[Note - I will be busy on a mission of mercy for the next week or two.  I shall return, God willing.]
​ 
I have long sought the answer to the title, reading whatever excerpts I get from the Miami Herald, the NYT and the Washington Post, and still I am not entirely appeased.  I have heard the conservative opinion on it, that it is socialism that is the culprit, and I have read the befuddlement of the experts as to why a revolution against the current head of the country, a scoundrel by the name of Nicolas Maduro, has not exploded among a people known to not shy away from violent revolution.  
 
I question much of it, too.  I lived a total of just under three years there – half a year in 1987, two years from ’88 to ’90, and a few months in ’93.  For my fieldwork I had to know the history of the country, so I read scads of books, as well as contemporary local newspapers and essays.  I visited and lived in all portions of the nation except for the Orinoco Delta region, and among all classes of people except for the very rich.  I talked with a governor, argued with commandants of the police and military, and had a close encounter with death with two hoodlums with knives.  For much of the time, I had a female Puerto Rican native, a fellow researcher who could really speak the language and who could get the women’s point of view.  And I was in more contact with the prickly academic elite than I care to remember. 
 
Still, the current horrendous state of the nation fills me with doubts.  How the hell could a nation with a comfortably small population, great natural resources, beautiful tropical beaches, and one of the largest oceans of oil under its territory become one of the most dysfunctional countries in the world?  North Korea has its psycho leaders and powerful China to back them up, and countries like South Sudan and Syria are mired in endless civil war, but Venezuela?  When I was there, I talked to guys in the bars as I would with anyone in the US.  I stayed at people’s houses and rented their services and had actual friends among them.  They understood the West because their traditions were largely from the West.  They were at least nominally Catholic.  We understood each other.  And now they are fighting over scraps and rats in the street to eat.  It was not the world that caused this; there was no invasion, and the world still wants the remaining huge reserves of oil they control.  What went wrong?   
 
I’ll skip the history lesson.  I do not know why the nation went socialist with Hugo Chavez when it did, but I do know, in hindsight, that something like that was bound to happen, and I do know, as a matter of course, that once the nation went socialist, it was going to go down the tubes. 
 
But this is not a conservative diatribe against socialism.  Here’s the thing: socialism can work if the great majority of the citizens consider themselves to be an integral part of the nation, and believe that others believe the same thing.  When this is the case, people don’t resent giving large portions of their hard-earned income into the national till, because they feel that they must help their fellow citizens because they will help them as well.  They also feel that their government will handle the money responsibly, not using it for personal gain or to manipulate opinion, policy, or people in general.  In other words, they feel a commonality with their fellow citizens and trust both them and their elected government officials. 
 
Unfortunately, this is so seldom the case that most people in favor of socialism can only point to a few small, homogeneous and democratic nations for examples of success – and even those are only partly socialistic.  To say that socialism would not work in the massive, confrontational diversity of the US is an easy call, but it is even easier to predict disaster for such a system in Venezuela.  Here, the division of the populace between a small elite and the masses goes back to its founding in the early 1500’s.  This division has never ended, largely because of massive insider corruption.  This corruption long ago percolated through the society so that fellow citizens fundamentally do NOT trust each other, and certainly not their leaders, with good reason.  Everything from petty theft to colossal government fraud was and still is the rule of the day.   In one week, the maid fixing your bed at the hotel will steal your toothpaste, while the vice president will run off to Miami with 70 million stolen dollars, or his nephew with 70 pounds of cocaine.   It is the norm.  There is little to no trust outside close friends and family (for this reason, the family is so important in Latin America). 
 
So when large-scale socialism was instituted by Chavez, the people rejoiced at the prospect of getting even with the elite and so widely supported him.  But almost instantly, the new leader and his people became the new cartel, simply replacing or, in many cases, joining the old.   People still had no faith in their fellow citizen or government, but now the corrupt government had even more control of people’s money.  Additionally, those political insiders were guaranteed employment no matter how sloppy their work, and the profits of entrepreneurs were increasingly absconded to pay for the great promises of socialism.  Now, even the basic incentive of personal gain was lost.  So it was that leadership of large enterprises was taken over by incompetent insiders, while the most basic reason for productivity was nixed.  What a mess.
 
