Brownstone Institute
Reflections on the Triduum: Can the Darkness Turn to Light?
From the Brownstone Institute
The days leading up to Easter Sunday of 2020 were the darkest days not merely of my priesthood, but of my life.
People were no longer allowed to attend Mass or even to go to Confession. My very life’s vocation was rendered suspended indefinitely. Worse yet, I experienced a deep sense of betrayal as I had been formed to believe that it was a priest’s job to be ready to “preach, pray, or die at any moment.” The lack of pushback against what had never happened in the whole of history seemed to render such a sentiment a macabre joke.
I experienced a similar sense of betrayal from many of my “friends” on Facebook. From the beginning I was vocal about how predictions of doom were obvious untruths and that lockdowns were tantamount to civilizational suicide. Many heaped mockery and derision upon me for having spoken blasphemies against the Narrative.
Echoing Jeffrey Tucker’s moving reflection, the sunrise had become a curse. Waking up became a moment to wonder what fresh new Hell would be unleashed upon us. It was during this time that I encountered a song which framed perfectly the emotions I was feeling:
No good word today,
No good word today,
The sun’s still a shining
And I’m still above the ground,
But there’s no good word today.
Worse yet, now approached the Sacred Triduum, the special liturgies which begin the evening of Holy Thursday and carry us through into Easter Sunday. The thought of celebrating this holy time in an empty church for the benefit of internet streaming transformed my favorite time of year into a period of intense dread.
It was as if the “night” of John’s Gospel, which represents an end of the “day” when the works of the Father may be done (John 9:4), the time when men stumble because the light is not in them (John 11:10), and when the betrayal of Judas is set in motion (John 13:30) had become our unbroken reality with no end in sight.
Of course, the night is not to be feared, for the darkness has not overcome the light (John 1:5). My experience of Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 2020 became a profound moment of grace for me, a moment that would strengthen my resolve against the forces of evil which had brought us to such a dark moment in human history.
Good Friday: Fear Begets Darkness
In seminary, one of my Scripture professors challenged us to understand that the text of Sacred Scripture doesn’t reveal all of its secrets in one’s first reading, but only through constant revisiting. Tasked with celebrating and preaching the Good Friday ceremony to only a camera, it occurred to me for the first time that, just like in lockdowns, nearly everybody was motivated by fear:
-The Sanhedrin is fearful of any challenge to their religious authority and they accomplish the trial at night due to fear of riots.
-Pontius Pilate is fearful for his career, as this whole affair has the potential to be the final straw that ends a career that has placed him in this “last chance” assignment. Pilate is fearful of the crowds. Pilate is fearful even of the concept of truth itself.
-Eleven of the Twelve Apostles are fearful. The faithless betrayer and thief is afraid for the end of his ability to embezzle and looks for one final opportunity to cash out. Nine disappear into hiding completely. The leader observes from a distance, but denies his friend and Lord under the slightest of social pressure.
– The crowds, easily manipulated by the passions of the moment, rapidly change their tune from “Hosanna” a few days earlier to “Crucify him” out of fear of standing out against the direction where these events were clearly going.
Such great evil accomplished in so short of a time! The fearful spiritual darkness of night unleashed the worst that humanity was capable of, not merely once in human history but as a recurring pattern. The spread of fear in March 2020 clearly had nothing to do with God or goodness. As I preached that day, I drew attention to a news story from an Emergency Room just days prior. Fear and panic were so prevalent that a woman assaulted and killed an old woman with dementia who, while confused, moved too close to her.
What was happening was evil. What was happening was dark, and it was fear that was the means by which this evil created the darkness.
Easter Vigil and the Missing Voices
Saturday night after dusk is the time for the Easter Vigil. Once again, I was charged with preaching. But at this ceremony, I would have a disturbing spiritual experience during the chanting of the Exsultet by the deacon when he arrived at the part which announces:
Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
ablaze with light from her eternal King,
let all corners of the earth be glad,
knowing an end to gloom and darkness.
Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
let this holy building shake with joy,
filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.
At this point I began crying and shaking. It was as if I could hear in my mind a malevolent voice taunting me: “Filled with what people’s voices? Look at these empty pews! Look at what I have accomplished! Behold and despair, priest.”
I did not listen to this voice, whatever or whoever it was. Instead I was filled with a sense of defiance, a defiance which I expressed in my sermon later in that ceremony. The light conquers the darkness! Nothing matters more than gathering together to fill a church and cry out with mighty voices! This evil which we have brought upon ourselves must never happen again.
