As far as the externals go, this Christmas is different than any other in our shared lifetimes. Services in church, gatherings with family members. opening presents together, the big dinner at the home of whoever has the biggest table – all of these holiday traditions have become downright dangerous.

   On a deeper level, celebrating the birth of the Savior in the middle of a worldwide plague - with the latest surges and death counts hitting us in the face with every day’s headlines - raises the inevitable question: who’s going to save us from this? 

   On paper, we’re counting on science – vaccines, mainly. But science isn’t enough. The fact is, science created the problem. Increasing human population sizes plus the widespread availability of international travel made it possible for a virus that got its start in a Chinese market to fill a mass grave just outside New York City. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll be the first one on line when the vaccine becomes available in my neighborhood. But it’s going to take more than that to get us through this. Under it all, it’s a question of faith.

   I’ve heard it from any number of believers: “God’s trying to get our attention”. That’s hard to argue with. I’m not going to bother. Someone or something is trying to get our attention and we’d better damn sure pay attention. And what has Christmas got to do with it? Everything.

   To get down to basics, what is the Savior supposed to be saving us from? The answer is simple – ourselves. At the time Jesus was born, illness, misfortune and death were all held to be the result of human behavior having angered an all-powerful deity (or several competing deities depending on your group’s position). Anything resembling modern medicine was over a thousand years away, the earth was a fairly flat place on which we lived, and the sun, moon and stars were there to provide us with varying degrees of light. I’m bringing that up because, despite having received scientific information to the contrary, that us-centric view is still our actual life experience. The sun rises, the sun sets. The stars twinkle. The number of humans who have gone high enough into space to observe the earth revolving around the sun with their own eyes wouldn’t fill a small town church.

   In the gospel accounts, Jesus the Savior healed the sick with the words “Your sins are forgiven”, not, “Take two of these at bedtime”. And the key to earning Divine forgiveness, and, with it, our release from the crueler side of biology, was in learning how to forgive each other. It‘s a message that’s hard to miss – that “Love one another as I have loved you” thing. It has nothing to do with St. Peter’s Cathedral or the latest televangelist to cash in on the human need to believe. It’s all about how we treat each other and has everything to do with us a species getting though this latest trial.

   The most admirable human beings in this struggle have been those who made the benefits of medical science possible for the sick by risking their own lives to provide them – those we call “front-liners”.  Medicine is useless without someone with the guts to administer it. And if we’re really going to get through this, we’re all going to have to be front liners. If our country is fortunate enough to have a working vaccine, but there are places in the world who don’t, the virus will be free to keep mutating until it turns into something our vaccines can’t stop.  This may sound like getting ahead of ourselves, but we could have saved a lot of lives by getting ahead of ourselves the minute this thing started.

   The Savior’s message – that we have to love EVERYBODY is the best shot we’ve got - locally, nationally and globally. While we’re spending millions to celebrate the birth of a child who was born in an animal pen, poorest of the poor, we can’t forget what he stood for. Whether Jesus was the Son of God or a human being like the rest of us who got it, we need to get the message.





 

 
      Plague has always been a problem for organized religion. From its earliest origins in the human story, belief in the gods has been a response to things happening that humans can’t control – things like floods, drought and illness. We can’t control these things – but as long as we thought the gods did, we didn’t feel so helpless, especially if we belonged to an organization that claimed to be able to influence them/Him/Her on our behalf.
 
    Until relatively recently in human history, it was       believed that illness was a punishment for sin and could be cured by appeasing the gods. Prayer, especially when offered by a priest, was thought to appease them.  And on a one by one basis, many people who were prayed for actually did get better, so the idea stuck.
 
          But in an epidemic, where thousands keep getting sick and dying, prayer just doesn’t work. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now.
 