I have not answered all my own questions here, and of course my thesis needs greater historical backing to be thorough, but what is clear from Venezuela is this: without basic trust, a more perfect union cannot endure.   As one of our founding fathers said (I forget who), nations such as ours – ones with maximum personal freedom and minimum governmental interference – can only exist when the population has a generally high moral character.  But that’s nothing compared to socialist governments; when government controls most of the money, as it does in a socialist society, the moral character has to be both high and of a collective nature, where most everyone agrees on most everything of importance, and follows through on those beliefs.  Both commonality and trust must prevail. 
 
Such it is with any utopia: it must begin with trust as well as agreement on the fundamentals.  To enforce any such system is doomed to failure.  People will not be changed; rather, the utopia will collapse, either into chaos and revolution, or into a harsh dictatorship with an elite both unwilling to give up the dream and corrupted by the power they are granted from such dictatorship.   
 
Thus it is not from vengeance or radical cries of “social justice” that good government is born, but rather from a general sense of shared morality and mutual trust.   Thus further, a utopia is not initiated by a cynical people, but by a loving people who forward the love.  How these loving people are first formed comes, then, not from government, but from the spirit of love.  Or, as Christians call it, the Holy Spirit.
 
As usual, I have jumped ahead to first causes which always and must end in God, but poor Venezuela…torn by fear and jealousy and greed, it sought to remedy these problems through legislation, and then military force.  This made the thin glue that held the society together come completely apart.  It is not so much a lesson about socialism as it is about human reality – that the national spirit must change before the society and government can – unless one wants to use oppressive force.   Venezuelans might want to recall that they have been endowed with one of the greatest sources of positive internal change – Christianity – which has been a part of their culture since the Conquest (as contradictory as that sounds).   Like those in other nations, however, they have yet to embrace this philosophy/belief with the numbers necessary to complete the change.  That would truly be utopian.  But we can at least hope that Venezuelans realize their error – that a utopian society can be legislated by a charismatic leader or a committee and enforced by guns - and get back to the fundamentals of personal responsibility and integrity that are necessary for a free society and financial success.  Otherwise, thousands more will die and millions more will flee.   
 
    
 
 
 

​ 
I had seen it before, but that is not why I will not watch it again.  “It” is Ken Burn’s series on the Civil War, and my distaste for it is now forming a pattern.  At the beginning of summer, I could not watch the series on the Vietnam War.  I had thought that it was because I had gone through that on a personal level, not as a soldier but as a youth tossed in the social turmoil that the war created.  But I did not live during the Civil War, nor do I know of any great-great somebody in the family who did.  No.  I finally figured out that it was because it was war, plain and simple.  I now see the soldiers as babies born to mothers who at least once cared for them, and to fathers who had given these soldiers as children lessons in life, looking upon them as their carnal future for time immemorial.   I see them being ordered to actually point a rifle at someone and purposefully send a lump of lead into them to kill.  What lessons learned does that kill?  How crazy is that?
 
I am not a pacifist, and, except for a possible moment or two spent in adolescent idealism, never have been.  Most Christian churches preach the right to fight against an unjust foe, and I have always and still believe that.  Those who refuse to fight in all instances are doomed to be obliterated, unless, like the Amish, they are surrounded by countrymen who are willing to fight for them.  I have read of numerous communities thus wiped out, from Buddhists in India to converted Algonquin tribes in Canada, who have no progeny left in our current age.  At times it is a necessity, this self-defense, and sometimes it is just to use preemptive force to prevent the dire need for self-defense, or to prevent a much larger war later on.  I get it.   But I just can’t stand to watch it anymore.
 
I think it is age, and the odd clarity that comes from age even as other thinking faculties dim.  As a kid and then a teenager, I thought war was a great thing.  If not for the anti-Vietnam War movement, I would have been happy to become, or so I thought, a war hero.  In later years, until almost now, I turned to see war more as a political and strategic thing, a part of the movement of history that has always been.  The latter is true to this day.  But now it hurts.  In one way, it is because many “just” wars are fought, in hindsight, not out of necessity, but because tempers on both sides have become irrationally high.  That was the Civil War as I see it.  Slavery was on its last legs as a productive institution, morality aside.  By 1882, the last bastion of slavery in the New World – Brazil, if I remember correctly – finally outlawed the practice.  In the US, machines and cheap immigrant labor had become a better business model, and Anglo-American sentiment had turned sharply and irrevocably against slavery.  The old plantation elite would almost certainly have been forced to turn away from slavery between 1860 and 1880.  The 600, 000 plus dead, in a nation one tenth its current size, and the hundreds of thousands more wounded, probably had given their lives and health in vain.  One might also say the same thing about those in WWI and Vietnam. 
 