That night I gathered with friends at a house for a wonderfully and defiantly illegal social gathering. There was no distance, no masking, and no fear, only a celebration of the coming of Easter.
Mere days later I would write my first op-ed wherein I condemned these indefinite lockdowns as intrinsically evil. Merely posting on my private social media wasn’t enough; conscience convicted me that my voice had to go public. Now was the time to side with the light which the darkness cannot overcome, even through manipulation of human fear. Now it was John Cash’s cover of an old gospel song that reinforced my disposition:
… He spoke to me in the voice so sweet
I thought I heard the shuffle of the angel’s feet
He called my name and my heart stood still
When he said, “John, go do my will!”
… Go tell that long tongue liar
Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Defiant Lights Against the Darkness
For Christians, Easter has always been associated with the initiation rituals whereby the works of darkness are renounced and put to death so that the new life belonging to the Light of the World may be begun. In ancient days, the catechumens would defiantly turn towards the West to make this renunciation and then turn to the East, leaving behind everything to make their profession of faith.
Far too many voices want simply to “move on” and pretend as if the last 3 years never happened, even as we continue to deal with the destruction which has been wrought. This is an attempt to avoid admitting just how dark the things which were done were, because such an admission would require repentance, as I argued at the beginning of Lent.
Three years ago I felt the depth of the darkness which had entered the world, and I was moved to choose defiance in favor of the light. This brought my path to be part of the good work being done here at Brownstone. A Happy Easter to all, and let us continue the good fight against weaponized fear which seeks to prevent us from experiencing our highest goods.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Way back in the B.C. era (Before Covid), I taught Medical Humanities and Bioethics at an American medical school. One of my older colleagues – I’ll call him Dr. Quinlan – was a prominent member of the faculty and a nationally recognized proponent of physician-assisted suicide.
Dr. Quinlan was a very nice man. He was soft-spoken, friendly, and intelligent. He had originally become involved in the subject of physician-assisted suicide by accident, while trying to help a patient near the end of her life who was suffering terribly.
That particular clinical case, which Dr. Quinlan wrote up and published in a major medical journal, launched a second career of sorts for him, as he became a leading figure in the physician-assisted suicide movement. In fact, he was lead plaintiff in a challenge of New York’s then-prohibition against physician-assisted suicide.
The case eventually went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which added to his fame. As it happened, SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against him, definitively establishing that there is no “right to die” enshrined in the Constitution, and affirming that the state has a compelling interest to protect the vulnerable.
SCOTUS’s unanimous decision against Dr. Quinlan meant that his side had somehow pulled off the impressive feat of uniting Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and all points in between against their cause. (I never quite saw how that added to his luster, but such is the Academy.)
At any rate, I once had a conversation with Dr. Quinlan about physician-assisted suicide. I told him that I opposed it ever becoming legal. I recall he calmly, pleasantly asked me why I felt that way.
First, I acknowledged that his formative case must have been very tough, and allowed that maybe, just maybe, he had done right in that exceptionally difficult situation. But as the legal saying goes, hard cases make bad law.
Second, as a clinical physician, I felt strongly that no patient should ever see their doctor and have to wonder if he was coming to help keep them alive or to kill them.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s this thing called the slippery slope.
As I recall, he replied that he couldn’t imagine the slippery slope becoming a problem in a matter so profound as causing a patient’s death.
Well, maybe not with you personally, Dr. Quinlan, I thought. I said no more.
But having done my residency at a major liver transplant center in Boston, I had had more than enough experience with the rather slapdash ethics of the organ transplantation world. The opaque shuffling of patients up and down the transplant list, the endless and rather macabre scrounging for donors, and the nebulous, vaguely sinister concept of brain death had all unsettled me.
Prior to residency, I had attended medical school in Canada. In those days, the McGill University Faculty of Medicine was still almost Victorian in its ways: an old-school, stiff-upper-lip, Workaholics-Anonymous-chapter-house sort of place. The ethic was hard work, personal accountability for mistakes, and above all primum non nocere – first, do no harm.
Fast forward to today’s soft-core totalitarian state of Canada, the land of debanking and convicting peaceful protesters, persecuting honest physicians for speaking obvious truth, fining people $25,000 for hiking on their own property, and spitefully seeking to slaughter harmless animals precisely because they may hold unique medical and scientific value.
To all those offenses against liberty, morality, and basic decency, we must add Canada’s aggressive policy of legalizing, and, in fact, encouraging industrial-scale physician-assisted suicide. Under Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAiD) program, which has been in place only since 2016, physician-assisted suicide now accounts for a terrifying 4.7 percent of all deaths in Canada.
