​ 
            Technically – that is, materially – my life has not changed much since the Corona Crisis.  True, I don’t go to the gym anymore, but it is pruning and etc. season here on the farm, making silly weights and such overkill.  Since I do not have a punch-clock job, most other movements or habits have not been altered appreciatively.  I do watch more TV, however, and read less, as TV is communal, and that gets to the point: although I have no more fear of this disease than I do for the flu, and far less than I do for cancer (which at my age has become a genuine threat), the vast new edicts of government and the changes in many people’s behavior have appreciatively changed my very sense of being.  As much as everything seems the same, so it is not.  The street view from my window is the same, but there are far fewer cars and trucks.  The distant hum of highways has all but disappeared.  It seems that, without changing one apparent external item, we have been sent back to the early 19th century.
 
            It is eerie, which casts a vague shadow of fear.  Besides the fear of disease, there is also the very real fear of economic collapse, and that, along with prolonged hours of TV, has got me to thinking: what of that great movie screen philosopher, Don Corleone?  In “The Godfather,” he was asked something like this: “(God) Father, what is greater, Love or Fear?”  To which he replied, more or less, “Fear.  Fear brings greater respect.”  Or something like that, but Fear was the definite winner.  I recall arguing with someone about that back in the ‘70’s after the movie came out, but I can’t remember what was said or even which side I took.  It’s been a long time, and besides, I was young and it was the ‘70’s, which was the greatest decade of getting wasted the nation has seen since the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790’s, but I still remember the movie, and think that maybe this time I can bring a greater perspective to it.
 
            Fear.  For years, my son and I have had this game of “What would you rather?”  It often goes like this: what would you rather, your eyes plucked out or your legs cut off?  Be rich in China or poor in the USA?  Be Hitler or a Philippine rag picker?  And so on, all of which makes you think in such a way that you can perhaps answer this:
 
Some really evil Cartel types are looking for your sixteen-year-old daughter, who has fallen in with a bad crowd.  She owes $6000 to them for cocaine, and now they are coming for her.  She told you her plight only as the car pulled up, so you hid her quickly where only you could find her.  They break down the door before you can grab the shotgun, and now they have you pinned to a chair.  They pull out your left hand and put a bolt cutter over your pointer finger.  The leader tells you that they will start there and continue on to your next hand, and then ‘to someplace even worse’ until you tell them where she is.  They say that she will have to work off her debt in a border brothel, not only as payment but as punishment, but will spare you…if you speak now.  What do you say?  Do you figure they will kill you anyway, let them cut the finger off, then change your mind in fear and terror as reality hits home?  Or do you stick to your guns and go out to the bitter end, finger-less and emasculated?  Or, even more complicated, would you rationalize that your daughter does not deserve your life or your appendages for hiding her drug habit from you?  Would fear, then, determine justice, or would love win out over all?   
 
Could, or should, love win out over fear or even justice?  Personally, I do not know what would happen with me, and I never want to find out.  I would hope that I would go down with the ship, despite the drug habit, and forgive everything in the name of love and take the horrible consequences.  But since I do not know what I would do, this does not answer our question: which of the two is really stronger in the real world, love or fear? 
 
Despotic regimes, or criminal organizations, rely on fear, and fear does seem to work very well.  While protesters today often tell us that America is run by Nazis, presenting themselves as courageous warriors for the world, would they be out in the streets if they were to be sent to re-education camps, North Korea style?  I would bet 100 to 1 that almost none of them would.  For example, a large majority of Venezuelans hate the Maduro socialist dictatorship, but oppression by the army apparently has worked.  No longer do we see the marching in the streets.   Instead, the prisons have filled, the tanks have come out, and now a once-prosperous country cowers in poverty.  And yes, it could happen here.  This Don Corleone knows.  Fear is very powerful indeed.
 
Here is where the power of love comes into place.  Fear is our default master.   It is probable that most of us have a memory of a time in our lives when we did not do the right or noble thing because of fear.  But what of those times when we did, out of love for someone or for some ideal?  What of the power of that?
 
That is what the Godfather does not understand.  Buckling to fear is the norm, but when that it defied, the power of that negation is many times stronger than the fearful reaction.  It is strong in part because it is not the norm, or at least not what we first want to do.  To deny our self-protection for the sake of something greater is so astonishing that it is like the atoms in the nuclear bomb, tiny until a certain density of reaction takes place.  Then it is greater than any load of standard explosives that could fit on a bomber.   The real thing, though, is truly rare, although our myth- makers wish to exploit this anomaly to sell their stories.  Tienanmen Square is most often what we get for self-sacrifice, because the density of this kind of love, of this kind of self-denial, simply is not enough to counter the overwhelming explosive impact of fear.  
 
