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          Good Friday means a lot of different things to different people. Historically, it’s the day assigned to commemorate the grisly execution of a troublemaking preacher who was seen as a threat by the religious and civil authorities of his day and whose luck ran out during Passover. They were dead right about him being a threat. They were dead wrong about what they did about it. The most famous death in human history did more to propel his troublemaking ideas worldwide than they could ever have imagined.
 
          To a great many believers, it means a great deal more than even all that. To those who see Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate, it means an entirely new twist on religious belief and the whole idea of who or what God is. The Greek and Roman mythology of Jesus’  time had plenty of stories about Gods taking human form, doing wonders and miracles (usually destructive) and impregnating countless mortal women with their semi-divine offspring. The Jesus story is different. In the Christian version, the creator willingly chooses to take on the full burden of creaturehood – cold, heat, hunger, thirst, diarrhea, ear infections, hives, pain, fear, frustration and finally, the big one – death itself – and a brutal death at that, at the hands of the very creatures he supposedly came to save from themselves. Breaking his eternal silence, he uses a human tongue (with a human need to swallow between every few words) to preach a message of love, forgiveness and human equality and seals his credibility by forgiving his killers from the cross with his last breath. That’s a lot to take in. Most people, even believers, don’t try too hard. They fall back on the official story “He died for our sins” so as not to have to take in the enormity of the idea. A God who suffers, who chooses to suffer, who chooses to become his creation, is very different from the idea of a disembodied spirit running things from a safe distance.
 
          Whether you believe it or not, the introduction of such a powerful idea into human thought cannot be underestimated. It changes who we are. If the barrier between the source of all things and the things themselves no longer exists, then anything is possible and we are more than our biology. Most official religions have worked hard to suppress this central truth, or to cloud it in fancy imagery that dilutes its punch. The trick, the game if you will, is to treat Jesus as a one time thing, as opposed to a revelation about the actual nature of things. The nature of things is that all living things suffer – humans are no exception – but what we choose to do about it makes all the difference. We can deny our mortality, fight back, enslave each other to feel powerful, pile up wealth as a protective wall – or we can accept our shared situation, band together and do all we can to make our brief lives as fulfilling as possible. This is the central idea behind all the religions that have managed to survive over time, and the central conflict that has faced the human race since we crawled out of the caves.
 
          This is a Good Friday to remember it.  Jesus died, but he never left.


     

         Once again, events on the political front are turning into “philosophy with live ammo”.  The ongoing success of Donald Trump and his popularity with millions of voters, while confusing and more than a little scary to many conservatives and just about all liberals, is completely understandable given the current state of world and (especially) our national affairs. Mr. Trump is filling a void.
 
          It happens in nature all the time – a stroke of lightning burns the air away and the surrounding air masses slam together to fill the gap - warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico draw down cold air from the Arctic – it’s pretty much what runs everything. Human beings aren’t that much different. We are more than our biology and we need more than our biology. What every one of us needs in order to take our next step, almost in order to take our next breath, is a unifying sense of meaning that defines our place in the world and how we’re supposed to act in it. It’s not about religion. Religion was created (by humans) to fill part of this need. It drives everything we do, from the clothes we wear to our ideas about right and wrong to whether we pick up a pizza slice with our hands or use a knife and fork.
 
          Everything we do defines us and we create a mental/emotional structure around ourselves to support the definition. When church and state were linked at the hip, and everybody in the tribe was from the same ethnic group, this was easy to maintain. We knew who we were and what was expected of us, by our neighbors, the police, the king and even our God. It’s not so easy these days. What’s an American anyway?  We’re split down the middle politically, we’re ethnically and religiously diverse and faced with an economic disparity that is no longer supported by our culture. In ancient times, the king and the nobility were supposed  to be richer than the common folk. In America that wasn’t supposed to happen, at least not in the mythology that defined us. When we lose our sense of ourselves, especially if we feel that someone has taken it away from us, we get scared, and we get mad.
 
          Now for some of us, defining ourselves by our sense of diversity works. Feeling that we’re part of an all-inclusive global community feels just fine and is in sync with the world around us. This is very much my own reality, supported by the urban multi-racial, multi cultural world I’ve spent most of my adult life (and made my living) in. For someone who sees their own ethnic, religious and economic identity being chipped away at by foreigners who take their jobs, rich CEOs who export whole industries to other countries and murderous terrorists who hate their country and their religion, it’s not so easy. If my sense of identity is “White American Christian with a job” it’s not hard to get the feeling that somebody who was supposed to be looking out for my interests has sold me out. This leaves me with what might be called an “identity gap”. Donald Trump is filling this gap. Last night he spelled it out.
 
          In his speech after sweeping several Super Tuesday primaries, Mr. Trump pitted his “Make America Great Again” slogan solidly against the “Make America Whole Again” slogan his likely opponent had spelled out just a few moments before (in front of the same TV audience).  His exact words were “Make America whole again, what does that even mean?”. He knows perfectly well what it means, and so do his supporters. “Whole Again” means “Diverse and Happy With It”. “Great Again” means “White Christian Again”.  His assertion that he can bring back the money that’s fled overseas with a half hour meeting in the oval office, while flying in the face of reason and why the money fled (non white Muslims work for less) makes perfect sense if you see the whole thing as a case of mythological identity – they’ll come back when they see they’ve got their White Christian country back.
 
          His supporters have, with some justification, lost their belief that the American political system represents not only their interests, but, more importantly, who they are. They want their sense of themselves as Americans back, and feel that restoring it will bring their jobs back too. Blaming the “enemy” (Muslims, Democrats, Barack Obama and anybody who likes him) for the loss of both is the oldest trick in the book and Mr. Trump knows how to play it very well.
 
          None of his opponents, either in his own party or on the Democratic side, have been able to conjure up a competing mythology of identity. They’re going to need to, regardless of who wins the nomination or the election, even more if he does.