          In the 14th century, the Bubonic Plague caused a major credibility problem for the Catholic Church in Europe. The fact that the plague raged for years and that the clerics were killed off just as fast as the common people undermined the notion that the Church had a monopoly on God’s influence. The result was not a loss of belief in God’s power over disease, but rather a loss of confidence in the authority of Catholic Church. In many ways, this set the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. The people of Europe started looking for someone with a better connection to God’s ear. The idea that the Plague was a bacteriological disease transmitted by fleas carried by rats would simply not have occurred to anyone, and wouldn’t for another couple of hundred years.
 
          Organized religion is in a similar situation now. The idea that disease is caused by natural phenomenon (bacteria, viruses) and can be treated by natural means (medicine) has been around for the past few hundred years and has been largely successful. But people still go to church and still pray for the sick. The deep needs that religion has addressed for all of human history can’t be addressed by Tylenol.
 
          High on the list of those very real needs is the notion that human life makes sense and that our lives mean more than a bunch of biological processes we share with monkeys. The pandemic is an attack not only on the idea of the “bargaining” function of the Organized Religions, but on the very sense of human meaning they are there to support. If we can be killed off in the hundreds of thousands by mindless, lifeless, microscopic specs that by blind chance are multiplying in our all too human bodies, then how special are we really?
 
          Fortunately, that deeper concern is being answered in great part by the countless acts of service and generosity humans are showing other humans in this crisis. If we’re the kind of species that’s willing to put our own lives on the line to save total strangers, then there must be more to us simple flesh and blood. There is. And that will survive, this virus, the next and more.
 
        What may not survive is the religious bargaining chip. The more established Faiths (Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Islam) have responsibly accepted the reality that gathering the Faithful puts the Faithful’s lives at risk, and have shut down (or gone on line) for practically all of their public rituals. The few fundamentalist pastors who promised their followers that God would protect them, and would heed their prayers when they prayed together, have paid a heavy toll, as have their followers. The few in reach of a microphone who have spoken out to claim that the Coronavirus is some kind of Divine punishment have largely been dismissed as ridiculous.
 
           When the dust settles, organized religion as an institution may find itself in the same position the Catholic Church did when Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to the church door. What is different from the fifteen hundreds is that the failure of prayer globally has been witnessed globally, brought into every home on screens provided by human technology. The virus attacks believers and unbelievers alike and everybody knows it. The Churches couldn’t stop it. None of them.
 
          Whether the  idea of an “Organized Faith” can survive without its lobbying function is yet to be seen.
 
          Faith will survive. The churches may not.
 
          Consider this a work in progress.
 
 
 
         
 

     The central problem for we humans is that we are able to imagine eternity but find ourselves trapped in finite, fragile and frequently messy bodies. An event like the coronavirus throws this in our faces, reminding us of our fragilities not only as individuals but as a species.
​
   In some ways, our imaginations make it worse. The animal who gave the virus to its first human host only knew it felt sick. It wasn’t worried about its children, unemployment or a breakdown in the food supply chain. We can imagine all the possibilities, good and bad.

   The good possibilities include human medicine, which exists because a number of imaginative humans started looking through microscopes to find reasons for human illness beyond the anger of the gods. The good possibilities also include our ability to feel empathy for each other, to communicate with each other and to work together for the common good.

   The bad possibilities include getting too close to the wrong person in the supermarket, a massive economic depression and, worst of all, that this thing just won’t stop no matter what we do and, even if it tapers off, will be back next year and the year after to keep killing us.

   I think and write a lot about the human need for meaning and the various ways it expresses itself. In many ways, it’s our best way of keeping our heads when general chaos starts gaining on us. In fact, it’s our only way. But this time there’s no room for armchair philosophy. Reality is using real bullets. We need to as well. The pen may be mightier than the sword but you don’t go to a gunfight with a pen. You go with a song.

   God didn’t do this to us and God can’t fix it. He’s off the hook for this one. It’s our own success as a species that has done this to us. We’ve been fruitful and multiplied beyond anything they could have imagined in Eden and our skill with inventing machines that drive, float and fly has eliminated the protection that mountains and water used to give one tribe from another tribe’s troubles. We’re one big tribe this time. We’ll all get through this or none of us will get through this.