MAiD will be permitted for patients suffering from mental illness in Canada in 2027, putting it on par with the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.
To its credit, and unlike the Netherlands and Belgium, Canada does not allow minors to access MAiD. Not yet.
However, patients scheduled to be terminated via MAiD in Canada are actively recruited to have their organs harvested. In fact, MAiD accounts for 6 percent of all deceased organ donors in Canada.
In summary, in Canada, in less than 10 years, physician-assisted suicide has gone from illegal to both an epidemic cause of death and a highly successful organ-harvesting source for the organ transplantation industry.
Physician-assisted suicide has not slid down the slippery slope in Canada. It has thrown itself off the face of El Capitan.
And now, at long last, physician-assisted suicide may be coming to New York. It has passed the House and Senate, and just awaits the Governor’s signature. It seems that the 9-0 Supreme Court shellacking back in the day was just a bump in the road. The long march through the institutions, indeed.
For a brief period in Western history, roughly from the introduction of antibiotics until Covid, hospitals ceased to be a place one entered fully expecting to die. It appears that era is coming to an end.
Covid demonstrated that Western allopathic medicine has a dark, sadistic, anti-human side – fueled by 20th-century scientism and 21st-century technocratic globalism – to which it is increasingly turning. Physician-assisted suicide is a growing part of this death cult transformation. It should be fought at every step.
I have not seen Dr. Quinlan in years. I do not know how he might feel about my slippery slope argument today.
I still believe I was correct.
From the Brownstone Institute
Many news outlets reported the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday by saying President Donald Trump had missed out (Washington Post, Yahoo, Hindustan Times, Huffington Post), not won (USA Today), fallen short (AP News), lost (Time), etc. There is even a meme doing the rounds about ‘Trump Wine.’ ‘Made from sour grapes,’ the label explains, ‘This is a full bodied and bitter vintage guaranteed to leave a nasty taste in your mouth for years.’
For the record, the prize was awarded to María Corina Machado for her courageous and sustained opposition to Venezuela’s ruling regime. Trump called to congratulate her. Given his own attacks on the Venezuelan president, his anger will be partly mollified, and he could even back her with practical support. He nonetheless attacked the prize committee, and the White House assailed it for putting politics before peace.
He could be in serious contention next year. If his Gaza peace plan is implemented and holds until next October, he should get it. That he is unlikely to do so is more a reflection on the award and less on Trump.
So He Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Meh!
Alfred Nobel’s will stipulates the prize should be awarded to the person who has contributed the most to promote ‘fraternity between nations…abolition or reduction of standing armies and…holding and promotion of peace congresses.’ Over the decades, this has expanded progressively to embrace human rights, political dissent, environmentalism, race, gender, and other social justice causes.
On these grounds, I would have thought the Covid resistance should have been a winner. The emphasis has shifted from outcomes and actual work to advocacy. In honouring President Barack Obama in 2009, the Nobel committee embarrassed itself, patronised him, and demeaned the prize. His biggest accomplishment was the choice of his predecessor as president: the prize was a one-finger send-off to President George W. Bush.
There have been other strange laureates, including those prone to wage war (Henry Kissinger, 1973), tainted through association with terrorism (Yasser Arafat, 1994), and contributions to fields beyond peace, such as planting millions of trees. Some laureates were subsequently discovered to have embellished their record, and others proved to be flawed champions of human rights who had won them the treasured accolade.
Conversely, Mahatma Gandhi did not get the prize, not for his contributions to the theory and practice of non-violence, nor for his role in toppling the British Raj as the curtain raiser to worldwide decolonisation. The sad reality is how little practical difference the prize has made to the causes it espoused. They bring baubles and honour to the laureates, but the prize has lost much of its lustre as far as results go.
Trump Was Not a Serious Contender
The nomination processes start in September and nominations close on 31 January. The five-member Norwegian Nobel committee scrutinises the list of candidates and whittles it down between February and October. The prize is announced on or close to 10 October, the date Alfred Nobel died, and the award ceremony is held in Oslo in early December.
The calendar rules out a newly elected president in his first year, with the risible exception of Obama. The period under review was 2024. Trump’s claims to have ended seven wars and boasts of ‘nobody’s ever done that’ are not taken seriously beyond the narrow circle of fervent devotees, sycophantic courtiers, and supplicant foreign leaders eager to ingratiate themselves with over-the-top flattery.
