favour only, to be allowed to be near her son to protect him with her tenderness.  This favour Our Lady was not granted. And it was her Son who refused it.

     The episode is in the third chapter of St Mark’s gospel.  Jesus had not chosen His Apostles.  He had driven out demons and had begun to preach the Kingdom of God.  Crowds thronged about Him. He entered a house.  The crowds gathered there likewise, so that they could not even take their food.  “And when His friends had heard of it, they went out to lay hold on Him.  For it was said:  He is become mad.  And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said: ‘He hath Beelzebub and by the prince of devils he casteth out devils’.

     Thus the scribes looked upon Jesus as one possessed; but many thought He was merely mad.  “They said,” or “It was said: He is become mad.” Who said this? Not His relations, presumably. Certainly not His Mother. But His relations and still more His Mother were anxious.  They knew that He was alone, exposed to the ill-will of the people and the hatred of the scribes.  For that cause they came.

     Poor Mother!  She knew the bite of a new sort of suffering.  Up till now it had not occurred to her that the salvation of the world required that her Son, who was Wisdom Incarnate, should be treated like a madman, and that He in whom the word of God dwelt ineffably should be accused of being possessed by Beelzebub. These insults, these blasphemies were a new note in her heart’s agony.  She knew that her Son felt them likewise and that His heart was bleeding under them. For she knew that within the house, where the scribes had come, He sought to justify Himself before them: “How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”  He was alone against them all.

     She longed to enter, to take Him away with her, to show Him that her heart at least was faithful, to strain Him to her breast if He would allow her.  “His Mother and His brethren came.  And standing without, sent unto Him, calling Him.  And the multitude sat about Him.  And they say to Him:  behold thy mother and thy brethren without, seek for thee.”

     It was a moving moment, but Jesus was not moved.  He had been bearing the harshness of His enemies: yet the moment He meets tenderness, the moment He becomes for His Mother an object of compassion, in that moment He seems to grow harsh Himself. It almost seemed that He scarcely deigned to notice that poor maternal love that was offered to Him, that frail refuge that she would have made for him. “And answering them He said:  Who is my mother and my brethren?”  In that place these words seem hard, even cruel. What is the mystery contained in them?

     What that mystery is, He proceeds to show: “and looking round about on them who sat about Him, He saith, Behold my mother and my brethren.  For whosoever shall do the will of God, he is my brother and my sister and my mother.”  Beyond the bonds of  natural relationship appear the bonds of a new relationship, spiritual and outshining the first as the sun outshines the light of tapers. Natural relationship is not denied.  The bonds that bind husband and wife, parent and children, master and servant, still remain. Indeed, they are immeasurably ennobled (Eph. V. 21-vi. 9). But above them are the bonds that bind the children of the Kingdom in a mysterious, more intimate kinship; and these are more precious and more profoundly interior to us, are beyond the power of time and relate us to each other by what is closest in us to God.  Because this is so, the bonds of natural relationship become illicit and must be trampled underfoot whenever they so act upon us as to weaken the spiritual relationship: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke xiv.26). The saints are under no delusion as to what Our Lord means, as we shall see.

       Can it then have been that Our Lord’s kinsfolk had come to Capharnaum to dissuade Him from preaching - that, under the impulse of too earthly an affection, they were trying to deflect Him from the mission entrusted Him by His Father in heaven, of founding the Kingdom

     Yet how magnificent these privileges become once we grasp that they are the efficacious sign, the instrument, of the highest graces.  Our Lady’s motherhood according to the flesh, with all the agony and renunciation it demanded, becomes immeasurably more splendid when we know it as the cause of the purest love ever granted to a creature. Completed by Jesus’ answer, the words of the great-hearted woman of Galilee begin to reveal the fullness of their meaning. Thus, the Church can repeat them.  In the Mass ‘Salve sancta Parens’  (of which the gospel is taken from this same passage of St Luke), she joins them to those of Our Lord.  She repeats them at the Communion, when Christ enters into us to communicate to us sacramentally a little of that love which on the day of the Incarnation he communicated to the Virgin in such abundance: “Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary which bore the son of the eternal Father!”  By setting down here, in a more perfect light, the acclamation of the unknown woman, the Church continued to fulfil through the ages the Virgin’s prophecy: “Behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke i. 48).

     A sword shall pierce her soul, and all generations should call her blessed – blessed because in the likeness of her son, she bore suffering and desolation in their fullness.

     Is the interpretation we have given of the passages of scripture concerning the Blessed Virgin necessarily the true one?  Is it certain that Jesus, under the external semblance of repulsing His Mother’s tenderness, was actually binding her to Him still closer by an interior love and associating her with Himself in the work of redemption?  An episode which took place at the beginning of His public life but which we have held in reserve till now, seems to put the matter beyond question.  It is the episode at Cana (John ii. 1-11).

                          MARRIAGE FEAST AT CANA  -  Gerard David 1456

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  And the wine failing, those who were giving the feast were ashamed. Jesus’ mother saw this and said to her Son: “They have no wine.” Verbally, this was a mere statement of fact. Actually, she was asking for a miracle.  Then came Our Lord’s mysterious answer:  “Woman, what is it to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come.” The literal translation is as we have given it – What is it to me and to thee? The bearing of this phrase, used to this day by the Arabs in Palestine, is roughly expressed by the words “Leave it to me”. The whole meaning depends upon the tone in which the phrase is uttered – it might signify impatience or rebuke or indifference.  In the present instance, all three of these possible implications are negatived by the event.  But they can also bear within them great tenderness, signifying: “Do not be disturbed, I have seen all, all is well, leave it to me.”  And it was thus that Jesus spoke to His Mother.

     He called her Woman, as at the hour when He was nailed to the cross (John xix. 26) – a word of reverence, for He was speaking to her as God in regard to a solemn matter, one that went beyond the framework of family relations, for it touched upon the destiny of the Kingdom of God.

     It reads as though Jesus was quite clearly refusing the implied but unspoken request of His Mother.  He did it with great gentleness and He gave her His reason – that the hour for the inauguration of His public life of preaching and miracles was not yet come. The meaning seems perfectly clear:  Mary must trust in Him without reserve, must leave the whole matter entirely in His hands: and so, indeed, she had done from the beginning.

     But here what seemed so clear is suddenly cast into darker mystery. Jesus had just told His Mother that His hour was not yet come, and she acted as if He had said the reverse.  She seemed to take the miracle for granted.  “His mother said to the waiters: Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye.”

     Here is the key to the mystery. If there had not been the prayer of Mary, the hour fixed from all eternity for the inauguration of Jesus’ public ministry would have come later, and Jesus, who was to accredit the message He bore to men by signs and wonders, would have awaited some other occasion to manifest Himself – would have made a paralytic walk, or given sight to a blind man, or cleansed a leper.  This is what Jesus Himself was affirming when He told His Mother that in this sense His hour was not yet come. But at the same moment, by a secret illumination with which He filled her heart, He willed her to know that from all eternity the hour of His public ministry had been advanced because of the humble prayer she had just uttered.  There is profound tenderness, an infinite delicacy of love half-hidden under the mystery, restraint and even, as some readers feel, coldness of the words recorded by St John.  Marvellous, too, the power of the Virgin’s prayer. A thought of her heart, a word uttered by her with the desire to relieve the mildest of human embarrassments – the thought and the word were foreknown from all eternity, and from all eternity the hour was set forward at which Jesus should begin the public preaching of the Kingdom of God. Nothing so great has ever been said, or ever will be said, upon the might of her intercession as the gospel story of the miracle of Cana. It was the hour of Mary’s power.

     The Virgin had all power over the heart of her Son. She had done His will too utterly for Him to refuse to do hers – Voluntatem timentium se faciet (Ps. cxliv. 19) – the Lord will do the will of them that fear Him with the loving fear of a child for its father. And in fact Jesus speaks: “Fill the water pots with water."

And they filled them to the brim.  And He said to them:  "Draw out now and carry to the chief steward of the feast ----- This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested his glory.  And his disciples believed in him.”  It was to the intervention of the Virgin that they owed their belief in Him thus early.

