A reader sends this message. She gave me personal information about herself and her family, but asked me to withhold it. She writes, in response to the Omen post. Make of this what you will:

I don’t usually remember my dreams, but I this one was particularly vivid and it’s never been repeated. It happened at least 8 years ago and has heavily influenced my decision making. In this dream, I saw a flood wiping over everything, then everyone froze in place. When I woke up I didn’t know what to think. I felt like I had been given a warning, but wasn’t sure what to make of it. But, here’s the clincher. The next morning at church as I sat there pondering the meaning of the dream, a complete stranger walked up to me told me that God told her to share a bible verse with me. She said that I should be strong in the lord and witness to what he says. I remember feeling like the blood was draining out of my face. I told her about my dream and she was convinced it was real. She later sent me the bible verse.

The concerns that I had at the time were 1) that things that we take for granted could become inaccessible 2) that skills would be lost, whatever that meant, and 3) I needed to learn as much as I could. I am a stay at home mom with a degree in science so the first few years I was obsessed with learning about medicinal plants and identifying edible plants. I remember being really worried that antibiotics would be the hardest to replace. I have tried to hone up on basic skills that my great-grandmother’s generation would have taken for granted, like baking bread. Over the years with no clear direction, unfortunately my zeal has waned.

I’m definitely not a hard-core disaster prepper, but when I saw this pandemic coming back in January, all of it came back to me. By March 1, my pantry was stocked and overflowing. I still have toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Yay! I’m hoping that there are no floods in store for us, after all this time I’m assuming that my vision was more about being prepared in the face of an uncertain future. After seeing all of the articles about how we are reliant on supplies and medicines (antibiotics) that we no longer have the ability to make here in the US and people are losing their jobs because they are considered non-essential, I get why I would be given a message about skills being lost.

I think that everyone will look at life through a different lens after this is over. I’m thankful that I have been watching your blog because I think that you were in the right place and knew the right people to give us the advanced warning that we needed. Due to your influence we took our kids out of school and put them in a classical Christian school at the beginning of the school year. Consequently, they have been doing school online since last week while the public school is still figuring out what to do. My husband is a physician, I gave plenty of warning to my church and family, and so far, all seem to be doing well. I want to leave you with the bible verses that the dear lady mailed to me. “Be strong with the strength Christ Jesus gives you. Stand steady, and don’t be afraid of suffering for the lord. Bring others to Christ. Leave nothing undone that you ought to do” II Tim 2:1; 4:5(TLB).

Like I said, make of it what you will.

You don’t need to believe in visions and prophecies to read the signs of the times. But some people — including people of faith — refuse to do so. A Christian friend reaches out this morning to complain about people in his church community who are still refusing to take coronavirus seriously. People — believing, observant Christians — who are passing around images of empty hospital parking lots, saying that this is all exaggerated. Another Christian reader told me this morning that in her social media feed, she’s seeing a lot of the same kind of denial, and anger at the leaders of her church for shutting the church’s doors during this pandemic.

The first reader, a Catholic, said that this 1964 quote from Joseph Ratzinger comes to mind when he thinks of the Covid denialists in his circles:

[A] faith that will not account for half of the facts or even more is actually, in essence, a kind of refusal of faith, or at least, a very profound form of skepticism that fears faith will not be big enough to cope with reality. … [T]rue believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves.

Is that ever true, and much needed right now. I told that reader that the quote reminds me of the arguments I’ve had over the past three years with many other theologically conservative Christians about The Benedict Option. It’s not that they are looking at the same set of facts about the decline of the Christian faith in terms of numbers, and/or in terms of theological literacy and orthodoxy, and arriving at different conclusions about how to face the crisis. It’s that they deny that there is a crisis at all. In my experience, not too many conservative Christians flat-out deny it; the numbers are too obvious. The strategy is more psychologically sophisticated than that. It goes like this:

 Dreher says that the faith is in steep decline in the West. Dreher also says that believers need to head for the hills and live in separatist communities to keep the faith. But the Bible says we are to evangelize and serve people in the world. We can’t do either if we are hiding out in our hillside bunkers. Therefore Dreher is wrong about the crisis.

When I point out to them that I do not, in fact, say that we need to head for the hills and live in separatist communes, but rather that we need to form tighter communities of spiritual and moral discipline so that we can keep the faith in the tough times ahead, that makes no difference to them, I have found. Seriously, it’s the most bizarre thing. Christians who have not even read the book, but who have still concluded that it must be wrong. After a while, I decided that the whole thing is a strategy of denial. The specific strategies I recommend in The Benedict Option may be mistaken, but the diagnosis is not. Or at least I haven’t read anyone who has plausibly challenged that diagnosis from a morally and theologically conservative point of view. (Progressive Christians, on the other hand, would see moral and theological progress where we conservatives see decline — though even progressives, if they’re honest, have to admit that their numbers are in steep decline.)