As a site that explores the spiritual, the reader can see where this might go.  Here, we might say that this “atomic seed” is the mustard seed or the leavening of the Gospels, manifested by the one sacrifice of Christ for saint and sinner alike that objectively changed the world, probably for all time.  This is a miracle seldom if ever seen since, but it does show us the power of love.  While faith in the love of God can move mountains, love for an ideal, whether personal or social, can move many more people than fear.  It is not a magical formula, but a shadow representation of the eternal spiritual world, a material manifestation that mimics in small what is writ large in the universe.   In the human world, one hero might not change the world for all time, but he can inspire many others, and if there are enough, the world can change, if only for a time. 
 
Fear.  The defiance of fear is not based on the world, but on something greater than the world.  It is ultimately ennobling to the self and to anyone who learns of it.  It is where the human world touches the world of the angels, and where the evils of humankind begin to end, for evil exists on a large scale only through fear. 
 
Think of what the world would be if none of us could be controlled by fear.  The plans of the depraved and those hungry for power would fizzle out like a damp firecracker.  There would be no fuel for them to burn.  The world that so many wish for might then come to us without war or purges or pogroms or programs.  If we embraced the guidance of the same spirit that enables us to place love above fear, that world would simply be.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

​[Note: see the new comment on the March 13 blog below.  FK]

​ 
Boy, that was a title that wrote itself.  I don’t know about you, but I felt the weirdness factor take a quantum leap last Saturday when we had a special session of our guitar group practice at the band leader’s home.  We were at his home because the library had been closed for the Corona virus.  It seemed like a picnic, a freak party, a spontaneous jubilee, but without closure.  Freak parties are supposed to end.  This continued throughout the day, and then into the next, and then into the weekdays until now, the end of the week.  ‘Jubilee’ has changed to a sense of disaster.  Businesses are on the brink, bars are shutting down, perhaps forever, and in spite of the derision hoarders of toilet paper get, there is still no toilet paper at the grocery stores.  Our retirement savings have been savaged and friends who own businesses have been calling for comfort because there is nothing they can do.  The picnic has become a bad dream, or better, a shift into another reality.  People say that the government should tell us about UFO action because we would NOT freak out, but this proves that we would.  The panic hoarders would be buying everything then, and soon we would only be able to get something from them by force.  It would not be pretty.
 
This will not get that bad.  I believe it is an overreaction, because the epidemiologists have been given the reins, and all they think about is saving specific lives from the disease, without thinking about how many deaths will be caused in the long run from a global depression.  There would be less free food, less charitable donations, less subsidized medicine, less concern for anyone else while trying to keep one’s family alive.  There would be less of everything.  I could be wrong, I know, and besides, I am getting too close to the political.  Instead, I want to get back into the scary, magical space of the alternative reality we have entered, which really hit me last night when my younger brother called.    
 
I was watching a news show that had been recorded when he rang, and of course I picked it up.  I always pick it up when it is him because we can talk about everything and usually do.  And of course we started right in about the weirdness of our times, which increased when he said, “Did you watch that news show tonight?”  I explained I had been watching the recording of it when he called.  “Well, turn it to the last three minutes.  Right there, some freaky looking dude with a robotic voice just said we already have a cure, with chloroquine.”  Chloroquine?  I was very familiar with it.  We carried it around in bottles like aspirin when I lived in the southern forests of Venezuela, which was lousy with malaria.  It “bleaches” the liver, which I take to be a metaphor, if used too much, but a few weeks of it at a time kills off the most common of the malarial parasites.  It is an absolute necessity, used since the early 20th century and just about as cheap as aspirin.  This would be the miracle drug that everybody was hoping for without even thinking about it, thinking it was beyond hope.    
 
I turned to the last three minutes as advised, and sure enough, there was that strange man, head of some medical department at Stanford no less, telling us that a peer-reviewed study in France has just been completed, where 100% of the 40 people treated with it were cured of the Corona virus.  It was, he said, only the second virus killer ever found, the first being for hepatitis C about 20 years before.  It was a one in a million shot of luck, like winning a large lottery.  It was like the voice of God speaking, an impossibility that was; in effect, it might be a real miracle, another poke in our fragile minds pushing us further into the unknown. 
 