     Mary was close to her Son in the bond of love. But at the same time, the suffering of separation, which had lain in her heart from the day the Child had slipped away from her in Jerusalem, began to grow and did not cease its growing from the moment when His public life opened.  That suffering held supreme tests in store for her.

  Ack. 'The Mary Book', published Sheed and Ward, 1950

    

    

The First Three Sorrows of Our Lady - C.C. Martindale S.J.

 

The First Three Sorrows      -    C.C. Martindale  S.J.

“The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me.”   Genesis  iv.  10.

 

Eve, so named because she was “Mother of all living” (Gen. iii. 20), became for that very reason, Mother too of all who should die.  When – the first Mater Dolorosa – she held upon her knees the murdered body of her son Abel, she stood at the head of a long history of Death, which, so far as human bodies go, is not even yet completed.  Indeed, Abel was seeming to her just then her only son; for though Cain was alive, he had fled; she could not see him: she knew nothing save that he was “in the land of wandering”.  As for Cain, he foresaw well enough that he had originated a tale of vengeance – “whosoever findeth me, shall kill me!”

            But even for him, in the hour of his despair, God provided at least this consolation – he and his race should not be exterminated: nay, on anyone who should kill him, vengeance should be wreaked “seven-fold”. Yet also, even this became the occasion for a sneer and for new bloodthirstiness in that tainted race.  His descendant Lamech made a song:

 

‘As for me, I will slay a man for merely wounding me!                                 Yes, a young man for so much as bruising me!                                                  If Cain shall be avenged seven-fold,                                                          Then Lamech, seven and seventy- fold! '

 

And ever since there has been in our wretched world a race of the violent and the outcasts – of Cains, and Ishmaels, and Esau’s.                

But to Eve a better consolation was appointed.  She bore another son, and called him Seth, exclaiming: “God has given (or assigned) me another seed instead of Abel”, for Seth is assonant to the word sath, “assigned”.  So once more Eve became Mother of the Living.

            Life, Death, and Life may be said to be the history of Mary, too, albeit there was no sin in her. 

            You may say that Our Lady’s self-sacrificial life began when she made (as we cannot but believe that she did) her decision to remain virgin. This certainly involved, for her, the renunciation of any hope that she should be Mother of the Messias.  The prophecy of Isais did not create or perhaps even witness to a general tradition that the Messias should be born of a virgin. The humble child experienced the inspiration thus to dedicate herself wholly to God, and, obedient as ever, as ever His handmaiden “whose eyes are upon the hands of her mistress”,  she listened to the heavenly prompting and was content to wait, to hope and to pray, and would have given the most unselfish homage to the Messias’s Mother, should she have been allowed, someday, to meet her. She was happy in her self-sacrifice:   but it was a “whole burnt offering” of herself and her future that she made.  No more extreme instance of so losing one’s life that one finds it!

            The episode of the Visitation must have been one of pure ecstasy: but, had it not been that Mary   “waited”   thus “upon the Lord”, and interposed no conditions of her own upon the sequence of events, the period of St Joseph’s bewilderment must have been agony, and even Bethlehem a very shadowed joy, seeing that she can hardly but have felt that He had   “come to His own , and His own received Him not”.

                                               

     First Sorrow.  

  But, with that alternation of pain and consolation which, we saw, was God’s method from the outset, the Presentation in the Temple made up for that, at least for a moment.   Ample, indeed manifestly miraculous, was Simeon’s recognition and acceptance of the Child he took up into his arms: how, amid all that throng, could he have singled out the working man and his young wife and her Baby, save by divine illumination?  And magnificent indeed was the prophecy of his Psalm!  But at once the shadow fell again. Turning to Mary herself, he said:

            “This Child is set to bring about the fall, as well as the uprising, of many in Israel – to be a Sign, but a Sign that shall be contradicted - that so the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed – yes! - and thine own soul a sword shall pierce!”

            We have placed Simeon’s parenthesis after the words that follow it in St Luke, for clearness’ sake.  Simeon had most clearly foretold the Messiah-hood of Mary’s Son – that He should be a light for the Gentiles no less than a Glory for the Jews.  But His victory was to be no more than partial. Not all would receive that Light nor walk in it.  While some should rise and stand upright because of Him, others should fall because of Him, and thus should be revealed that most mysterious thing -  the innermost “set” of the soul, obscure till some shock or challenge brings it to light:  St Luke’s word dialogismio  means more than ‘thoughts’; it means the whole mental movement; the putting this against that and the assessing of the result:  the Child could not but become a sign: something set up high and inevitably noticed: but some would say this about it; some that.  In a thousand ways Mary’s heart should be pierced as by a sword: her love for her people, which was God’s people: her anguish when she should watch them rejecting their Saviour:  her love for her Son and her desire to see Him universally triumphant; and her resignation to God’s Will, which did not intend to coerce human wills so as to ensure that universal triumph: her longing that her little Child should be happy, and, her perception, ever growing, that He was marked for  Martyrdom: yes, and that she, inseparable from Him, would have to share in that which we now know to have been Calvary.

                                                          

'Mother and Child'   -  Montagna

 Second Sorrow

            The months went by (perhaps a year or more) a breathing–space. Then came the strange joy of the Magi’s visit, followed forthwith by the news that in direct consequence of that visit Herod was seeking the Child’s life.  The Holy Family fled:  true, Egypt was not far: its northern part was full of Jews who even had a sort of model temple there.  Mary and Joseph would have found their own talk, customs, and compatriots.  And they were safe.  But apart from the tormenting anxiety of the actual flight, and the heartbreak due to the murder of the Innocents of which echoes may easily have reached her, it must have seemed bewildering to Mary that already the “Sign” was being spoken against – humanly speaking, everything seemed to be going wrong.  Even when Herod died, and they felt safe in returning to Bethlehem (where I think Joseph had meant to go on living), they were too frightened to stay there once they heard that Herod Archelaus had inherited Judea. He was a worse monster even than his father. So they returned to Nazareth.

            Even there, life was no suave idyll.  When Jesus was about ten years old, the turbulent north-country Galileans made a raid on an armoury of Herod Antipas at Sepphoris, visible from the hillcrest over Nazareth.  The Romans, to make an example, crucified two thousand men of that townlet and the neighbourhood.  Jesus and Mary must have been accustomed throughout their lives to the sight of men dying upon crosses.

 

   Third Sorrow

            But a true turning-point was imminent.  Jesus seems to dissociate Himself from these two souls who loved Him so dearly. The Holy Family went yearly to Jerusalem for the Pasch.  Jesus was now twelve years old – on the eve of coming “of age”.  When the caravan returned, He was not to be found.  The first stage of such a pilgrimage is said to have been short:  next morning, therefore, they were back in Jerusalem, hunting in anguish for Him.  Not till the next day did they find Him under the Temple colonnades where Rabbis held classes and taught the scriptures to children.  And there was Jesus, “listening and asking questions”. When they on their side catechised Him, “they were all of them out of themselves” at the intelligence shown by His answers.  But when His parents saw Him, they were “thunderstruck”, and Mary said: “Son, why have you done so to us? Your father and I have sought you in anguish!” But He said:  “How was it that you sought  Me? Did you not know that I must be–it was My duty to be–in My Father’s House?”  X   “Thy father and I?”–No: God was His Father.  The house at Nazareth? -No: His native home was God’s House – the Temple.

X   The Douay version has “about My Father’s business”.  The Greek phrase might mean either.           

            Ack. 'The Mary Book' published Sheed and Ward 1950.                                                                       

'I Know that my Redeemer Liveth' - Job.

 

In the traditional liturgy of the Catholic Church it is customary at this time of the liturgical year for the readings at Sunday Mass and at Sunday Office to be taken from the Book of Ecclesiasticus or Job. Commenting on this, St. Gregory says:  "There are men all athirst for passing joys who are ignorant or indifferent where eternal blessings are concerned.  Poor wretches!  They congratulate themselves on possessing the good things of this life without regretting those of above, which they have lost..  Fashioned for light and truth, they never lift up the eyes of the soul;  never betray the smallest desire or longing for the contemplation of their eternal home.  Giving themselves over to the pleasures among which they are thrown, they bestow their affection upon a dreary place of exile as if it were their fatherland; and surrounded by darkness, they are full of rejoicing as if they were illumined by a brilliant light.  On the other hand the elect, in whose eyes fleeting goods are of no value, seek after those for which their souls were made.  Kept in this world by the bonds of the flesh, each, none the less, is carried in spirit beyond it while making the wholesome resolve to despise the passing things of time, and to desire the things which endure for eternity."