   The thing we have in common, the thing that makes us different from all the other fragile creatures scurrying around the planet, is, once again, imagination - our ability to make pictures in our heads and impose them on the raw stuff rolling around us. A sunset is beautiful only because we say it’s beautiful. And the virus is ugly only because we say it’s ugly. God didn’t make the sunset, we did. And God didn’t make the virus, we did. In fifth century B.C. China, this would have been a local problem. We made it, with cities full of people and international travel. And we can fix it. With faith. And that song I was talking about a few lines up.

   There are two kinds of faith. There’s external faith, where you believe in a system someone else has constructed for you as your way of dealing with the unsolvable.  Then there’s internal faith, the faith every one of us needs to get up in the morning. You need to have faith you’ll make it through the day alive. You have no way of proving or guaranteeing it, but if you can’t make that act of faith you won’t be able to take your first step. Whether you’re a soldier going into battle, or just a person pulling into Philadelphia traffic on the way to work, there are plenty of things waiting out there to kill you, some of them maybe already inside your body. The virus simply reminds us of that, and brings the commuter’s real odds of getting killed uncomfortably closer to the soldier’s. 

   External faith is in over it’s head with this one - going to church can literally get you killed. It’s up to our internal faith, individually and together, to get us through this. We’re bluffing. We know it, just like we do every morning we get out of bed. But we get up anyway – we breathe, we move, we act – and that’s our song.
​
   We’re counting on the same imaginations that get us into this mess to get us out of this. The odds are good that it will, for the species, and hopefully the survivors will learn something from it. But no one of us knows for sure we’ll make it, far less our kids, parents, friends, jobs or security. But our only way through is to keep up that bluff and that song, to keep up that faith.
​
  More to come (an act of faith if there ever was one).

​The sudden resurgence of Anti-Semitism in the United States is as disturbing as it is surprising. There was no “event” that triggered it. Jews in America are as assimilated as the Irish and are, in most cases, just as hard to identify in a crowd. Consequently, the attacks tend to be focused on Synagogues or the Hassidic Community, where the symbols of Judaism are easier to target (and kill).
 
          The fact that Jews tend to be identified as liberal-leaning, urban, powerful in the business and media worlds and, worst of all, intelligent  to some degree explains why they wouldn’t be popular with one side of the current American divide. Also, as is perhaps the most dangerous reality of our media-driven world, one highly publicized attack inspires the next. But that’s certainly not enough to explain why this is happening.
 
          Sometimes in trying to understand a modern problem you need to go back to its roots. The anti-Semitism that has been business as usual in the western world - general disenfranchisement, persecutions, inquisitions and, ultimately, the Holocaust - finds its source in the notion in the “Christian” World that the Jews killed and rejected Jesus. This idea, like most ideas that feed mass paranoia, couldn’t be further from the truth.
         
          The Jews didn’t reject Jesus as the Messiah. All of his followers, everybody who accepted him during his lifetime – his apostles, his disciples, John the Baptist, Mary and Martha, his Mother, everybody – were Jews. The Jews who rejected him were the members of the religious leadership, an elite group who were in collusion with the Roman Empire to keep their own people in line and who were the frequent targets of Jesus’ verbal attacks. He attacked them because they didn’t represent their own people but instead used their religion to exploit them (a trend which has survived). The priests had good reasons for wanting Jesus dead - but the simple truth is that they didn’t kill him. The Italians did.
 
          The exoneration of the Roman Governor in the official Gospels and the shifting of blame for his execution to “the Jews” is beyond improbable. The high priest was appointed by the Roman Governor. Caiaphas worked for Pilate. His job was to keep the common people under control.  The conversation between priest and governor regarding Jesus would have been very brief:
 
Caiaphas: “This guy is stirring up the people. Help me with my problem before my problem becomes your problem.”
 