Wow.  With all that, I woke the next morning, yesterday, expecting the news to be shouting the wonder of this miraculous discovery; I expected the stock market to have shot up like a rocket and for everyone to be crying tears of joy and relief.  To my surprise, I was dead wrong.  The same baleful voices were telling us of more disaster and more dead and more people out of work, perhaps for months or years or God knows, until the End Times which these might be.  What the heck?  I had heard the man himself, a doctor at Stanford who would ruin his career with such a statement if he had been wrong.  He had quoted the peer-reviewed study which clearly showed that this cheap drug which needed no additional testing for general use might be a very effective cure for most people.  But no one seemed to care.  Was it because of politics?  Was the news media too enamored of its breathless reporting to face the beginning of the end of the biggest world crisis in our lives? 
 
By later in the afternoon, some had mentioned the drug but with the caveat that it still “needed further tests.”  No one mentioned the Stanford doctor or the peer-reviewed study which showed such clear and testable results.  Were politics or storytelling at stake, or had they, too, slipped into that other dimension? 
 
Of course they had.  It is not hard to do.  Take Fred Rogers for example.
 
On that same Saturday where I had the guitar practice and had found that we had all been propelled into an alternate reality, I did something that I had not done for at least twenty years.  I held a family matinee of “A Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood” in our living room, with wife and our now twenty-something son who happened to be home.  We had brats for lunch, then made popcorn doused in butter, closed the curtains, and began what I knew would be a tear-jerker, but hopefully not too corny a tear-jerker.  It was not.  It was absolutely excellent.  It was excellent because it took this man who seemed so wimpy and unreal and showed how he was more real and more courageous than the rest of us.  It did not do this by showing his struggles with some vice or with a rough childhood or anything of that sort.  Rather, it showed a man who was committed to loving each and every person in the world as most Christians have been told to do but almost never do.  He did this by acknowledging that each of us lives in his own reality field, a universe complete unto itself, so complete that each feels lonely and misunderstood and underappreciated and perhaps crushed by this loneliness.   With this understanding, he was able to enter other people’s world the only way one can – with complete empathy.  Most of this was done with children, but in this story, based on real life, it concerned hurt and lonely adults.  It showed us that Mr. Rogers understood that each adult is still that small child living in his complete universe, but one that has been so muddled and hung with armor and scars that he often cannot find his own way out.  As with the children, Mr. Rogers could enter that world and offer the necessary solace.  With that solace, the individual could at last free himself from his isolation.  In so doing, he – any of us - would then be able to reach into another’s universe with the same compassion. 
 
See how it all fits.  In a way, we are brought together by this Corona catastrophe, but because it is based on fear, it alienates more than it unites.  That is what fear does: that, fear of being exposed, is why we self-alienate in the first place.  More fear makes us hide even deeper.  It is this which gives us the feeling that we have entered another dimension.  But intensified fear is also what can force us out of our personal universe, because it often gets too weird to handle. 
 
Fred Rogers showed us how we can escape our personal prisons: to treat each person as a full universe with all the emotions that he can imagine right there, as it is with all of us.  To use other, more venerable words, if we are to reach across the vacuum between personal universes we have to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”  This does not mean we have to love them as a spouse or as our child, but rather to recognize them as the full universes that they are.  This kind of love is a matter of ultimate respect.  It is what brings healing to all but the most damaged.  It is the only cornerstone that can be used to develop a true one- world new order.  Where politicians and dictators fail, recognizing others as humans just as full and complex as ourselves will work, if honestly tried. 
 
 Chloroquine or any other drug is not the panacea to our problems.   Rather, our new fear reminds us that we are always in fear.  Good ‘ol Fred reminds us once again how we can heal ourselves and others more deeply and become free of that fear. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
This was going to be a cautionary tale about how many things can go wrong or be wrong and continue to make more things wrong, and that’s just the way it is.  Often, that IS just the way it is.  In this time of panic over viruses, we might recall not only the Spanish Influenza of 1918, but what spawned it: WWI.  From there we can go on and on, to WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, and our current contentious political climate that is so bad, I sometimes feel that we should just divide the country and be done with it. 
 