As for necessary war, if we were attacked by, say, a coldly expansionist China, I suppose I would load up the old 8 MM bolt-action Mauser and head to the hills, but I would not like it.  I would not feel the hero.  But that is unlikely.  It is more likely that we will have war started by the flaring of tempers around issues that could have been worked out eventually, much like those before the Civil War.  It will be the hotheads, not those clinging desperately to life, who will fight, neither side as just as they think they are.  
 
“Where do the conflicts and disputes among you originate? Is it not your inner cravings to make war within your members?  What you desire you do not obtain, and so you resort to murder…You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly, with a view to squandering what you receive on your pleasures.  Oh you unfaithful ones, are you not aware that love of the world is enmity to God?” (James, 4: 1-4)
 
I write this now because our nation, as well as all the rest of the developed West, seems to be enjoined in a conflict of opinion not overly shy of actual civil war.  I know this because I am no wilting flower, no man in the middle who lets life pass on by, even if that would be for the best.  Frankly, sometimes I feel that war might be the only way to solve our problems.   But I am wrong.  The threat is great indeed, reaching into the very fabric of our moral lives, but would war improve our national morality?  Our Constitution reflects many biblical values, but chief among those is one truly from God: that we have a choice.  We have a choice as to whether or not we take on the mantel of the world, or focus our wills on that which is so much greater.  Yes, our survival as a culture depends on it, but if the collectivity chooses the former, it deserves to collapse from its own hubris.  This will force those in disagreement to not only preach their faith, but to live it.  That is the world that James lived in 2,000 years ago, and perhaps the world we must live in in the near future. 
 
If I sound overly dramatic, that is probably true.  That is my nature.  But greater and greater numbers believe that we truly are at the turning point, especially those in the younger generations.  Such times have happened before, and most certainly will happen again. 
 
We are not alone in our fears, either.  Currently, I am reading a book, God-Sent, by Roy Abraham Varghese, that chronicles the approved apparitions of the Virgin Mary.  Fascinating stuff, especially because of the shift in tone and the frequency of apparitions since 1830.  In the years before then, the visions had focused on continuing the faith through, say, the building of a chapel. Since then, she (the Virgin) has appeared far more frequently, warning of catastrophes and the wages of sin.  Since the 1970’s, she more and more has spoken of an ‘end-times’ that is immanent within a lifespan.  Still, exactly when this will happen, as well as how bad things will get, will be up to us. At Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where I visited last March, the Virgin has stated that a cataclysmic change is almost certain, but that the bad can be limited, again by our choices.  It is promised that afterwards will come an era of peace – but how many will enjoy it will be up to us. 
 
You can be certain that I will return to this book in my writings soon, but for now, I, and many of us, should take a breath.  In the long haul, what will be, will be because of our collective will.  To crush some aspect of this will would probably give us what we got through our Civil War – a huge amount of dead, and enmity that lasted for a hundred years and more.  As useless as it sounds, it is better now to pray, even if we do not believe in a spiritual realm.  Prayer usually informs our consciousness from a position of peace, and that is precisely what we need - peace, calm, and a rethinking of what we want to be.  If what we want collectively is a culture that justifies vengeance, inter-group (and inter-gender) conflict and crass self-gratification, then those who don’t wish for it will be challenged in a manner that is sometimes necessary for true faith.  To the others, they will reap what they sow.  Peace be on them, too.   In the end, if there is no Truth, it will not matter; and if there is, then it must and will prevail.   
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
It was mere coincidence, but it had never happened in such a way in my presence before.  It was with the “small group” – five of us, including me and my wife, all of us people who had attended a Catholic retreat at one time or another who now met for discussions of theological literature.  This time, the meeting was at a Mexican restaurant, “El Patron,” which had a large room, huge tables, and normally few customers, a perfect place for us to discuss Biblical considerations.  This time there were several customers, with one large family group at a very large table just in front of ours, but the space in the place was so great that we could still use the names of God without too much offense.  I had ordered the Chile Relleno.  It was not as good as last time, but still good enough.  My wife had gotten something that looked better than mine, as usual, but I was not all that concerned with the food, because we talked of the book while we ate, Jesus Shock, and the book had been my choice.
 