I receive these stories about Christian Covid denialists as a pathological version of Benedict Option denialists. Why? Because the Covid denialists are terrified that The Bad Thing Might Be True, because if the Bad Thing is true, then the assumptions upon which they have built their stable lives are falling to bits. And they will have to change their lives if they are going to survive. For some people — for a lot of people — it is easier to pretend the Bad Thing isn’t happening than to look at it with open eyes, and prepare to face it in such a way that you survive the trial.

Look, I’m not being judgey. I’ve been thinking these past two weeks about how we are living in my household during this terrible time when we are denied the liturgy (which is to say, church on Sunday). Here I am, the guy who wrote a book about dark days ahead, when Christians are going to have to rely on spiritual strengths and disciplines developed in a time of ease and liberty, to get us through what’s coming. Now, out of nowhere, and in a way I did not expect, we face a trial. Have I been leading my own household spiritually as I should have been doing? No, I have not. I have my reasons, but the fact is, I have not been taking my own diagnosis and warnings as seriously as I should have. This has been part of my own personal apocalypse (unveiling) of this crisis.

Today my parish learned that we won’t even be able to have livestreamed services for the duration of the crisis. The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America (my jurisdiction) has ordered that any priest who has had contact with anyone who works in a medical facility treating Covid patients is prohibited from celebrating the liturgy in a church building. Our priest is married to a nurse. Therefore, here in Baton Rouge, we can’t have services until this crisis is over. God only knows when that will be.

What a blow. My God. We are now denied even the livestream at our parish. The thing is, I don’t hold any animosity towards the Synod for this. The world has to defeat this virus. Aside from the mass death we’re seeing, the entire economy is careening towards collapse. I know people who have lost their jobs and their livelihoods. If the governor opened the economy up tomorrow, it could not possibly thrive with tens of thousands more falling ill and dying at home, because there are no beds in the hospitals to handle the numbers. What choice do the bishops have, really? Or church pastors? We are prepared, maybe, for a catastrophic crisis in which we can gather together in our churches to pray, to worship, to comfort each other, and, if we’re a sacramental church, receive the Body of Christ — all of which gives us strength to weather the trials.

But this? Did anybody expect a crisis in which we could not come together, to be the church, and to strengthen each other as the church, shoulder to shoulder, face to face, with the Eucharist? I did not. Or at least I anticipated that we would have a situation in which coming to church posed a risk of paying a price, as under the Chinese social credit system. But if you’re strong in faith, you’ll be willing to pay that price. This thing, though, in which going to church could give you a deadly disease, or put you in a position where you spread the deadly disease to others? No. The particular evil of this trial is that it atomizes us even more, and forces us to resist our natural instincts to hands-on compassion.

Yet here we are. What are we going to do about it?

I know what I’ve got to do: double down on the Benedict Option, in terms of being more disciplined in daily prayer, in my life and in my family’s life, so we can have what it takes to get us through the long run. The news this morning made me realize that I have been counting on this thing winding down somehow this summer, and all of us getting back to church. In truth, that’s probably not going to happen. I could sit here and complain, and lament that the rain won’t stop … or I could get busy building an ark, like I talk about in The Benedict Option.

We are not going to be able to go back to normal anytime soon. The disease won’t allow it, and if, by some miracle, scientists come up with a vaccine, it’s not going to be soon enough to stave off economic devastation. You don’t need to believe in an eight-year-old apocalyptic dream you read about on the Internet to see that. And in truth, none of us know when we will be able to go back to church. Even if the authorities allow it, the virus will still be present, silently moving among us, unseen. Many, many of us will not be able to go to church, not because we are men and women of little faith, but because we don’t want to risk dying, and spreading a deadly disease to others.

So what do we do? How do we keep our faith strong through this trial? The first thing we have to do is to stop living in denial. And stop dwelling in anger at the religious and civil authorities. This is a virus, not a political ideology. No one alive today in the West has ever had to deal with anything like this.

