Are You Afraid? Run to Our Lady!

Our Lady crushes the head of the serpent by her obedience and humility!

I'm treating myself today by reading the last few post by Fr. Gordon MacRae at Beyond These Stone Walls. My heart "leaps up" as I reflect on Father's thoughts and glorify God for what He can do even when his servants serve locked behind "stone walls." So many saints show us that truth firsthand: St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Thomas More, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Edith Stein, St. Miguel Pro. And then there are the saints who voluntarily locked themselves behind the stone walls of monasteries and convents. We could fill a multi-story library with their biographies all of which illustrate the solution to overcome fear.

We live in times when evil men and women, with the arrogant goal of controlling the world, labor to instill a mind-numbing control over others using fear as the tool. I posted yesterday about the latest screaming scamdemic filling the internet -- bird flu. The previous hype with bird flu in 2009 was a dud. That was then; this is now; and with gain of function terrorism fueling the latest bird flu propaganda, the fear-mongering is in hyperdrive! And of course, the worldly solution is another vaccine. Never mind that the annual flu vaccine generally misses the mark offering no immunity. The lemmings go for it anyway, trusting lab-coated witch doctors gazing into their crystal virus balls. Every year they assure us they have a cure for the latest quickly mutating virus. Listen to them and you will never die.

Are you afraid?

If so, I offer Fr. MacRae's antidote to fear in his January 1st post, A Glorious Mystery for When the Dark Night Rises. Here's the beginning:

To comprehend this post, readers must understand the world of 1962. Something happened in America that dramatically changed our view of ourselves and the world around us, and its tentacles reach deeply into the present day. It brought a sense of futility, a resignation that we are powerless over the great tides of history sweeping us up into their grip, and resistance to evil is futile. So look out for Number One, and live for the moment! That is the great lie of our age.

I turned nine years old in April of 1962. Five months later, I began fifth grade a year younger than everyone else in my class. A month after that, the United States and the Soviet Union approached the very brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962. The administration of President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union had placed strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Diplomacy failed miserably, and it just exposed our impotence. The United States demanded removal of the missiles and the Soviet Union flatly refused. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were all that stood between us and nuclear annihilation. Fear and deep anxiety engulfed everything — even the 5th grade. [Read more...]

Perfect love casts out fear. On our journey through 2025 we have some loving guides to protect us. Every one of us has a guardian angel. Every one of us has the perfect Mother to take our hand. And we have so many reminders of God's promise of care. We have the rainbow given to Noah and the stars given to Abraham, signs of God's love and care. 

I look at the sky when I'm fearful and my heart leaps up. William Wordsorth captured that message of love for me in his poem when he wrote, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky." But he also captured the essence of Our Blessed Lady when he called her "our tainted nature's solitary boast." 

There is no greater place to run when we are afraid than to Mary, who crushed the head of the serpent with her obedience and humility. The icon of hope, she invites us to be folded in her mantle protected from all danger. "Am I not here who am your Mother?" Let us turn to her every day in the holy rosary. 

And God bless Wordsworth for his praise of the Queen of Heaven. 

                                  The Virgin

                            William Wordsworth

        Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost         With the least shade of thought to sin allied.         Woman! above all women glorified,         Our tainted nature's solitary boast;         Purer than foam on central ocean tost;         Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn         With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon         Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;         Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,         Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,         As to a visible Power, in which did blend         All that was mixed and reconciled in thee         Of mother's love with maiden purity,         Of high with low, celestial with terrene!