The name had been well chosen, for the author, Peter Kreeft, never allowed a dull moment.  Bam, bam, his words hit like a hammer, true and shocking in their simplicity and effect, at least as far as I was concerned.  I had taken up the author’s style and was trying to convince the others, if they needed convincing, that the heart of Jesus Shock, according to Kreeft, could be summed up in one phrase: that Jesus was not only of the past, but alive and active now.  The shock could be as startling as seeing a dead relative walking into your living room.  Jesus was active NOW and, if you allowed it, He would prove that He was active.  Stunning and frightening, as it must have been for those who witnessed Jesus raise people from the dead, and then, finally, Himself.   The works of God could be terrifying, as the old prophets knew. 
 
Then the old man of the family in front of us began to gag, expressed mostly in short, weak coughing.  “Dad,” said a 30-ish woman, “are you OK?”  “He’s not OK” said another, and then the woman again, “He’s not responding!”  He slumped over the table, the choking mostly gone, and after a few more efforts to get him to sit up, the adults at the table quickly pulled away the chairs and lay him on the floor of the restaurant, right beside our table.  “Call 911!” someone said, probably needlessly, as a half dozen iPhones were already in the air, and then the daughter took over.  She obviously had had some training, as she checked for a pulse, and then leaned down to feel for breath.  “Nothing!”  One of the woman in our group was a physical therapist and joined them.  I sat with the others as a useless spectator. 
 
It went on like that.  The daughter pumped the chest to get the heart to beat, while I watched the man’s eyes.  At first they were closed, but then they opened, and there was nothing there – no response, no recognition.  The man was dead, or so I thought, and I tastelessly said so in a side whisper to the guy next to me.  The police arrived and brought out a defibulator.  A robotic female voice sprang forth from the device to tell them what to do: “Apply the device.  Remove and step back.  Do not touch the patient…you may now touch the patient.”  It went on like that until it became clear to me that not only was the man dead, but that it was ridiculous to go on with this frenzy.   I thought I could feel his spirit, and his annoyance: “Leave me alone!  The worst is over.  It’s time for me to leave!”  I became annoyed as well for him, or so I imagined, as the fire department arrived.  Still, no response.
 
It was then that I searched for that feeling again, that irrefutable feeling that my friend and I had had in the Upper Peninsula of  Michigan when we happened upon a car accident on the lone ribbon of road that cut deep through the state forest just south of Pictured Rocks National Seashore.  We could both feel that death was there.  He (she) was dark and ominous.  It had just happened, but already three others were there on the scene, and it was obvious that they felt him too.  I wrote about it in the essay “Dark Angel” (in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars).  The presence had been so clear, so unmistakable, that even a day later, another friend noticed that we were marked with a darkness, as if we carried a physical blemish.
 
So I knew that feeling well and searched for it, thinking it must be there, but it was not.  There may have been annoyance (or maybe that was only me) but there was no angel of death.   I found that curious.  I remained glued to the action, just another rubber-necker.  He had just died, but there was no sign of it.  
 
As I pondered this, the fire department guy declared that he had gotten a pulse.  Then the man started to breath.  And then the doctor arrived and gave him some kind of shot, and then the ambulance came, and, and … he was alive.  He had been “dead” for several minutes, but not really.  He seemed to have left his body, but something knew better; something knew that he would not die.  Maybe he would that night, or maybe he would have one hell of a scary tale to tell for years to come, but for then he was alive – critical, but alive. 
 
“Making it real” is what I had numbly said at the time, which for many there might have been intimately true.  Things happen not only for one person, but for many people in many ways, all of them valuable lessons if we allow them to be.  The daughter must have gone through a slew of emotions about her dad, about the good things he had done and the bad, about his life and the closeness of his death.  The wife, who had wept during his temporary death, must have had other emotions, and other memories.  The physical therapist in our group had an elderly father who had been ill, and this must have made her think, too; and the father of the guy I had whispered to was so near to death that it would come less than a week later, only a few days from this writing.  There were also the grandkids of the man on the floor, who had been hustled out after granddad had become unresponsive; how would this affect their lives?  And then there was me; I had been hung up on the spirit of death.  I had been puzzled at his absence.  I was no longer. 
 