It is this, this contentiousness, which prompted this essay.  One of my worst vices is listening to political debate and then spouting my own views off to others.  These views have changed considerably with the years, but I am just as certain that I am right now as I was then.  But since my circle of argumentative friends is short, I usually spout off to my wife, who winces at every declamation and quickly tries to change the subject. 
 
It was at such a time last week when I stopped myself and tried my best to be generous and reasonable.   “Jeez, you know I really want to know your opinion.  Why won’t you tell me?  I promise I’ll listen.”  After a long pause and a look of weary defeat, she sighed and finally replied:
 
“In this nation of 300 million with so much talent and skill, we have decided to elect idiots for office.  I cannot listen seriously to any of them or vote for them.  It’s so depressing that I just don’t want to talk about it.”
 
Well then.  I don’t agree with her totally, but I do agree with the general premise.  Our politicians are made with feet of clay and are thrown into an arena where special interests absolutely must be listened to if one is to win any seat of prominence.  Thus ‘the best for the most’ often goes unheard.  It is not even the politician’s fault so much as the institution.  Although I might cheer myself up by remembering Churchill’s dictum, “Democracy is a terrible system, but it is the best we have,” I have to concede that what our politicians do sometimes seems incredibly stupid.  Such actions often lead to bad results – see WWI above – and can make one very depressed.  It all seems so inevitable and so inevitably bad. 
 
It was in this frame of mind, then, that I had to think of my poor left eye.  Over the last few months I have had two cataract surgeries.  The one for the right eye was necessary, and everyone assured me that the operation was painless and almost hassle free.  The first for the right eye was not painless and hassle-free but it did result in perfect distance vision.   On the other hand, the one for the left eye was not needed at the moment, as the cataract was still in an early stage, but the ophthalmologist strongly recommended that I get it over with once and for all.  With lingering doubts, I assented.  As the one before had been somewhat painful, I told the anesthesiologist to crank on the drugs as I was just fine with them.  I don’t know, but that might have sent a red flag of “drug addict” to the doctor, because that operation was gruesomely painful, with every slice of the eye not only felt but heard.  For weeks afterward, the recovery was somewhat painful and painfully slow.  Then at just under six weeks after, the vision in that eye took a nose dive.  A visit to my regular eye doctor told me that the fluid around the retina had built up and that I might be somewhat blind in that eye for life, unless the fluid really builds up, in which case the retina would detach and I would be totally blind for life. 
 
            So the upshot to this essay was supposed to be depressing.   Sometimes, things go wrong and stay wrong, and maybe make other things go wrong, and on and on, from wars to politicians to eyes.  Sometimes, I was going to say, life just sucks and will continue to suck.  That’s when, as the old 60’s group Hot Tuna once sang, “…you need that true religion, hallelu.” Sometimes you get a prognosis of cancer or war or pandemic and it’s just going to play out to the bitter end.  Such is this fallen world.
 
            But then a funny thing happened.   A few days ago I got an e-mail from my older brother who edits medical journals concerning the Corona Virus.  He went on to say reasonable things, but of course there is nothing good about it and its affects are going well beyond the disease itself, bolstering my idea that some things just continue to make things worse.  I returned with an e-mail about my own health issues, focusing, so to speak, on my left eye.  Bad will continue to be bad and will make other things bad – such was my message.  I gave it a cursory once-over and sent it, satisfied and feeling a little better somehow now that I had declared my own sad plight, then went downstairs.  It was then that I noticed that funny thing.  Looking at the digital clock on the oven, I realized that suddenly I could see a whole lot better.
 
            The improvement continued, until by evening the left eye was almost as good as the right.  Those prayers to St Lucie, I thought, had been noticed against all but my most naïve expectations.  This was a win-win, for not only had my sight increased but so had my faith.  As Jesus well knew, to those who are blind in faith, miracles matter.  For me, then, who was partly blind in both faith and sight, a part- miracle was in order.  It was not only in order but apparently got delivered. 
 
            That made me think: did WWI have long-term GOOD repercussions?  Although it took some time, it spawned WWII, which spawned the nuclear bomb, which spawned an era of the small war, meaning no more big war.  Sure, Mao killed off a few tens of millions and Pol Pot a third of Cambodia, but those things happen.  We have not had a world war since 1945, which is now an incredible 75 years ago.  Maybe it is, then, that if we have faith, bad things will lead to bad to bad and so on until it ends, and out comes the good.  It is the way it used to go in the movies, so why not in real life?
 