Trump Could Be in Serious Contention Next Year
Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan falls into three conceptual-cum-chronological parts: today, tomorrow, and the day after. At the time of writing, in a hinge moment in the two-year war, Israel has implemented a ceasefire in Gaza, Hamas has agreed to release Israeli hostages on 13-14 October, and Israel will release around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners (today’s agenda). So why are the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ mobs not out on the streets celebrating joyously instead of looking morose and discombobulated? Perhaps they’ve been robbed of the meaning of life?
The second part (tomorrow) requires Hamas demilitarisation, surrender, amnesty, no role in Gaza’s future governance, resumption of aid deliveries, Israeli military pullbacks, a temporary international stabilisation force, and a technocratic transitional administration. The third part, the agenda for the day after, calls for the deradicalisation of Gaza, its reconstruction and development, an international Peace Board to oversee implementation of the plan, governance reforms of the Palestinian Authority, and, over the horizon, Palestinian statehood.
There are too many potential pitfalls to rest easy on the prospects for success. Will Hamas commit military and political suicide? How can the call for democracy in Gaza and the West Bank be reconciled with Hamas as the most popular group among Palestinians? Can Israel’s fractious governing coalition survive?
Both Hamas and Israel have a long record of agreeing to demands under pressure but sabotaging their implementation at points of vulnerability. The broad Arab support could weaken as difficulties arise. The presence of the internationally toxic Tony Blair on the Peace Board could derail the project. Hamas has reportedly called on all factions to reject Blair’s involvement. Hamas official Basem Naim, while thanking Trump for his positive role in the peace deal, explained that ‘Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and maybe a lot [of] people around the world still remember his [Blair’s] role in causing the killing of thousands or millions of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.’
It would be a stupendous achievement for all the complicated moving parts to come together in stable equilibrium. What cannot and should not be denied is the breathtaking diplomatic coup already achieved. Only Trump could have pulled this off.
The very traits that are so offputting in one context helped him to get here: narcissism; bullying and impatience; bull in a china shop style of diplomacy; indifference to what others think; dislike of wars and love of real estate development; bottomless faith in his own vision, negotiating skills, and ability to read others; personal relationships with key players in the region; and credibility as both the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s security and preparedness to use force if obstructed. Israelis trust him; Hamas and Iran fear him.
The combined Israeli-US attacks to degrade Iran’s nuclear capability underlined the credibility of threats of force against recalcitrant opponents. Unilateral Israeli strikes on Hamas leaders in Qatar highlighted to uninvolved Arabs the very real dangers of continued escalation amidst the grim Israeli determination to rid themselves of Hamas once and for all.
Trump Is Likely to Be Overlooked
Russia has sometimes been the object of the Nobel Peace Prize. The mischievous President Vladimir Putin has suggested Trump may be too good for the prize. Trump’s disdain for and hostility to international institutions and assaults on the pillars of the liberal international order would have rubbed Norwegians, among the world’s strongest supporters of rules-based international governance, net zero, and foreign aid, the wrong way.
Brash and public lobbying for the prize, like calling the Norwegian prime minister, is counterproductive. The committee is fiercely independent. Nominees are advised against making the nomination public, let alone orchestrating an advocacy campaign. Yet, one laureate is believed to have mobilised his entire government for quiet lobbying behind the scenes, and another to have bad-mouthed a leading rival to friendly journalists.
Most crucially, given that Scandinavian character traits tip towards the opposite end of the scale, it’s hard to see the committee overlooking Trump’s loud flaws, vanity, braggadocio, and lack of grace and humility. Trump supporters discount his character traits and take his policies and results seriously. Haters cannot get over the flaws to seriously evaluate policies and outcomes. No prizes for guessing which group the Nobel committee is likely to belong to. As is currently fashionable to say when cancelling someone, Trump’s values do not align with those of the committee and the ideals of the prize.
Author
Canadian MPs order ethics investigation into Mark Carney’s corporate interests
Canada Seizes 4,300 Litres of Chinese Drug Precursors Amid Trump’s Tariff Pressure Over Fentanyl Flows
Biden’s Autopen Orders declared “null and void”
Nobel Prize nods to Alberta innovation in carbon capture
-
Alberta2 days agoFrom Underdog to Top Broodmare
-
Business2 days ago
Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy
-
Business1 day agoBank of Canada governor warns citizens to anticipate lower standard of living
-
Business2 days agoCanadians paid $90 billion in government debt interest in 2024/25
-
International22 hours agoSagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona is now tallest church in the world
-
Agriculture21 hours agoCloned foods are coming to a grocer near you
-
International2 days agoNetanyahu orders deadly strikes on Gaza with over 100 dead despite ceasefire deal
-
Fraser Institute21 hours agoOttawa continues to infringe in areas of provincial jurisdiction