There had been one unifying factor, however.  Death.  It had not come, but no matter; its shadow had overlain us all, exposing seams and wrinkles within that we had not noticed, or had not even known of, before.   Death is an enormous shock, impossible for the god of our egos, for our own little eternity, in its finality and its apparent darkness.  It cannot be but it is.  And it was with this, death, that Jesus had caused even greater shock, not because he had caused it or died himself, but because he had reversed it.  He had brought others, and then himself, from the dead, proving to be the God above all gods with dominion over even that dark angel.   The story of His life, death, and return to life cannot be real, no; but neither can death.
 
What is the most startling thing of all is that we fear the return from the dead even more than death.  Zombies.  Ghosts. The half-rotten hand from the grave.  Death is supposed to be quiet, done once and then out of sight and mind.  ‘Jesus shock’ is that which takes us by the neck and says, “No! It is not final!  Look to me, for I am still and forever alive even after death!”  We shrink from this, terrified, and make of it only wishful thinking, but who can wish for something so horrifying?  And yet we do not want to die and do not really, really believe that we will die, not absolutely and forever.  
 
Jesus is our worst nightmare, a living hand from the grave, but also our greatest hope, our dearest dream.  We want to believe and do not, all at once, just as we believe in death and do not, all at once.  But if He lives, He leaves a mark, as all living things do.  Could this mark only be in our dreams, or a trace on our soul, or is He stamped so broadly into everything that we cannot even see Him, just as we cannot grasp what this death is that is so universally stamped into life?  Is ‘Jesus shock’ the startling realization the He, that God, is everywhere and working not only all around us, but within us, just as death is? Is He the broad counter to death, as He said He was, always at work in broad daylight, and we, so ignorant that all we can see are the obscure shadows? 
 
We might say ‘no’ and be left to the gnawing terror of these shadows, or we might say ‘yes’ and be left to the terror of eternal life.  All creatures who live in the dark shy from the light, but all creatures want to live, by design.  We are left as spectators in a restaurant, making of death what we will, but finally, making of it only death.   It becomes our decision to live in terror of its shadow, or to face the even greater terror of coming into the light.  Light which is there and always has been, its hand not cold and dead but, if it is beyond death, luminescent and warm, the mystery of death solved.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

      A quick little note here, as I will be busy, off and about from now until early next week - One: if you are interested in both psychic and holy phenomena, look up the Zeitun (Egypt) Images of 1968 through 1971. Here, over a Coptic Christian church, the Virgin Mary was seen by millions over a period of 3 years, including the pope of the Copts, as well as, I believe, Pope John Paul II (he at least went there, and declared the spectacles genuine).  Millions of photos were taken of these visitations in an era when distorting photos was much more difficult - and besides, hundreds of thousands of people would not and could not do this.  There were also dove-like images of light floating around her (she is known as the Bride of the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, which is symbolized by the dove). Stunning.

And two: when I write again next week, I will describe the experience of death a group of us (who were meeting to discuss religious things) had at a local Mexican restaurant last night, at the table right next to us.  I called this "Making it real,"  which was not treated as a joke at the time.  It was not like the last time that I had experienced recent death (described in the essay "Dark Angel", in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars).  I will explain why that was as well.  Until next week, FK 

​It is often surprising that the worst of enemies often share (some) nearly identical traits.  Hitler and Stalin come immediately to mind, but it was Juan Diego and St Paul who got me on this particular tract.
 
Juan Diego was an Aztec peasant who in 1531 was one of eight million Aztecs practicing the old religion even as they had been under their new masters, the Spanish, and their new religion since the remarkable conquest by Cortez some eleven years earlier.  But it was in the later year on one chill winter morning (it is chilly in the highlands of Mexico in winter) when he encountered what would become known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, who sent him to persuade the Spanish Bishop to build a cathedral in her honor.  To prove to the Bishop that the illiterate Aztec was telling the truth, Our Lady gave Diego a bouquet of roses, which did not grow at that time of year, and a “tilde” or Aztec cape made of cactus fiber with her image clearly stamped into the fabric.  To this day, the tilde is in perfect shape.  Scientists cannot understand how this is, or how the image was made.  More remarkably, this miracle converted almost every one of the eight million Aztecs to Catholicism nearly on the spot. 
 
But that is not the point.  The point is that the Aztec religion and the Catholic religion were seen as antithetical, and in many ways they most certainly were, at least in theory.  And yet they shared something that was brought to my mind by Juan Diego, concerning a latter-day practitioner of the old religion, one Don Juan Matus, as told (or created) by anthropologist Carlos Castaneda in his Tales of Don Juan series.   
 