            Today, March 12 as I write, things have not gotten better.  Our presidential candidates have not improved, the panic of Corona has double once again, the stock market is dragging us towards recession or worse, and my eye has returned to seeing as if it were smeared in Vaseline.  Bummer all around.  Once again, the intent of this essay seems to have been pushed back towards disillusionment and chaos. 
 
            But hey, not so fast; I know now that my vison CAN improve and just might.  We also know that the virus will not only run its course in a month or two, but that the media will tire of its current subject of torment and find something else to make us cry.  There is an end in sight and the promise of improvement, even as bad is following bad is following bad.  It will pass, all of it.  Awful will turn to nice again, and even though nice will be followed by awful, so what.  There is always hope, as there should be.  We are not as in-charge as we think we are and that is a good thing; what runs the universe could kill us in a second, or make it as though we never existed at all, but it hasn’t.  We are that helpless, and that protected, too, so much so that our soft and vulnerable bodies do very well for 60 or 70 years amidst the harshness of a dark vacuum washed by deadly rays. 
 
We were, that is, meant to survive.  Further, we were meant to hope, because there is always hope, even when we find that there is no doctor to heal, not this time, and no miracle to perform.  Hope is found in our last calls to mother, or to God or Jesus, because hope has built the universe and is what keeps it going, the whole impossible thing.  Our cries are not prayers of desperation, but of revelation: we hope because we realize right to the end that there has always been hope.  It is the fundamental law of creation, and will continue to be so long after whatever has been created falls away into something else.  It is the very urge to life itself, and it tells us all we need to know: that even when there is no hope for this, there is always hope for that, for all eternity and for all of us.  It is promised in the turning of the seasons and in the birth of everything good.  It is the eternal promise that lies at the root of all being.
 
The eye is no longer improved, and some day death by virus for many of us might look like a blessing.  We should not be, as St Augustine wrote, “…like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and is agonized to lose them.”  But the temporal gives us a map for the eternal.  We should not confuse one for the other, for the temporal is only temporary, but we can take from it that the hope that lies in our hearts is not in vain.  That, too, reflects eternal truth.  All temporal things, even the evil, end, leaving in the ashes the hope that proves to us by its perennial persistence that hope is not in vain. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
It’s been another exhausting retreat, my 6th as musician- in -residence, and my 7th overall.  It would be a lie to not say that some parts of it now bore the pants off me, but some things are always new and always strike me in different ways, as if to show that the human race has a nearly inexhaustible range of emotions.  This time, though, the varieties of the religious life reached extremes that I would not have thought possible in your average hometown church production.  There is the trite expression, “It made me laugh, it made me cry – it did it all!” that could almost be used here, but that would be not only trite but inaccurate.  I cannot think of anything in the retreat that made me laugh more than normal, but I can think of something that was so terrible that it went beyond tears, and so wonderful that is caused tears of joy.   First let me relate the story of that one soul-searing testimonial.   
 
Testimonials: they bring up visions of Elmer Gantry on the sawdust trail hollering from a wooden platform in a circus tent, but these are usually accounts from normal people sharing the experience of their hardest of times and how Jesus or the Lord or whoever they want to say saved their butts from the deepest pit of despair or desperation.  People love these stories because these people often speak of something in their lives worse than what we have ever experienced, and yet, through the grace of God, were able to not only overcome but excel in some higher spiritual way.  I, too, usually love testimonials.  That is why I was surprised by the one I am about to present.  I did not love it.  In fact, it scared the wits out of me.
 
She had come from a highly dysfunctional family in Chicago, whose only saving grace was the love of a grandmother.  To escape the chaos and callousness, at the age of fifteen she moved in with a boyfriend who was much older than she was.  Her parents, or whoever were her guardians or guardian, didn’t give two damns and let her go.  After three years, at the age of eighteen, she married the guy.  This is supposed to be the point at which she gained some order in her life, but as she put it, this was when the husband’s true nature came out and things got very, very bad.  He beat her, starved her, threatened her with death daily, and sold her out as a prostitute.  After two years of this, she got pregnant, but when she was beginning to give birth her husband took her to the cemetery to kill and bury the child.  She lay on the ground unable to deliver due to a breach birth as she begged her husband to bring her to the hospital to save the child, promising that she would tell nothing of his illegal activities.  Finally he relented for some reason, but the baby was DOA. 
 