    As for Job, he is set before us in Holy Scripture as the very type of a man detached from the goods of this world.  "If," said he, "we have received good things at the hands of God, why should we not receive evil?... The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away... Blessed be the name of the Lord."  The lessons from the Book of Job, deal with the experience of this pious and wealthy personage of the land of Hus, endowed at first with every blessing, but suddenly overwhelmed with the most frightful calamities which mortal man can endure.

    To summarise the Scripture narrative, Satan presented himself one day before God, and said:  "I have gone round about the earth, and walked through it, and have seen how Thou hast protected Job and his house, and all that he possesses.  But stretch forth Thy hand a little, and touch all that he hath:  and see if he will not curse Thee  to Thy face. Then the Lord said to Satan, "Behold all that he hath is in thy hand;  only spare his life."  And very soon Job had lost his flocks, his goods and his family, while he himself was stricken by Satan with " a very grievous" ulcer, from the "sole of the foot even to the top of his head".

    Bearing in mind Satan's malice, the Church makes us ask that we may be defended "against all the attacks of the evil one".  His is the kingdom of death, and if almighty God allowed him his way, he would rob all beings of the life they possess.  St Paul speaks of an infliction from which he suffered as "an angel of Satan sent to buffet me".  And as we read in Holy Scripture, it was the devil who reduced Job to such a state that the holy man could cry: "Hell is my house: and I have made my bed in darkness.  I have said to rottenness - 'thou art my father; to worms - my mother and sister.'  My flesh is consumed like a worm-eaten garment, and my bones cleave to my skin.."

    Further, the Church applies to the dead the pressing appeal which Job made on this occasion to his friends.  "Have pity upon me, you at least my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath stricken me." But his call met with no response and Job turns towards God and cries with a firm hope:  "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth.  And I shall be clothed again with my skin: and in my flesh shall I see God.  Whom I myself shall see and my eyes shall behold and not another.  This my hope, is laid up in my bosom."

    Job also describes the joy with which he will one day hear the voice of God calling him to a new life:  "Thou shalt call me and I will answer Thee; to the work of Thy hands Thou wilt reach out Thy right hand." And the Lord accepted the face of Job ...  And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before ... And the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning.   (Ack.'St.Andrew's Daily Missal. imp.1952)

    The experience of Job is one which is shared in some way and to some degree by all of us, for the very nature of our lives involves both suffering and joy, resignation and hope. However the essential factor for Job was that he recognised his sufferings as ordained by God, and in spite of apparently losing everything, he remained a loyal and faithful servant of God, openly proclaiming God's Majesty and divine Kingship over his life, and always filled with divine hope and trust in God's will. We know that God was well pleased, and rewarded Job for his loyalty and trust. Unfortunately so many in today's world have no love nor even belief in Almighty God, and the idea of bearing a cross willingly in this life for His honour and glory, never occurs to them. Thus we have a world largely without God, ignorant and devoid of divine hope, and in which God's love for humanity is unrecognised and unreciprocated. Job's humility and acceptance of all that God willed for him, is a lesson for us all. We desperately seek peace, love and happiness, in our lives, during the course of which we will inevitably experience our own crosses of pain and suffering. We should not complain or criticise God, but instead  reciprocate Job's words:-  "If we have received good things at the hands of God, why should we not receive evil?... The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away... Blessed be the name of the Lord."  

The Sixth Station: 'Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus' by Caryll Houselander

 

This post is a further extract from Caryll Houselander's book 'The Stations of the Cross'

The Sixth Station:  Veronica wipes the Face of Jesus

Now, while Simon labours under the Cross with Jesus, while Mary, his Mother follows behind him in the crowd, someone – a woman-- forces her way through the rabble, even through the guard of Roman soldiers surrounding him, and comes face to face with Christ.  She is driven by compassion.

The face that the Lord turns to her is terrible to look on; it is difficult to believe that it is the face of the Son of God.  It is difficult even for those who have once seen his face shining with the brilliance of a fire of snow upon Tabor, to believe in him now. Two of them have fled from him, just as those others have done, though they have seen him command the wind and the waves and raise the dead.

Now that face of infinite majesty and compelling beauty is unrecognisable. The eyes which could see into the secret places of men’s souls are blinded, swollen from the long sleepless nights of trials and judgement, and filled with sweat and blood.  The cheeks are bruised and dirty; the mouth swollen; the hair “like ripe corn” is tangled by the crown of thorns and matted with blood.

Certainly, there is no sign now of the beauty that could win a man’s heart by a single glance, or of the power that can rule the tempests and give life to the dead.

On the contrary, here is a man who is the very personification of humiliation, who is ugly with wounds and suffering, who is in the hands of other men who have bound him and are leading him out to die, and who is not even able to carry his own Cross alone.

It is all this, from which his close friends have fled, which drives this woman to him.  It is the ugliness and the helplessness which frightened those whom he called his “own” away, that draws her to him; it is her compassion that gives her the courage to come close to him.

She comes with a veil in her hands, a cloth on which to wipe the poor, disfigured face.

She kneels, as we kneel to wipe the tears from the faces of little children.  Gratefully, the head bowing over her sinks into the clean linen cloth, and for a moment is covered by it.

Then he raises his head, and she, kneeling there, her own face lifted, sees the face of Christ looking down at her, and behind it the great beam of the Cross. The two are together within the shadow of the Cross on the street, Veronica, and Christ.

She sees the majesty that was hidden, for now she has wiped away what she can of the blood and sweat and tears; she sees that they hid a face that is serene in its suffering, calm, majestic, infinitely tender.  The swollen mouth smiles, the exhausted eyes are full of gentleness; the expression, after all, is not one of defeat and despair, but of triumph and joy.

The power of Christ is able to control fiercer storms than those of the wind and sea.  It is able to still the torrents of evil of the whole world in the stillness of his own heart.  It is the power which enables him to command the floods of all the sorrow in the world and hold them within his peace.  It is the power which can not only give life back to the dead but can change death itself to life. It is the power of divine love.

So, for a moment, a vision more wonderful than that of Tabor is granted to the woman whose compassion drove her to discover Christ in a suffering man. Then Christ passes on, on the way of sorrows, leaving her with the veil in her hands and on it the imprint of that face of suffering that hid the beauty of God.

In Christ burying his face in that woman’s veil on the Via Crucis, we are looking at the many children of today whom war has twisted and tortured out of the pattern of childhood, who are already seared and vitiated by fear, persecution, homelessness and hunger.

We see grown-up people who have been maimed or disfigured, those whom chronic illness or infirmity has embittered.  We see, too, those most tragic ones among old people, those who are not loved and are not wanted by their own, those in whom the ugliness, not the beauty, of old age is visible.  We see the tragic ones who are cut off from all but the very few, the Veronicas of the world, by mental illness.  We see, too, many who are dying, who with Christ are coming to the end of their Via Crucis, yet sometimes without realising that Christ is suffering for and in them.

Suffering is not something to sentimentalise.  It can obliterate even the beauty of childhood. It can ennoble but it can also degrade; it can enlarge a man’s heart, but it can also contract and shrink it.  To the sufferer who does not know that he is indwelt by Christ, his pain of mind and body, his humiliation and loneliness, are baffling.  He can see no purpose in it; he is embittered by it, and his bitterness sets up a barrier between himself and others, imprisoning him in his own loneliness.  Outwardly, he shows only the ugliness of the world’s sorrow, suffering and all the effects of sin.

It is the Veronicas of today who wipe away his ugliness from the face of Christ living on in man.  The Veronicas of today are all those in whom compassion overcomes fear and repulsion, all those who seek and find the lost and the forsaken, the downtrodden and the lonely.  Those who seek the maladjusted, broken children of our wars and our slums, who go on their knees to wipe the tears from their eyes.

