TORONTO (LifeSiteNews) — Tammy Peterson, wife of prominent Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, has revealed that praying the Rosary every day has transformed her life.
In a video published by True Faith TV, Tammy and Jordan Peterson describe how praying the Rosary may have brought about Tammy’s miraculous recovery after she was diagnosed with a “very rare cancer that was 100% fatal.”
“I never allowed myself to worry,” Tammy revealed. “I just gave myself to God and to the prayer to take me where (…) He needed me to go and whatever He needed me to go through. I decided that it wasn’t up to me anymore.”
In 2015, Tammy was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma and had surgery to remove half of her kidney. Tammy later suffered from complications; last month she told LifeSiteNews that she first “experienced flank pain.”
“That symptom was later associated through biopsy with a Bellini tumor, a deadly disease,” she continued. “I was told there was no possibility of successful treatment with chemotherapy or radiation. They said surgery was my only option, that even that was improbable, and that I had a prognosis of 10 months to live.”
Tammy revealed that her close friend Queenie Yu immediately came to support her at the hospital when she became sick.
Queenie, a Catholic, brought Tammy a rosary blessed by the pope and a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus. To Queenie’s surprise, Tammy recognized the rosary beads. However, she also admitted that she did not know how to use them.
Over the following five weeks, Queenie taught Tammy to pray the Rosary, explaining each mystery and asking if Tammy had special intentions for each decade.
“So we would pray, and I would tell her my life story, and I would cry, but it really soothed me,” Tammy recalled in the video.
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Peterson compared the prayer to that of Job in the Old Testament.
“I would say she was doing what Job does in the Book of Job, which was attempting to reconcile herself to the torments that were being visited upon her through no apparent fault of her own,” he said.
“She wasn’t praying to live; she wasn’t praying that God would provide her with some special dispensation,” Peterson continued later in the video. “She was praying that she would conduct herself as appropriately as could possibly be managed given the situation at hand.”
Peterson explained that this is what it means to “put yourself in the hands of God. You don’t know what the right outcome is, and maybe it’s that you live, and maybe it isn’t. What you can pray for is that you handle what’s thrown at you in the best possible manner.”
He revealed that praying the Rosary continues to help Tammy “confront the demands of the day in the best possible set of mind.”
Following her lengthy stay at the Toronto hospital, Tammy travelled to Philadelphia for further treatment. Before leaving, Tammy received a blessing from Father Eric Nicolai. Nicolai gave her a card with a novena for the sick to St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, which Tammy says she faithfully prayed.
When the day came for Tammy’s surgery, doctors discovered that the medical issue had resolved itself on its own and canceled the surgery.
While Peterson explained that the recovery could be attributed to various medical factors, he noted that it took place on their 30th wedding anniversary, just as his wife had assured him.
“That is what Tammy had said would happen months before when she had no way of knowing that or even any reason to assume it,” he explained.
“I don’t know what to make of that; I’m pretty happy about it,” he continued. “She’s also, as far as we know, the only person who ever survived this cancer.”
Tammy further revealed that praying the Rosary has enabled her to accomplish things that she had previously considered impossible, including giving opening addresses to Peterson’s speeches to audiences of over ten thousand people.
Tammy stressed the importance of making the Rosary a practice in one’s life.
“You’re going to go through hard times in your life and nothing will survive except for the things you practice when life and when everything is obliterated, the only thing that you will find in the ashes are the things that you practiced and so decide what that’s going to be.”
Tammy is set to enter the Catholic Church this Easter, having recently entered the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA).
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