Empire Of The Mask
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Life is now the opposite of a masked ball. At masked balls, the eyes and nose, or upper face, were covered in order to hide the identity of the wearer. The mouth was revealed to enable communication, laughter, eating, facial expression. And safety.
We now have the muzzle. Covering the mouth and nose is not safe and threatens long-term psychological harm, particularly for children. We learn communication, how to love and be loved, by using our words and expressions to communicate the deepest and most beautiful emotions and affections. These transmissions are now completely blocked because they are covered.
It will only be revealed in time how masking has harmed the development of our children. The authorities who imposed the masked mandate won’t be available then to help or offer recourse. The rest of us will have to step in and pick up the pieces of lives, relationships, and marriages harmed by the effects of habitual mask usage.
The world has now awakened and groaned to find itself insane. Masks do not protect health, yet they are now treated in many places as a uniform to a new kind of sinister masked ball that encompasses all of society, or a ticket to participate in public life. A totem, a good luck charm, is very harmful for faith. Imputing power to mere physical objects that belongs only to God is a surrender of faith eclipsed by the evil power of superstition.
Only faith confers life. True life, eternal and beyond this world which is “passing away,” is made possible only by faith.
Doctors have spoken out about how the masks do not stop transmission. The only sure way for those who are afraid to get sick is to stay home. Period. Yet now we have an entire class of hypochondriacs who are demanding that everybody else change their physical behavior, disguise their appearance with a piece of cloth that does not stop disease, to accommodate a mental condition.
When an individual enters a church or chapel filled with healthy individuals, not a sick person among them, and freaks out, running from the building in fear and alarm, because none of them are masked, we have a case of illness, not physical or COVID-related, however. With such a reaction in the absence of any evidence of risk for illness or death, the evidence all points to the fact that the individual who reacts irrationally has an illness mental or psychological in nature that is preventing their full, rational, and healthy participation in the larger community of society or the Church.
In a study published on nih.gov entitled “Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33087517/), the website of the National Institutes of Health, it was revealed that “…medical masks (surgical masks and even N95 masks) were not able to completely block the transmission of virus droplets/aerosols even when completely sealed.”
N95 medical masks, the official PPE of the medical profession, when used in even the direst of conditions for risk of transmission, in the presence of infected individuals, are not guaranteed to protect the wearer from transmission.
Masks interrupt the body’s natural protection and hamper healthy breathing. Breathing can bring in some elements that are unhealthy. A healthy body filters out these elements, particularly when one breathes through the nose. Counties are now slapping the indoor mask mandate back on and by doing so they are exacerbating the psychological or mental illnesses of those who give the mask way more credit than it deserves, as if it has more power to confer health than living itself has to expose us daily to danger and to death.
We are at more risk for danger of accident or death the minute we get in the car and turn it on than we are at risk of infection. Yet the mask is treated as if it has infinite power to confer life when in fact in can hamper the healthy functioning of the respiratory system.
Our superstitions are now harming and violating our faith. One cannot profess faith while acting as if God does not exist. This is what happens when one has a relationship of trust with a piece of cloth covering a portion of the face.
We are all going to die, some from COVID, the flu, or other diseases, tragically, some from violence or acts of nature. Some in their beds from old age. Cardinal Burke contracted COVID and then pneumonia, was placed on a ventilator and subjected to an induced coma. His chances do not look good as many now pray for his recovery.
In some places, like Afghanistan, life is so “cheap” and the danger of violence so great after the Taliban invaded, that men would rather risk, and sustain, death as some tragically did, attempting an escape by clinging to the wheel wells and wings of a U.S. plane taking off from the Kabul airport. As we recently witnessed, horrified, a number of such poor souls fell to their death.
Hundreds have died tragically as a result of an earthquake this month in Haiti, already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Men and women of goodwill all over the world are rushing aid to that poor country to prevent further deaths resulting from injury or disease.
This is the nature of the world we inhabit and the truth about human life here, which is very short in comparison with the eternity we seek by means of faith. When eternity is more important for us, faith comes first. The promise of never-ending life with the Lord must have priority over physical health which can never, despite all our efforts, last forever. The mask issue is an opportunity for us to examine our faith and to strengthen it if we have become weakened by a loss of trust in the Lord and His perfect will.
Faith can only fully function and help us to truly live with freedom once we take off the mask of superstition and ignorance. Only when we are able to use the all-too-rare faculty of common sense are we free to engage faith in an effective way.
Common sense tells us that when we have a mental condition that hampers our full engagement with life we have to seek a mental health solution. Faith is an element of mental as well as spiritual health. Faith is an answer to the risk of death that is simply part of being alive for every one of us on planet Earth.
The empire of the mask has nothing in common with the Kingdom of God. It is inimical to, and a countersign of, the spiritual health of grace through faith. Only this invisible, mask-less protection can truly protect and save us.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever:apriestlife.blogspot.com