They are the nurses who comfort the dying in hospitals, who wipe the sweat of death from their faces. They are the Sisters of Mercy who go into the homes of the sick and poor to serve them.  They are all those who befriend the friendless in our mental hospitals.  They are those who, in their own families, tend and comfort the old and infirm in their last days.

They are, too, those priests who minister to the dying, and who go into the prisons to absolve the prisoners and restore Christ in their souls; those priests who follow men to the scaffold, cleansing them with the spiritual waters of absolution.

It is not only the physical wounds that the Veronicas of today tend and cleanse; it is, by that same act of tender compassion, the mental and spiritual wounds, the emotional wounds that corrode and fester in the spirit, almost obliterating the image and likeness of Christ. It is not only the sweat that blinds the eyes of the dying that they wipe away, but that which blinds the soul.  Ignorance of Christ, ignorance of their own supreme destiny of being “other Christs”, misunderstanding of suffering and its ugliness, that ugliness so resented by those who cannot see beneath it.

Until someone comes to reveal the secret of Christ indwelling the sufferer’s soul to him, he cannot see any purpose in his pain. There is only one way to reveal Christ living on in the human heart to those who are ignorant concerning it.  That is Veronica’s way, through showing Christ’s love.  When one comes, maybe a stranger, maybe one close at home but whose compassion was not guessed before, and reveals Christ’s own pity in themselves, the hard crust that has contracted the sufferer’s heart melts away and, looking into the gentle face of this Veronica of today, the sufferer looks, as it were, into a mirror in which he sees the beauty of Christ reflected at last from his own soul.

Until Veronica came to him on his way to Calvary, Christ was blinded by blood and sweat and tears. The merciful hands of Veronica wiped the blindness from his eyes; looking into her face, he saw his own beauty reflected in it.  He saw his own eyes looking back at him from hers.  She had done this thing in the power in which alone she could do it, the power of Christ’s own love.

In the compassion on her lifted face, Christ saw, in the hour of his extreme dereliction, the triumph of his own love for men.  He saw his love, radiant, triumphant in her, and in all the Veronicas to come through all time – in them and in those sufferers in whom his own divine beauty would be restored by their compassion.

 

Prayer

 

Saviour of the World,

take my heart

which shrinks

from the stark realism

and ugliness of suffering,

and expand it with your love.

Open it wide

with the fire of your love,

as a rose is opened

by the heat of the sun.

 

Drive me by the strength

of your tenderness

to come close to human pain.

Give me hands

that are hardened

by pity,

that will dip into any water

and bathe any wound

in mercy.

 

Give me your hands,

hands that heal the blind

by their touch,

hands that raise the dead

and are nailed to the Cross;

Give me your hands

to tend the wounds of the body

and the wounds of the mind.

 

Give me your eyes

to discern the beauty of your face

hidden under the world’s sorrow.

Give me the grace

to be a Veronica,

to wipe away

the ugliness of sin

from the human face,

and to see

your smile on the mouth of pain,

your majesty on the face of dereliction,

and, in the bound and helpless,

the power of your infinite love.

 

Lord, take my heart

and give me yours.

'The First Station - Jesus is Condemned to Death' - Caryll Houselander

 

We are now in Holy Week, and this post is taken from Caryll Houselander's book 'The Stations of the Cross', published in 1955 by Sheed and Ward. The author goes into considerable depth into the circumstances of Christ's Passion, as portrayed in the traditional Catholic liturgical prayers of the fourteen 'Stations of the Cross' represented on the inside walls of most Catholic churches world-wide, by paintings, wall carvings, prints and symbols etc.

Caryll Houselander was an English Roman Catholic writer and artist, very well known in the mid 20th century, as a writer and illustrator of children's books, religious books, and poetry, the latter in an idiosyncratic style which I like very much. Her religious poetry is practical and down to earth, and reflects her strongly held faith and belief that God's presence exists in all men and women, although not necessarily recognised and respected.  

This post considers the First Station, Jesus is condemned to death.

                                      *****************

The First Station: Jesus is Condemned to Death

 

“Behold the Man!”

                He is a man of sorrows.  He is covered in bruises and stripes. He is made a laughing stock. He is crowned with a crown of thorns.  A reed is put into his hands for a sceptre, a tattered soldier’s cloak is thrown over his naked shoulders. His eyes are blindfolded.  His face covered with spittings. He is bound like a dangerous criminal. His own people have chosen a murderer before him. His friends have forsaken him. The kiss of treason burns on his cheek.

“He has no comeliness whereby we shall desire him.”

                “He is a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people.”

            And he is condemned to death.

“Away with him! --- Away with him! --- Crucify him!”

            “Behold the man!”

            Behold the Son of God!

            Behold the man abiding in mankind!

            He has put on our humanity. He has put you on --- and me. He has covered himself with our shame, blindfolded his eyes with our blindness, bound himself with our slavery to self. He is bruised by our falls. He bleeds from our wounds. He sheds our tears. He has made himself weak with our weakness. Faint with our faint-heartedness. He is going to die our death.

            All men are condemned to die, but he is condemned to die not only his own death, but yours and mine, and that of every man whom he will indwell through all the ages to come.

            “Behold the Son of God!”

            “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased!”

            He alone of all men born need not have died; but because things are as they are, because we have to pay the price of our sins, and our life on this earth must inevitably be a journey through suffering to death, Christ has chosen to give himself to every man who will receive him, so that each man who wills can tread that road with the feet of Christ, and at the end of it he can, if he wills, die, not his own death but Christ’s.

            That is why death is the choice of Divine Love.

            “Dost thou doubt that if I call on my Father, even now, he will send more than twelve legions of angels to my side? But how, were it so, should the Scriptures be fulfilled, which have prophesied that all should be as it is?” (Matt.26 v. 53-4).

            His bound hands hold back the legion of angels.

            He has chosen our impotence in order to give us the power of his love, our weakness to give us his strength, our fear to give us his courage, our ignominy to give us his majesty, our pain to give us his peace, our wounds to give us his power to heal, our dying to give us his life; our interdependence that we may give him to one another.

            “Behold the man.”

In him behold mankind!

            Already in this mysterious moment of time, at the beginning of the Via Crucis, Christ has given himself to all those whom he will indwell through all the centuries to come; already he has taken them to himself, made them one with himself. All manner of men, and women, and children, the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous, saints and sinners, all who will be redeemed by his Passion are in Christ, and his Heavenly Father sees them all as Christ, his Son, in whom he is well pleased.

            There, in the Prince of Peace, stripped and wearing a soldier’s coat that has been put on him, are all the conscripts compelled to go to war. There in the young man in the flower of his manhood, going out willingly to be sacrificed, are all those young men who go willingly to die in battle for their fellow men.

            “This is the greatest love a man can show, that he should lay down his life for his friends” (John 15v.13)

            There, in the prisoner, bound, publicly shamed, condemned to the death of criminals, thieves and murderers, are all the criminals who will repent, and accept death on the scaffold as their due.

            There, in “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, are the kings of this world.

            “Art thou a king then?”

“It is thy own lips that have called me king.”

“My kingdom is not of this world.”

            There, crowned with thorns, and bearing a reed for a sceptre, are the kings of our days, whose crowns are thorn indeed and whose sceptres are reeds shaken by the wind.

            There, in the blameless Lord, made subject to men, illimitably patient, silent when he is mocked, silent before Herod, silent when Peter denies him, are all those innocent children who are so commonly patient and inarticulate in suffering, and whose suffering and death baffles and scandalizes us.

            “ --- you will all be scandalized in me!”

            There, in him, are the martyrs of all times; those of our own time with every detail of their martyrdom, including those which their persecutors try to hide, shown to the whole world.

            The trickery---the utter injustice---the faked evidence---the verdict decided before the trial---and the things that have been done in secret to prepare the victim, if possible to break him: the mental torture, a veritable crowning with thorns; the long nights without sleep. Cruellest of all, the attempt to make him a stumbling block to his own people.