Remember my story about Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the Croatian Jesuit who escaped the Nazis in 1943, and arrived in Bratislava to tell Slovak Catholics that after the war, Communists would rule their country? He told them that they had to prepare for that dread day, while there was time. A number of priests thought Kolakovic was an alarmist, but he attracted young followers, who took him seriously, and did what he told them. In 1946, he was expelled from the country; in 1948, the Communists took control of Czechoslovakia, and soon began throwing priests and Christian leaders into prison. The “Family,” as Father Kolakovic’s followers were called, emerged as the backbone of the underground church.

I tell their story in my forthcoming (September) book Live Not By Lies, but it’s important in the context of this post for a particular reason. What Father Kolakovic could see, and many of the other priests in Czechoslovakia could not, was that when the Communists took power, they would try to crush the faith of the Catholic people by neutralizing the clergy. Father K. did his best to encourage the laity to educate themselves, so they could join with priests in the underground to keep the faith alive through the persecution. And things happened exactly as Kolakovic foresaw. I spoke to a Catholic lawyer in Bratislava who said the state passed a law greatly restricting the work of priests. They were paralyzed. The work of the Church had to be done, to a previously unknown extent, by faithful lay Catholics. They couldn’t administer the sacraments, of course, but they could do a lot in terms of education, through seminars and the underground Catholic press, and so forth. And they became the accomplices of secretly ordained priests and bishops of the underground.

There’s a lesson in that for us. A hostile government has not shuttered our churches; a hostile virus has. We don’t know when any of us will be able to resume normal church life. What do we do between now and then? Live in denial, or whine about the bishops and the governor, or complain about how hard it is?

Or do we get to work building within our own hearts, minds, families, and communities, scattered though we are by circumstances, the framework of a durable faith for hard times?

One more thing — something you’ve heard before, but that I’m thinking a lot about right now. I’ve told you the story of Dr. Silvester Krcmery (kirch-MERRY), a Slovak physician who was one of Father Kolakovic’s disciples, and who, with Father Vladimir Jukl, another Kolakovic follower, set up the underground church. Dr. Krcmery is dead now, but before he passed, he left an account of his prison years. In this passage from a draft of my forthcoming book, I write about it:

In his 1996 memoir This Saved Us, Krcmery recalls that after repeated beatings, torture and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”

In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety,” he writes. “Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations.

The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.  

His personal routine included memorizing passages from a New Testament a new prisoner smuggled into the jail. The Scripture Krcmery had already learned before the persecution started turned out to be a powerful aid behind bars.

“Memorizing texts from the New Testament proved to be an excellent preparation for critical times and imprisonment,” he writes. “The most beautiful and important texts which mankind has from God contain a priceless treasure which ‘moth and decay cannot destroy, and thieves break in and steal’ (Matthew 6:19).”

Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.

“Indeed, as one’s spiritual life intensifies, things become clearer and the essence of God is more easily understood,” he writes. “Sometimes one word, or a single sentence from Scripture is enough to fill a person with a special light. An insight or new meaning is revealed and penetrates one’s inner being and remains there for weeks or months at a time.”

Krcmery structured his days and weeks to pray the Catholic mass, and sometimes the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. He interceded for specific people, and groups of people, including his captors. This was a way of ordering the oppressive expanse of time, especially during periods of solitary confinement. Krcmery and his fellow prisoners were astonished, repeatedly, that beatings and interrogations were easier to endure than seemingly ceaseless periods of waiting.

The prisoner did periods of deep, sustained meditation, in which he thought deeply about his own life, and his own sins, and embraced a spirit of repentance. At one point, Krcmery wondered if he was wasting his time and increasing his emotional and psychological burden by sticking to these day-long spiritual exercises.

“I attempted to live a few days entirely without a program, but it did not work,” he remembers. “When I thought that I would only vegetate for the whole day, and just rest, that is when there were the most crises.”

Why do I post that now? Because I have spent these early weeks of quarantine following no kind of schedule at all — certainly not a prayer schedule. I see now, re-reading Krcmery, that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Remember, this is the testimony of a man who had the mass taken away from him, who had his church community taken away from him, who had all his usual work in the world taken away from him. Not only that, he was beaten and tortured in prison. Yet he says elsewhere in his book that he resolved early on never, ever to feel sorry for himself. If he did that, he said, he would fall into a hole that he couldn’t climb out of. So he received this suffering — all of it — as a challenge to deepen his conversion, and to serve Christ, and his fellow prisoners.

We have to do the same. The suffering thrust upon us has to be received as a call to deeper prayer, deeper repentance, deeper service, and deeper unity with God. What else is there? You don’t need to be a visionary to see that. You only need to open your eyes to reality. As the future Pope Benedict XVI said in 1964, “True believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves.”