SAVING FAITH

Remove Item D from the plastic wrap.

“Item D? Let’s see. Oh, here it is. The strand of beads. OK. And?”

HANG ITEM D AS SHOWN IN FIGURE 2.

“Like this?”

“Uh… I guess.”

“Let me see the picture.”

“Figure 2.”

“Oh, I see. Like this. Here. OK, step three?”

PLACE PALMS TOGETHER WITH FINGERS EXTENDED BEFORE YOUR HEART. 

“Palms… what?”

“A little higher.”

“Here?”

“Perfect.”

“Now what?”

STEP FOUR: CLOSE YOUR EYES.

“Okay.”

IMAGINE THE LORD FATHER.

“Huh?”

“Here.” Look. Figure five.”

“Let me see. Oh. Of course.”

“ Are you doing it?”

“Yeah. Next?”

IMAGINE THE LORD FATHER BEING TORTURED BECAUSE OF YOU. 

“Huh?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Is there a picture?”

“Yeah. Figure six.”

“Let me see…”

New Wave

Societal change rolls like ocean waves. Or something like that. There is a visible component, its surface, surging toward the shore, but underneath churns the outward-surging drag, and this second, nearly invisible force works to reverse the flow. In some cases, as any child who's stood hypnotized on the beach will tell you, the invisible backward pull overwhelms the visible surging, taking the whole of the wave under and out to the depths where its elements can be remixed and brought forth to roll again.

In my lifetime, the most startling instance of this watery dialectic occurred around the year 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. The election of the hyperconservative Reagan came on the heels of a fifteen to twenty years of surging in the opposite direction. Civil Rights, Vietnam, LSD, feminism and youth culture were some of the banners of that transformative reawakening of the American spirit. Had they asked any of us if an elderly, anti-civil rights, pro-dictator, chauvinist, anti-intellectual, uneducated, C.E.O.'s erotic dream come true, worst enemy of the common worker was electable in 1980, we would have laughed in your face. Our mistake was believing that a wave has only its visible force.

Patriotism

The less educated you are, the less you have mingled with people different from yourself and the less you read, the more likely it is that you will think your birthplace is the number one place of all to be from. If, in addition, you yourself have been humiliated in your youth, then you will easily accept that masculinity means intimidating the vulnerable and the more you will believe that visiting violence upon the those different from yourself will resolve your feelings of helpless rage.