            It is significant that everything contributing to that condemnation is parallel with everything that contributes to the passion of the martyrs of our own times.

            The intrigues and the fears of politicians, the hatred of fanatics, mass hysteria. The unstable crowd swayed by paid agitators, the popular craving for sensation--- and those many Pilates of our day, who wash their hands of the responsibility of knowing “What is truth?”, who shut their eyes to Christ in man, and try to escape from their own uneasiness by evasions.

            “I am innocent of the blood of this just man --- look you to it!”

            “In any case, there is nothing that I could do about it!”

            Neither is it by chance that those who will carry out the sentence will be the young and ignorant soldiers of an army of occupation, lads brought up like the soldiers of the Red Army, deprived of the knowledge of the one God, obeying their orders without question, because they are conditioned to obey orders without questioning or thinking.

            “Father, forgive them; they do not know what it is they are doing.”

            “Behold the man!”

            Yes, and behold in him yourself.  Each one of us can recognise himself, a sinner, in the disfiguring, the bruising, the ugliness, hiding the beauty of the fairest of the sons of men. And there can be few who do not recognise themselves too, in the utter loneliness of this man in the midst of the crowd that lately spread their garments to be trodden by the little ass he rode on, and now clamour for his blood.

            “Behold we have seen him disfigured and without beauty; his aspect is gone from him; he has borne our sins and suffers for us; and he was wounded for our iniquities, and by his stripes we are healed.”

                                          

                                                                   PRAYER

           “Lord that I may see!”

            Give me light to see you in my even-Christian,

            And to see my even-Christian in you.

            Give me faith to recognise you

            in those under my own roof.

            In those who are with me, day after day,

            on the way of the Cross.

            Let me recognise you

            not only in saints and martyrs,

            in the innocence of children,

            in the patience of old people

            waiting quietly for death.

            In the splendour of those

            who die for their fellow men;

            But let me also discern your beauty

            through the ugliness of suffering for sin

            that you have taken upon yourself.

            Let me know you in the outcast,

            the humiliated, the ridiculed, the shamed.

            In the sinner who weeps for his sins.

            Give me even the courage

            to look at your Holy Face,

            almost obliterated,

            bruised and lacerated

            by my own guilt,

            and to see myself!

            Look back at me, Lord,

            through your tears,

            with my own eyes,

            and let me see you,

               Jesus, condemned to death,

            in myself,

            and in all men

            who are condemned to die.

                                                       Caryll Houselander                    

'Hero' of our Times, one of many' - history will honour you.

 

                                                 Dr Peter McCullough

            When the full and raw history of the Covid nightmare is finally written, the name “McCullough” will sit atop a relatively (very) short list of brave and inspirational figures who stood tall and firm before the tidal wave of tyranny. Restrained and unassuming by nature, this unlikely Titan of the righteous ‘resistance’ has refused to bend his knee despite relentless attempts by corrupt and compromised authorities and institutions to crush and cancel him.

            Typically delivered in his extempore style, this deeply personal testimony was given at the Religious Liberty Weekend conference held in January 2023 at the Village Seventh Day Adventist Church in Berrien Springs, Michigan. In effect, he relates the high cost of conscientious objection to implacable agendas dictated to national governments and transnational bodies by the unelected, unaccountable money powers. Tragically, his hard experience has taught him that very few in today’s affluent West are willing to pay this painful price of priceless freedom.

            Hailing from Presbyterian stock, he stresses above all the spiritual war we are in; relating moments during his providential ‘calling’ to engage in this battle that convinced him--- utterly---of its supernatural nature, thereby transforming his once casual faith.

            Extracts from his introductory biographical information are included not only for their topical interest (the subsequent ‘events’ in Israel and Gaza), but as a summary explanation of the formative and marital influences behind his unwavering commitment, dignity, and resilience. Our transcription/title. Speaker’s emphasis in italics.

Acknowledgements and thanks:- Rod Pead, ‘Christian Order’, November 2023. No.11 Vol. 64.

                                                    *************

               

  “It Is A Spiritual Battle”         by Dr Peter McCullough.

            As a child, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, a steel town, not dissimilar from Detroit, in the 1960s. My family is an Irish immigrant family. My Dad worked in the factory. My family came after the potato famine, which was 1850. My family came from Northern Ireland, and they fared better during the tough times. You heard about the kulaks, and 15 million who died, in an intentional famine in Ukraine.  You heard that earlier today, and that was around 1920.

            Economic hard times fell in the early 1970s. Before we knew it the factory jobs had gone away, and we didn’t have any money. And we got to the point where we lost our car, lost our house, lost everything. And so we packed up a car, and drove to Texas, because we heard at that time there was work in Texas. We landed in Wichita Falls and started out a new beginning in Wichita, Texas.

            So I finished school in Texas. I went to Baylor University undergraduate , the University of Texas Southwestern medical school, I finished top in my class. And then I went on to residency at the University of Washington in Seattle.  I did three years service work ---and at the time it was common, 30 years ago or so, to do service, and so many of my fellow  residents in Seattle became CDC officers, or they were already in the military, or they did some sort of service.  I did a rural health service, and I was in Grayling, Michigan. That’s how I came to Michigan. So I was up in northern Michigan, we really were all over, as a kind of patchwork, trying to deliver healthcare in northern Michigan.

Middle East connection.

And so in the third year of that, I decided I needed more training in epidemiology and statistics. I went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbour and I studied epidemiology there, and then did my fellowship at William Beaumont Hospital. Then I was fully baked as an internist, a cardiologist and an epidemiologist, well trained and I launched my career. And I married after residency and had two children. We raised our kids in Northville, Michigan. And I’d consider our nuclear family as being solid. We were what I would consider reasonable Christians. I was baptised in Knox Presbyterian church in Kenmore, New York, and we went to a Presbyterian church in Northville.

            My wife is interesting. She is a Christian Palestinian. Her family was of historical importance in Palestine. My wife’s grandfather was the assistant Governor General under (Herbert) Samuel who was the Lord, if you will, of Britain through the British Mandate, who was overseeing the nation-building of Israel. And my wife, on her father’s side, her grandfather was the Stationmaster of the Palestinian railroad. So the Palestinians had a full railroad system, full educational system. And at the time there were about 70,000 original Jews who were right near the ocean in a town called Acre. That’s largely where they were. This was true for about 500 years.

            My wife actually has a Turkish last name, Buyuk. The Ottoman Empire and the Turks controlled that region for 800 years. So the modern nation-building of Israel is a pretty recent phenomenon. So many of the current Israelis there are people who ostensibly are Russian or Polish, or some other.  The current Israeli accent is almost more of a Russian accent. So when I go to Israel, and I go jogging outside, which I do, I fit in, because there’s so many blond-haired Russian-looking people. They don’t look like they are Semites. Both the Palestinians and the Jews are Semites, they’re a Semitic people. And they do have this common origin.

            Hebrew is a limited set of Arabic; an Arabic derived from Aramaic. So Arabic is a broad, very dynamic language, and Hebrew is very limited. So all the Palestinians there can speak Hebrew, readily. My wife, her family, they can speak Hebrew readily as they live in this new environment.  They probably, 500 years ago, could speak Turkish too.

Resilient Christian bedrock

            If you’ve ever been to Nazareth there’s almost no Jews there. It’s almost completely a Palestinian area. It’s within the borders of Israel.  So, Israel, I’ve been there several times, we have real estate there. I’ve found it such an amazingly diverse place.

            One of the things I’ve concluded from going to Israel, is it will never be a Jewish state. Never. It’s the birthplace of Christianity, the original people are still there, the Palestinians. There are Druze, an early sect that has different beliefs. There’s messianic Jews. There’s Franciscans. Christians. If you go to Jerusalem you know the different quarters. By its nature it’s an incredibly multi-cultural, diverse place.  And century, after century, after century there’s one ruling group after another that wants the entire place to be ethnically cleaned. And it’s just not going to happen. The current regime wants it to be a Jewish state. And with forty percent of people who are doing something differently, including Christians, Muslims and others, it’s just not going to happen.