Pilate: “String him up. And you owe me one.”
 
          The notorious image of a Jewish crowd yelling “His blood be on us and on our children” that was used to justify two thousand years of persecution is one of two things:
 

1. A scripted ploy by a handful of the high priests’ people, or​
2. A complete fabrication to whitewash Roman involvement in Jesus’ death after Christianity was co-opted by the Roman Empire in the third century with the formation of the Roman Catholic Church. 
   

          Either way, “The Jews” had nothing to do with it. St. Peter’s Basilica is named for a Jew. So is Christmas.
 
           While the current resurgence in anti-Semitism seems to have regurgitated the “protocols of Zion” myth about a secret coven of Jewish millionaires plotting to take over the world, it undoubtedly has its origins in its “Anti-Christian” back story.  Which is what it is, a story.
 
          Somebody needs to say so.
 

A few days ago, I posted an account of my encounter with the Cathedral Rock “vortex” in Sedona, Arizona. I had assumed prior to my visit that the reports of “swirling energy” at the vortex sites were simply New Age tourism. To my surprise, when I made my way to the top of the mountain trail and put my palms against the looming rock face, I felt a totally unexpected “vibe” – some kind of energy I couldn’t account for.

Never one to just let things alone, I went out of my way over the next couple of days to climb two similar mountain trails with large rock formations on top that are NOT identified as vortex sites, just to check for vibes.

Nothing.
​
When I put my palms against the formations on top of both Bear Mountain (AZ not NY) and Chimney Rock, I could feel the roughness of the rock face, some feedback from my own heartbeat, still pulsing after the climb - but no trace of the “hum” that had come off Cathedral Rock.

Only one thing to do – scientific method – look for replication. So, early this morning, I hauled my aching bones up Cathedral Rock for a second time, arriving at the “End of Trail” sign on top of the mountain a little after 8 AM. I wanted to allow myself a little time with the spirits before the Arizona heat kicked in. ​

This time I made sure to rest and rehydrate for a few minutes before approaching the rock face. My biggest anxiety, after going through all this sweat and trouble, was that I’d feel nothing and would have to conclude that my first encounter had been some kind of fluke or my overactive imagination.

No problem. The vibe was still there.

It’s hard to describe – the closest I can come to it is the idea of an electric fan running on a table top and what you might feel if you lightly squeezed the leg of the table – vibration without movement, hum without sound. This time I also noticed a slight feeling of warmth from my palms to my elbows. So here I am standing on the edge of a cliff with my palms pressed against an unknown energy source (the rock face is to the right of the "End of Trail" sign in the picture).

​Now what?

After I posted my first experience with “the rock”, I was advised to try seeing it with my “third eye”, which is, to those who know, located in the middle of your forehead (every day I learn something). So, having nothing to lose, I pressed my forehead against the rock and waited. The vibration was, if anything, more intense. I held my position for about a minute, then went back to pressing with my palms, just waiting to see if anything would “happen”. For no particular reason, I closed my eyes.

Click.

In my mind’s eye I could see a swirling cloud of dust and twigs. A face emerged out of the swirl, an old face, at first threatening, then smiling. The swirling cloud expanded till it seemed to be hanging over the valley at my feet. Then the whole cloud silently exploded over everything (as in “swept to the four winds”) and was gone. I opened my eyes. It had only taken a few seconds. Everything was the same around me. Oddly enough, I had no sense of fear or the  “what the hell was that?” feeling  like I’d had on my first encounter. I guess I’m getting used to chatting with the spirits. I leaned my back against the rock face for a few minutes to rest and then began the long trek down the mountain.

Unfortunately, I have no words of wisdom or message for mankind to report, at least not yet. After making the first report, I felt it was only right to share the follow up. The official pamphlets on the vortex tours (in little pink jeeps, with professional guides) urge the participants to have no specific expectations, but to simply be open to whatever comes or doesn’t.