Up to this point, she had stayed with this man not only for fear for herself, but because he had threatened to kill her grandmother if she did not comply with his demands.  After the death of the baby, however, she ran off and lived for half a year in the streets, fearing for her life all the while.  Finally, someone brought her in to do some work for food and shelter, and it was there she met the man who would become her “real” husband.  He was a religious man who brought her to be saved by Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  Although the scars are deep and she has sustained permanent damage to her health, she continues to heal and even thrive to this day.  
 
The story horrified me because, as I relate in my book Dream Weaver, I had rubbed shoulders with the type of evil that she had initially married.  I had done it out of ignorant rebellion, thinking that I could be some cool space cowboy dealing pot and living the high life.  This was when I had gone to college in Philadelphia, and I simply had no idea that anything like true evil existed outside of the history books.  In Philly, however, it took little time before I met the real drug dealers who had such side-hobbies as luring underage girls into drug-dependency and prostitution.  They thoroughly enjoyed the power that threats and violence gave them, and seemed beyond any form of natural compassion.  They terrified me to the core, not so much because of my own physical safety but because they turned my relatively gentle life upside down.  I left the situation and began the journey that became the rest of the book, but it was overall an incredibly stupid thing that I had done.  Because of youthful vanity, I had come within an inch of being pulled one way or another into hellish disaster. 
 
I hate even re-thinking the experience, but the darkness helps to contrast the incredible light that I also received at the retreat.  It occurred on day three, when we were given to re-live our baptismal experience and promise.  There before the altar a crystal bowl filled with clear water was placed on a lace-covered table and then blessed by the priest.  It took place near noon when the sun had already begun to illuminate the stained glass behind the altar, bathing us all in a soft effusion of colorful light.  We were to walk up and re-commit ourselves silently before the water, then walk back to sit quietly in the pews, which I did near the beginning of the event.  Then, after several minutes of fairly mindless meditation, something strange happened.  An interior vision was given to me of bright water rushing beneath a shelf of rock, water which took on a life of its own as I was made to understand that this represented the huge and continuous flow of God’s love and forgiveness.  I am aware that these words are used in spiritual talk so much that they have become almost meaningless, so let me add that no words new or old could explain the depth and extent of that love.  It was, as they say, infinite and non-conditional, so deep and absolutely pure that it took my mental breath away, an experience so intense that it seemed I could not stand it for long, wonderful as it was.  With it came an unmistakable message, clear as day: “You are loved totally and absolutely and are forgiven for any fault or failing.”  With this was added the idea that I – we – could not go to Hell, or be away from God, by any other means than by our own personal refusal and denial.  That is, that we can only lose this eternal love by consciously turning away from it. 
 
This is not exactly identical with much of traditional Christian religious teaching.  Rather, it seems more like a New Age thing, where we can do what we wish but then, what the heck, still fly on back to Dad when the time comes.  To tell the truth, I don’t know whether we need a penance or expurgation before we return to God, but the vision was clear: if we want him, we will eventually be united with him.  
 
Darkness and light, and it is almost impossible to believe that anyone would choose darkness.  When I think of the people who love evil, I am brought first to think how this attitude would come about in the first place.  Was it because these people, too, were manipulated by evil and chose to become the devil rather than to run from him?  I know this is not usually done even by those who have lived very harsh lives.  Many of the people in that ghetto area of Philly where I lived had gone through hell, and yet remained decent and honest men, however damaged that they were.  The woman who presented her testimonial is another example.  So why do some people go the way of evil?  It hardly seems rational that anyone would choose this route when they know that heaven is at hand, regardless of their foibles and imperfections, if only they wanted it. 
 
That might be it right there.  While some might be born evil - which is hard to conceive if there is divine justice in the world – it might just be that most never knew that God was waiting for them, ready to take them back.  It might be that, after death, questions will be asked or a period of repentance will be required, but we are all welcome to the club, regardless - or so it came to me - of race, national origin, creed or everything else, as long as we know enough to embrace the all-good.   While those who choose evil might do it for power, would they pursue it if they knew that permanent paradise was the alternative? 
 
In the end, I cannot say.  Instead, I only relate here what I was told, told by a force of absolute good.  That force, it said, is there for you.  Whatever you think you need or want, it lets you know that the satisfaction of those needs or wants cannot compare with what is there, for free, without the need for violence or any other reaction against deep-seated insecurities and fear.