            I think that’s the tension of how things are presented to us. I learnt this after 35 years of marriage. And the reason why I’m telling you all this is because it’s the bedrock of my life and marriage: to have somebody as resilient as a Palestinian, whose family ultimately had to flee after the 1967 war. At that time the Israeli Defence Force had gathered up, the tide had turned in that country, and when they came to my wife’s house, they took the women and children to a ‘refugee camp’, they took the men to a prison work camp for the Israeli Defence Force, and they moved Polish families and Russian families into the family house, which they owned for hundreds of years. And so, after they had two or three years of that, they finally regathered, and then they ultimately took a plane to Toronto and they declared political asylum there, and then they established in Toronto, and that’s where my wife grew up. But it’s the fact that she’s a Palestinian and she’s Christian, and it’s an ancient line of Christianity, and she’s resilient, is very, very important.

Covid-19 upheaval

            So my life was perfect as an academic. I had all the wonderful privileges, of travel and fame, consulting and publishing. I’d given grand rounds in almost every major institution in the United States.  Had a sterling track record. I was studying how heart and kidney function interrelate to one another. And then, Covid-19 hit, and I did instinctively what I thought I should do, and that is to save every life that I possibly could, through my scholarship, my clinical care, my research, my authority in the country to do so. And, I learned within a few weeks, that something was dramatically wrong.

            Doctors who were my friends --- all over, including ones at Beaumont and University of Michigan, and Baylor in Dallas --- were basically letting people die; and get slaughtered by this virus. I couldn’t understand it. They quickly shut down, they didn’t want to talk about it, phone calls weren’t answered, emails weren’t answered, people started blocking one another. But these doctors were going to let their patients get slaughtered, and they did. And I could not believe it.

            And then it just got worse as we moved through the whole era of the vaccines. The same doctors who blocked treatment to their patients, and intentionally let them die, are the same doctors who are promoting and forcing the vaccines on the patients. It’s the same ones. The two are related. I told Tucker Carlson when I went into the (Fox News) studio, I said, Tucker, the two are linked. Something is going on, there’s some type of ‘disturbia’.

            And then, as a reasonable Christian, I started to see things --- when I say reasonable, I meant I went to church, I understood the principles, I accepted Christ as my Saviour, taught my kids Christian principles, but I did not believe God was specifically managing my life. And I really didn’t believe or see the acts of Satan or evil going on. I understood evil as a concept. But I thought everything was in the human realm. I really did.

Satan intervenes

Then what happened in 2020, I realised just even publishing a paper on treating Covid, was --- was almost sacrilege in medicine. That somehow, when I published a paper in the American Journal of Medicine, which is a very good journal, I received letters from (university) editors. I got one from Duke (Carolina), Monash (Australia), McMaster (Canada), from Brazil, and the letters were: Dr McCullough you can’t treat Covid. You can’t treat this. I said, what?  Of course I can. In my letter, I’d even have more and more evidence, I said, overcome your fear, and join me in treating patients, and saving lives. But the response was, you know, ‘I can’t do this.’

And so, as the medicines evolved, I needed to get a second paper updating the (Covid treatment) protocol. And at Baylor, we have the wonderful luxury where (the) American Journal of Cardiology and the Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Centre were published right in our offices. So, I organised a paper to go in the Proceedings of the Baylor University Medical Centre. And I went through all the peer reviewed process, I got the comments, I made edits, there was a final editorial decision, it was accepted for publication, copyright fees, gallery proofs, publication fees, everything --- it’s done, it’s a done deal, it’s forever going to be permanently in medicine. And by that time I was called by the US Senate, and I needed to cite that paper with the protocol in it. And I was waiting, and I was waiting, and I was waiting, and I was waiting, and nothing happened. And I kept contacting the publisher and Taylor & Francis. And finally I got somebody on the phone (at International publisher Taylor & Francis) and they said, ‘There’s a problem with this paper.’

            Problem?! A “problem” would’ve been two months ago. This is already a done deal, it’s already vetted. I’ve already paid the publication fees, or substantially, I’ve already paid them. It was done.

            They said, you have to go talk to the editor, who happens to be right down the hall from me. So I went right down the hall, and I talked to him. Now this is the senior editor, someone who’s one of the most published people in medicine, the longest standing editor of major journals, Dr Roberts.  I said, ‘Dr Roberts, is there a problem with this paper?’ He goes, ‘I’ve never seen this before, in 40 to 50 years of editing. This paper has been retrieved out of the National Library of Medicine, and now there’s an administrative complaint that it overlaps too much with the first paper.’

            The National Library of Medicine is a computer database. It’s not operated by people. It’s a computer database. There’s something like 20,000 entries made per day. Per day. It doesn’t do matching up of one thing versus another thing. It doesn’t have this (capacity). All the overlap with prior papers, all that’s vetted ahead of time. All that was vetted, I had a whole transmittal of what had happened.

            And when that happened, my face turned beet red. And I knew that something extraordinary had to have happened. It had to. It’s impossible for someone to fish that out (of the National Library of Medicine). It’s impossible for someone to actually be able to ID this, and realise that another treatment paper is coming. It’s impossible. It is physically, and from a computer technology (standpoint) impossible.

            I went home that night, and I told my wife, I think that is an act of Satan.  I think Satan had directly intervened in my life.       

Grace of the Holy Spirit

            And as things became more tense through 2020, I was called to the US Senate, and I was the lead witness in a historic set of hearings, November 19^th, 2020. I had to submit a US Senate biography, I got a speech- writer because I had a five minute opening statement, it has to have a certain format, so I hired a speech writer in Washington, and I did this, and it was negotiated with the Senate, it was accepted. And now all I had to do was read my speech. That’s all I had to do.

            And my wife and I went to Washington, I was in the Kimpton Hotel, probably 600 rooms, and there were three people in the entire hotel. All of Washington was shut down. All the Starbucks around were shut down. We literally walked, like three miles, to find a restaurant open, and we went past the Smithsonian, everything was closed down. I realised, Washington, in the fall of 2020, was shut down, our government wasn’t meeting. Everything had been dissolved.

            So that night I was practising my speech and my wife was timing it, and she goes, ‘You’re not making it in five minutes. You’re not making it. You’re not making the time.’ And I am just not a good reader of a message. My habit is to do what I’m doing now, to do it with no prepared comments. I prepare it in my mind, but I speak extemporaneously.

            So, I went to bed that night, I didn’t sleep well. I was about on day seventeen of Covid, I was recovering from Covid, I had a relatively severe case so I was on steroids, and I wasn’t sleeping that well. I hadn’t had my hair cut in months (due to lockdown). And so there I am, I’m on the Senate floor. Opening statements are given by Senator (Ron) Johnson, who’s the (Republican) majority chairman, and then opening statements by Gary Peters from Michigan, who’s the (Democrat) minority chairman.

            Senator Johnson has no mask on, he’s handsome, he’s brilliant, and he’s saying, ‘I’m bringing doctors here to tell America where they have found success in treating patients.’

            And Gary Peters left a black mask on, and Gary Peters said, ’Well, what we’re going to hear today? What I don’t want America to do, is to have any hope.’ (Audience sighs) He meant to say, ‘any false hopes,’ but it slipped out, that he didn’t want America to have any hope. He didn’t want America to have any hope, and I’ll just never forget that.

            The Senate chambers are relatively empty, most people aren’t there. Some people are on-line. We were supposed to have Mitt Romney, and Kamala Harris. Everyone’s in absentia.

            So after the comments, I’m the first witness, and Senator Johnson said, ‘Dr McCullough.’ He introduces me. I look at this impossible 700 – word speech in five minutes. And I look at it, I look at my timer, which I have five minutes, and that’s it. And then I just turn that speech over and I just went. And at that moment, I felt like a jolt of lightning went into my body. And my voice changed, I became aggressive, I became hyper-focused, I didn’t miss a single word, I didn’t stumble on a single point, I showed my protocols, I was clear, and I concluded. I had concluded that American lives were being lost because early treatment was denied. And I had concluded that academic fraud had occurred in the literature, and I used those words. But when I finished, and I looked down, it was five minutes --- not a second more, not a second later. (Applause)

            My heart rate had to be 140. Yeah.  And…I basically realised something had really happened. And then the rest of the proceedings to me were like a blur, even though it was hours it seemed like it was over in minutes. And I went to lunch in an empty restaurant with my wife in Washington, and I told her, ‘Something just happened. Something happened. I felt the Holy Spirit come into me for those five minutes.’ And from that point on, I knew that this was way more than an academic debate. This was way more than science point versus science point.