​Went there, did that. Twice.
​

I can always be surprised. In case I’d forgotten it, I was handed a reminder this morning a couple of thousand feet up on the side of an Arizona Mountain.
​
For readers who have not been keeping up with my day to day affairs, I’ve been spending the last few months in Sedona, Arizona, house sitting for an old (and generous) friend. I’ve taken frequent hikes along the trails through the Red Rock Mountains for which the town is famous. The Sedona area is also famous as a center for New Age activity, due in great part to the fact that the scenery lends itself to a sense of awe – awe being defined as “there’s something a whole lot bigger than me going on here”. Psychics, Astrologers, Alternative Healing Practitioners, and Spiritual Centers abound, as well as tours to several local sites described as “vortexes”.
 
What a vortex is is somewhat ambiguous, though the broadest definition is “a swirling center of energy that is conducive to healing, meditation and self-exploration”. Some go a bit further and suggest that a vortex represents a gateway to other dimensions, but that’s another discussion.
 
At any rate, it occurred to me the other day that I had been hiking around the trails for weeks but had never checked out any of the vortexes. As a lifelong student of philosophy and religion, this felt like an oversight. My basic position on such things is that they manifest the human need to believe. The Red Rock mountains were formed millions of years ago by massive geologic forces. Reportedly the entire region was once under an inland sea – hence the mountains’ resemblance to giant coral reefs. But there’s something about the austere beauty of it all that suggests to many that some other force is at work, some center of energy that an open heart and mind can tap into. The similarity to kneeling in a candle-lit church is inescapable (been there, done that - a lot).
 
With that similarity in mind, I set off early this morning  to climb the trail to Cathedral Rock, a reported vortex site which looms like a …well… Cathedral over route 179 just Southwest of Sedona Center. Getting to the rock involved a steep and sometimes tricky climb up 500 feet of ascending boulders and red gravel. I wasn’t alone. The Rock is a well known local attraction and there were several climbing groups and a couple of young families joining me on my trek. The kids had an easier time in some of the tight spots.
 
When I finally got to the spot marked “end of trail” I found myself very high in the air, with the Cathedral walls on my right and a smaller pinnacle on my left. The view of the surrounding hills, valleys and mountains were worth the sweat and effort, not to mention the serious contribution to my weight loss program. After a few minutes to catch my breath and some necessary hydration, I decided to check out the Rock up close. So far, aside from relief at having made it to the top, I hadn’t noticed any special “vibes” or feelings at the site.  But since I’d been drinking Gatorade instead of meditating, I thought a closer inspection was in order. So I went right up to the rock face, leaned forward and put both palms flat against it.  Surprise time.
 
When I put my palms to the rock, I could feel a deep, quiet vibration that reverberated down to my elbows – the "felt" equivalent of a low hum but with no sound. It was constant, with no change or variations. I took my hands off the rock and it stopped. Nothing had changed around me. After a few seconds of “What the hell was that?”, I put my palms on the rock again. Vibration is back. I held my position for a few minutes but nothing changed, no increase or decrease. I went back to my pack for another hit of Gatorade. My mind was distracted by some of the climbing challenges I expected on the way down and the day was getting hotter by the minute, so I didn’t stay around long. I mentioned the “vibe” to a few of my fellow climbers at the top and they gave the Rock a try. The vibes were still there (probably have been for a million years or so). They weren’t as surprised as I was. They’d hauled themselves up the side of a cliff to see a vortex and they got their money’s worth.
 
So – I made it down the cliff in one piece. No mood changes or visions yet, but I’ll let you know. It wasn’t a great big occurrence, no burning bush or anything, but since I was expecting nothing a vibrating wall rock that looks like a Cathedral is worth reporting.
 
And my New Age friends can have their “I told you so”  laugh.
 
