Holy Martyrs Pray For Us

Bernadino Luini, Madonna and Child with Sts Catherine and Barbara, 1522-1525

Where do I begin?

A pandemic struck.

Churches closed. Businesses went under. People retreated to their homes to quarantine. Jobs were lost in the hundreds of thousands—untold millions, globally.
Faces were masked.
Borders were shut.
Questions were asked.

Prayers were said.

[We lost a trip abroad: in a blind moment of southern hemisphere summer optimism, we booked a family holiday to Italy for late April to mid May. This turned out to be peak plague season for poor, blessed Italia. My brother's wedding was postponed. We sat numb for two weeks, wondering how we were going to get through it with our pottery business reliant on restaurants, all now scraping by on takeaway or shutting shop completely. My nephew received treatment for neuroblastoma amid all of this panic. ]

And here in Melbourne, we are in our second lockdown. We get to go through all of it again. Church on the internet. School at home. And then there is the strange irritation I get when strangers cross the street to avoid walking past me. There is distrust. The rest of Australia looks at our state with a mixture of pity and derision, decisively closing their borders to us.

We know all of this. We all have our microcosm of despair for the future, our micro and macro sorrows. Our personal health worries. There is little certainty and precious little that is the whole truth. I feel unease as crowds gather at the mall with permission but still, churches remain closed.


I am writing this because I can't write, can't move on, until I acknowledge and process this blighted time. A lot of people are stopping to look for the good in all of this. Of course, in the grand scale of world tragedies this is the smallest dust particle. My house still stands. My family is well. We are not in a real war.

Just a few days ago we commemorated the deaths of the Royal Martyrs, here is an account of the martyrdom of grand duke Sergei, grand duchess Elizabeth and nun Barbara among other Romanovs.

This account is harrowing and brave, it makes us look so feeble in our microscopic faith....

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A friend recently berated me that my writer's imagination has a tendency to catastrophize. It's a time of drastic change,  the state of emergency has seen the removal of civil liberties we took for granted. I worried that brandishing an infra-red thermometer to children's foreheads every morning on the way in through the school gate would condition them to very demoralising and unquestioning obedience.  (Infra-red thermometers are ineffective, this would be an exercise in futility unless there was some other agenda going on). I question how this pandemic has been handled and to what end. I question a lot.

In the end I had to stop. I had to turn off and tune out.

This said friend believes in politics. He believes that a sole human can go up against all of the demonic machinations and turn the wheel and steer us onto a different course.

And that's where we differ. Not politics nor royalty, nor famous rich cousins could save the Romanovs. In the end, you have to save your own soul. You can't save others if your own soul is lost. And what an example the Royal Martyrs are! One hundred years on and we are fed by their faith, how they held fast to it, even in the face of death.
 Countless saints have intoned the need to first work on saving ourselves. In this time, as in every other, you have to pick your own path to salvation through the muck and the mire.

'Lord, save your people.'