Prayer and Providence.

            In my involvement, in being called by the media, called by the Senate, I had previously been called by the White House, it just started to happen in a flurry. And, I ultimately amassed probably more media time than any person in the media, right now. Remember, you see Tucker Carlson, he’s on for an hour. You know, there were some days I would be on sixteen TV shows in a day. In a day.

            And it just kept happening, and happening, and happening. And what I had concluded, and what I got in the habit of doing is …for instance,. I’m a frequent contributor on call for Fox, when I go to the Fox studio they’re very nice, they pick me up in a car, and send in a make-up crew and I go through all these steps… but in the preparatory phase, in the commercials and all these lights are on, they shut the door, which is wonderful, so I’m in a box by myself --- I pray. I pray and say ‘God, I’ve got a minute, I’ve got two minutes, I have to …let these words speak through me, let these words come through me, out.’ So when you see me in the media, that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to let God speak through me.

            And it started to happen on a more regular basis, on a more regular basis. And then I began to do public programmes, like the first one I did here (in Berrien Springs) but I did many more. And it was a cold day in January of 2022, and I was in Minneapolis, and we had some type of death threat that was announced. So it rattled us, my wife was with me, the police were there, they had to check the hotel room, and things had to be checked out. So we were just a little rattled, that this was the first time that this had come up.

            And I got through the programme, and I knew I was going to go right from Minneapolis to Washington, and they had security in Washington because I was going to give a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the very first  Defeat the Mandates rally, and I was the first medical speaker. And so things were really tight, and there was a lot of commotion, just, you know, when I showed up there was a huge crowd and everyone wanted to say hi and shake hands, and the security people were pushing me back, like, no, I can’t say hi to anyone, or certainly can’t touch anybody.

            And as I was kind of ushered up on the Lincoln Memorial, I got up there and there I saw this huge crowd, and it was a freezing cold day, and the same thing happened. The same thing happened. (Looking heavenwards in prayerful posture) I just said, ‘Speak. Through. Me.’ And it was seven minutes. Seven. And I hit all the points. I hit all the points, and I stopped and I listened for any dissent from the crowd. And when you look back in history some of the most important speeches (whispering) are the shortest. The Gettysburg address was like two-and-a-half minutes. This is really important.

The Stripping.

            It started to happen over and over again. And then, through this period of time, my interpretation is the acts of Satan have been directed towards me and people in my circles, and probably towards you.

            So, I was walked into an office one day at the hospital, after years of perfect service, patient revenue, grants, success. I had had success with covid, I had testified in the US Senate, people were clapping, they took half a day off to watch the testimony. Six weeks later I was walked into an office, they said, turn in your badge, you’re fired. What was the reason? No reason. No reason. I hadn’t violated the contract, hadn’t violated due process. Didn’t matter. So I scramble …I have to transfer my practice and transfer all the insurance contracts and just a tremendous amount of work, for a doctor who’s busy to now transfer a practice. So I did it within the same medical centre, reset up-shop there, working now at just a fraction of my prior salary but at that point in time it didn’t matter, what matters is taking care of my patients and having a presence, and then I have more media exposure.

            And then the next thing you know I start receiving certified letters or email. Stripped of a professorship at one university. Stripped of a professorship at another university. For no reason. No reason.

            Now let me tell you what. Professorship’s a big deal. There has to be a faculty senate hearing. There has to be points made, discussions. I mean if I committed an act of moral turpitude or something like this, there would be all this investigation. There was nothing, and it was just a very sterile letter: you are stripped of this title. And then a follow-up letter: If you ever use this title publicly we’re going to sue you.

            Then editorships. I was the editor of two major journals. Again, no due process, no editorial meeting, no courtesy call. No transition plan. Just, ‘you are terminated as editor-in-chief.’

            Then it kept going. I was stripped of every National Institutes of Health (NIH) committee that I’ve been on, some for decades. Every pharmaceutical company committee. Pharmaceutical (committees that) have nothing to do with vaccines. NIH committees that have nothing to do with Covid.

            And it just kept going, and going, and going. Recently, two weeks ago, I got a letter from a French company, being stripped of chairmanship of two day-safety monitoring boards, which I’ve been on for, you know, this is a long-term investment.

            These acts take effort. They’re expensive for the people doing them because they have to find people to replace me. They have to re-contract. This is not a minor thing. People doing this are hurting themselves. They’re not benefitting at all. I probably have two dozen of these. In my book, ‘Courage to Face Covid-19', it tells the story that I’m telling you today, and there’s a chapter in there called “The Stripping”. And it almost has this religious analogy, right. This stripping. Of just how I’m being stripped. Now it’s not painful. I’m not in any pain. It’s humiliating. It’s a public thing. But it’s really come to a head last year.

Kangaroo Court

 In May, I get a letter from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), which certifies doctors as internists and cardiologists and other specialists. And the American Board of Internal Medicine said, you have violated our code of Covid misinformation policy.  Turns out that in September of 2021, the ABIM enacted a Covid misinformation policy. But they didn’t tell doctors what they consider misinformation. They didn’t give us teaching modules, talking points, or anything.  And we do lots of teaching modules, we do lots of compliance, we sign off on all this stuff. Nothing. So they come up with this policy in September of 2021. They went back in time to March 2021 and said, aha, what you said at the Texas Senate is misinformation, we disagree with you. And here’s the reason why we disagree.

            So I do a rebuttal letter to them. They go into deliberation, they have this committee of people who don’t have any experience with Covid, no experience of testifying in any public setting, really kind of junior group of doctors, and they come out of this meeting and convict me of Covid misinformation. And now have said that I have been recommended to be stripped of my internal medicine and cardiology reports. Stripped. I did three years of medicine in residency at University of Washington. I did three years of cardiology fellowship at William Beaumont hospital. I have passed all the exams. Did very well. I finished you know, number one clinically in my class in medical school. I have a perfect, flawless track record as a clinician. The only thing this board should care about is, is somebody competent as a specialist, and as an internist. That’s the only thing: are they in good stead, did they do a residency and a fellowship.

            Now, I’ve had to lawyer up and do this very arduous appeal process to the same kangaroo court that’s convicted me of misinformation, which isn’t provable or not provable. And all my statements as I’ve made, I’ve cited and referenced, I’m as tight with the data as anyone out there. So I’m on the precipice now of being de-certified. I may be the first public figure to be de-certified … that is, stripped of residency and fellowship… for no clinical reason. I won’t be able to contract with insurance companies anymore, so I won’t be able to hold hospital privileges anymore. So, my whole career begins to dissolve. So that by the time the American Board of Internal Medicine announces that I’ve been convicted of Covid misinformation, within a few weeks I’m called into an office with my current practice at the same medical centre, a very good private practice, two years of stellar track record, building patients and referrals, all this success, and I’m told that I’m fired, for no reason. So I go home that night and tell my wife I’ve been fired …for no reason.

Doctors: inner darkness and palpable fear.

            Now the doctors who fired me, they were my friends. One guy I went to medical school (with). They literally were looking at the table, they wouldn’t look me in the eye. (Head down, mumbles in imitation) “Um, you’re fired, uh…” They just seemed so uncomfortable. No vitriol. They weren’t mad at me. They had some type of darkness in them. They were almost trembling, and sweating. They were overcome with fear. Fear is in their bodies. The body language of fear, I’ve learned to recognise it. (repeats) I’ve learned to recognise it.