 

 We’re all familiar with “The Grapes of Wrath”, the iconic American film based on John Steinbeck’s novel about 1930’s Dust Bowl Refugees trying to find a new life in California.  I’ve seen it couple of times over the years but a few days ago an insistent  little voice in the back of my head said “You need to watch this movie NOW”. So, for $3.99 on YouTube, I revisited Tom Joad, Preacher Casey and the Joad family’s bumpy odyssey across America. I was stopped in my tracks like an overloaded Ford truck. It could have been filmed yesterday.

            Just to hit the main points:
         
         Thousands of ordinary working people have their ability to make a living pulled out from under them by a combination of climate change and a market crash they had no control over.

          Having heard of “enough work for everybody” in a far off State, they pack up their meager belongings and make their way with great risk and difficulty across highways, mountains and deserts to reach the “promised land” of California.

          When the migrants finally arrive at “the promised land” they are stopped by police at the border and treated like unwelcome refugees.

          They manage to gain entry to the promised land, but can only survive by working long hours for meager wages and living in deplorable conditions in camps designated for them.
 
          When a Government Agency offers them decent living conditions, the locals accuse them of being “Reds” and attempt to use violence to make the migrants “go back where they came from”.

          For further details, turn on CNN.

          With a change in language, and a switch in direction from West to North, this scenario is playing out with a vengeance along America’s southern border. Instead of southwestern and midwestern states, whole countries in Central America are no longer able to economically sustain their populations due to a combination of climate change, population growth, crime and government corruption. Thousands of people are making the long and dangerous trek north in hopes of finding some way to survive in the “promised land” of America. Americans, fearing that the refugees will take jobs away from U.S. citizens and bring disease, crime and overcrowding with them, are tightening border controls and setting up internment camps.

          Fact check: there wasn’t enough work in California for all the migrants seeking it, any more than there are jobs and housing waiting with open arms for the tens of thousands of refugees teeming at our southern borders. In both cases the migrants are acting out of a combination of desperation and misinformation.

          Second fact check: In neither case were or are the migrants an invading force. There is no orchestrated evil intent behind either these movement, just ordinary people trying to survive and feed their children.

          Third fact check: existing government policy either here or in Central America is insufficient to deal with this situation. The great Depression and the effects of the Dust Bowl droughts were only “fixed” by the radical shift in American Political Policy referred to as the New Deal (and referred to as a “Red” conspiracy by its detractors), as well as changes in farming methodology to conserve topsoil and the eventual return of rain to the Midwest in 1939. The New Deal happened because the American people voted for the president who pushed it through.

          In his second inaugural address, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt said:
“I see one-third of the nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished . . . the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”  

         At this point in history, over a third of the world is “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished”. Across the world, whole continents are approaching that situation. We can’t hide from it any more than California could hide from the stream of fellow citizens coming down Route 66.

          A major part of America’s identity has been our image of ourselves as a refuge for those seeking a better life. At this point, that image is wearing thin. The call for a wall to “keep them out” was supported by enough Americans to elect a President who promised to build it for them. This isn’t just racism, any more than it was in the Dust Bowl days, when people on both sides of the border were white. In both rural and urban areas, American poverty is on the rise, despite statistical postings of a “surging” economy. Our sense of our country as a place of abundance where there’s enough for everybody no longer matches the facts.

      That being said, attempting to see the fate of today’s refugees as “not our problem” and thinking we can “send them back where they came from” is a serious failure to see the big picture. Borders are at best artificial, especially in today’s interlinked world. A political solution will be impossible to come by without a human solution to create it.

       In the last scene of the “Grapes of Wrath” film, Mother Joad, despite the hardships her family has suffered, affirms that they will survive because “we are the people”. The people did survive. The Dust Bowl came and went.

​      Our new twenty first century Dust Bowl is bigger, deeper, and threatens all of us. It will take all of us to survive it. All of us or none of us.

      Tom Joad for president.