            I’ve challenged any doctor in America, if they think it’s right, to deny people treatment, or if they think it’s right to push these vaccines, to just come and talk to me, just look me in the eyes. Not a single one. I can’t get a bad e-mail. I can’t even get a bad text message from one of these doctors. None. It became so crazy that somebody in our group who’s got a lot of money has offered millions of dollars: ‘If anyone would just come up and talk to Dr McCullough, I’ll pay you a million dollars.’ No one will do it. (repeats) No one will do it. And when I see people, I see people in the hallway, I still have a few more clinic sessions before I am out of my current position, the doctors just look at the ground. They just look at the ground. They cannot look me in the eye. The nurses know what’s going on. They know what’s going on. But the doctors cannot look at me in the eye. It is a sign of incredible burden that they must have. I’ve come to conclude; they must have the presence of Satan within them.

A spiritual battle

            Nobody is chattering. If doctors really knew that not treating patients was immoral, and unethical, if they really knew that these vaccines were killing patients, and they still did it anyway, they couldn’t handle the guilt. They would be chattering. There’s no chatter. The doctors took the vaccine themselves. And they still are taking them. So doctors are divided. There’s a million doctors out there. There’s maybe 500 to a thousand who vociferously said they’re not taking the vaccine. Five hundred to a thousand. And then there’s about a hundred thousand that didn’t take the vaccine and don’t think it’s safe, but they won’t say it. And there’s probably about 900,000 who took it. I’ve seen one estimate where its 96% of doctors have taken the vaccine.

            So the doctors are in on this completely. But I do believe it is clearly a spiritual battle. I think what we’re seeing are acts of Satan.

Eerie silence and disregard

            You know this, with the next young athlete who dies, of which now you are seeing reports every day. And the report will show some wonderful young person, they’re perfectly healthy, and they’ve just died, on the sporting field, or they’ve died in the locker room. And there is some type of report like, ‘It was good to know them while they were here, and we need to appreciate people.’ Some type of language. But then never any cause of what’s happened, and never really any reaction from the parents. And then it’s gone. It is gone. The parents don’t speak out. There is never a mention of whether- or- not they took a vaccine. There’s never a mention of whether- or- not they had Covid. There’s never a mention of anything. It’s as if, they are just, disappearing. Just, like a flicker of light, and it’s gone.

Chilling censorship

            Person, after person …probably today while I am speaking there’ll be a few more. And every time there’s never any mention. Never any mention. And actually, if they have taken the vaccine in the past, quickly Google and all the search engines change where you can’t find it. Somebody has to be really skilful (in locating online data) to say, ‘Oh, look, they took the vaccine.’

            Irene Cara, the woman who sings the ‘Flash- dance’ song, it happened to her recently. And she died, and the write up said, ‘She died, and we don’t know what happened.’ Somebody dug it up somewhere and she just took the vaccine on her birthday, and she had tweeted that out and what have you. It was already scrubbed from Twitter. But someone had found it. Each time, each time.

Alarming Realisation

    So, when Damian Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills (footballer), has a cardiac arrest   out on the field, within 24 hours they had raced a film crew out to me. I was in Colorado and they wanted my commentary. And I had listened for 24 hours to commentary. Media person after media person, current player, former player, doctors --- not a single person would mention the possibility of vaccine-induced myocarditis and sudden death. It was a straight line. The straight line was, the US government paid the NFL (National Football League) money in 2021 to push the vaccines to the Covid Community Corps (of “trusted” government “messengers” pushing the jabs). The NFL was trying to decide what to do. The FDA came out and said ‘The vaccines cause myocarditis.’ That means athletes cannot have myocarditis and be on the field, athletes really can’t take the vaccine. Then the NFL in the mid-summer of 2021 says, ‘vaccine mandate.’ And then for eight months the players were mandated to take the vaccine. NFL proudly says 95% of players took the vaccine. I told (Fox News hosts) Tucker Carlson a week ago, I told Laura Ingraham this week, it is a straight line. It is a straight line. Any doctor who is not considering the vaccine (as the cause)… is in some form of a trance, some form of a fog, if they’re genuinely not considering the vaccine.

I think there’s a psychological phenomenon going on. I think when people have this (shot) inside their body, they cannot possibly imagine that the same thing could happen to them. The reason why the players look so nauseated, and all the commentators looked pale, is so many of them were thinking, ‘Oh ---, could I be next?’. That’s what they were thinking.’ Could I be next? Could I be next?

Instrument of the devil.

The vaccine, and everything it is, and how it’s been utilised, could be conceptualised, as an instrument of the devil. It meets all the characteristics for such an instrument.

Divides people. Makes people sick. Makes people question themselves. Removes joy. Removes clarity. Creates more confusion, more self doubt.

All in a single shot. And you know, it could be an instrument of the devil if it was saline, if it was placebo, it could still be an instrument of the devil. I think Covid-19 the illness, was an instrument of the devil.

Shuts down houses of worship, but leaves open the liquor stores and the striptease joints, right. Scares our seniors. Takes away our seniors. Takes away their last Christmas. Their last birthday.

Divides families.

Creates endless amounts of fear and suffering.

Hellish hospitals: explosion of pure evil.

And then the hospitalisation. I think the hospitalisation itself, represents evil. Hospitals themselves now, instead of being places to get well and recover, now are viewed as death traps. And it is true. And the horrors that have gone on inside hospitals, are unspeakable, when it comes to Covid. And there’s vignette after vignette, class section lawsuit after class section lawsuit … it’s inexplicable.

We’re three years into it, (and) not a single hospital in America has tried to improve patient care for Covid. Not a single hospital in Michigan claims to be any good at treating Covid. There are no comparative statistics in Michigan. Nobody has any outpatient protocols at any one of the major universities in Michigan to even treat Covid, let alone handle a vaccine injury. Michigan is a great place for science and medicine, Michigan is completely devoid of any excellence or bravado in Covid-19. Zero. It’s . . . beyond . . . any conception. The only thing that could keep University of Michigan down . . . University of Michigan is lower than the lousiest hospital in India right now, when it comes to innovation and Covid . . . the only thing that could keep University of Michigan down, is some type of prevailing force, that is pure evil. That is the only thing that explains it.       

Larger prevailing ideology

            You can’t get in the minds of thousands and thousands of people, without having some type of explanation. The same thing is true for the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. And the same thing is true for the  best hospitals in Japan. It’s worldwide (repeats) It’s worldwide. When Covid-19 hit, it came in the minds of people to hurt other people in the context of Covid. It came in the minds of people to do nothing, for people with Covid. And to impede anybody who was trying to help them. And now the vaccines, it’s come into the mind that no matter how bad they are, or how ineffective they are, they are going to be forced on people with no exception.

            It’s in the minds of people. All over the world simultaneously. And they’re thinking the same way. (My mind has been) opened up to what’s really going on. A larger prevailing … ideology … that because it’s so synchronised, and is so worldwide, it can’t be due to Twitter. It can’t be due to some Memo that was sent. It’s too big. (repeats) It’s too big.

Personal sacrifice

            So my personal journey and summary, is that I think through all this, I don’t feel worthy, but I think I’ve been called. (Applause) And I think my  mission, my instructions, are … to deliver a message. To deliver a message. And, as in so many examples in the Bible, being called means sacrifice. The two go together And I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me, billionaires that come up to me, ‘Oh, I want to get a picture with you, I want to meet you, and listen, I really like what you’re doing.’ I said, ‘Listen, you’re a billionaire. Do you know what good you can do for the world.’ And he said, (whispers) ‘Well, I want to stay behind the scenes.’

            Everybody in this great controversy that we’re in right now, doesn’t want to lose anything. They want a good outcome. But they want no personal loss or injury whatsoever. I don’t think it’s going to work that way. Look what (conference speaker) Dr Vine presented. There was no one who got out of that Ukrainian (Holodomor)  catastrophe unscathed. Nobody. Everyone paid a price. I think it’s going to get much worse, in the States. It’s going to get much worse. Not a single one of you is going to come out of this, without making a sacrifice.

            The only thing I can tell you, I can thank God right now, the sacrifices are with no pain, no physical pain, no suffering. I sleep very well at night. We are very well taken care of as a group of people. And I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t do anything any differently. Nothing. (Applause) It’s the most important work we can do. The most important thing. Looking back on it now, now I understand God was preparing me for this. The entire time, God was preparing my wife to do this. God was preparing my family, was preparing you. God was preparing us for times such as this. 

                          Thank you Dr Peter McCullough. Ed.