In one of the books – I forget which one – anthropologist Carlos and sorcerer Don Juan are sitting in a café in northern Mexico, where Don Juan is trying to teach Carlos about a greater reality.  Says Don Juan, “You see this table?  This is your perspective of reality as compared to the greater outside world.  Everything you believe can fit on this one tiny table.” 
 
Carlos is surprised, then challenged.  “Ok, then.  What about all we know from our arts and literature?”  Don Juan points to a salt shaker and puts it in the middle of the table, saying, “here.”  “OK, how about everything we know from science?”  Don Juan grabs a bottle of hot sauce and places it next to the salt shaker.  “That goes here.”  “OK, then, how about God?”  Don Juan grabs the sugar jar and places it next to the other items.    “And that goes there.”  “But Don Juan, God is everything.”  Replies Don Juan, “This is everything you know about God.”  (my paraphrase) 
 
Nearly two thousand years earlier, St Paul was faced with a similar problem trying to describe to both Jews and Greeks just who God was: “The message of the cross is complete absurdity to those who are headed for ruin…Scripture says ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and thwart the cleverness of the clever.’ Where is the wise man to be found?  Where the scribe? Where is the master of the worldly argument?  Has not God turned the wisdom of the world into folly?  … Jews demand signs, and Greeks look for “wisdom,” but we preach Christ crucified – a stumbling block to Jews, and an absurdity to Gentiles;…”  (1 Corinthians, 1:18-23).
 
The point being, that even as the two religions collided over some very basic features – the necessity of regular human blood sacrifice being one (although this is shared, too – except in Christianity, God as Jesus is the one and only blood sacrifice for the many) – the wise men, or those who understood the foundations of both religions, could agree: we don’t know Reality, the gods, or God.  It is not found in miracles or philosophy.  But, once we agree on that, where exactly, or how, is it found? 
 
This brings me back to my own limited, but evolving understanding of “Spirit”, or deeper truth.  At one time, I thought to find it in the wonders emphasized by mind-altering drugs; at another, through philosophy or theoretical science; and at another, in simple religious worship.  In plain experience, none have it – that is, none can produce this truth simply through ingestion or study or faith (although, I must note, plain faith has been the best of the three).  Rather, it is as Don Juan tried to get at in his own way, or as Paul insisted from his position as a Christian believer – that one finds spirit only through spirit and through nothing else.  That is, that one finds spirit through the grace, or will, of the spirit, but which can be stimulated by a practice in faith.  Don Juan’s “spirits” were of the more elemental variety, used for seeking supernatural power, and it was to those that he directed Carlos; that of Paul was the spirit of eternal truth, the One Spirit.  This latter, too, could and can only be experienced through the grace, or will, of Spirit.  This can find anyone at any time and place, as it did the pagan Juan Diego, but it is more likely to be found by those who use a religious path that requires faith in this spirit.  But it is not the religion that is spirit, just as it is not the signs of the Jews or the logic of the Greeks.
 
Music.  There is logic in music and studies of the logic of music, and there are certainly many signs in music – the G cleft, the mezzo forte and so on - but real music is a product of something we cannot understand, affecting us in ways we do not understand.  We become better at music from its study, but we do not become more gifted – the gift is given or not; and we can appreciate some forms of music better with study, but our appreciation of music, too, is a gift to our species, apparently a useless thing that brings nearly all of us joy and emotions and insight.  And, sometimes, spirit. 
 
So music is like spirit, and can help us find spirit, but still, even music as we usually know it is on that café table.   The One Spirit, the big kahuna, is like nothing else.  It is not irrational, but not rational, either.  It is simply something of another kind, of a kind, that is, that overshadows all understanding.  It is the “meta” of understanding, but really, it is even beyond the very mechanism of human understanding.  It is the one thing that is off the table.  And in that is the magic, the spell, and the wizardry with which the apostles were so enthralled.  It was not the miracles of Jesus or even his resurrection that finally compelled the apostles, for these were still signs, however great; rather, it was the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that grabbed them, so firmly that all but one died willingly for it as a martyr.   It was here that they became truly a part of it, a part of something so unexpected and so amazing and so total that it was worth more than anything, so much so that life itself could seem petty.  
 
It comes like the wind, as the Bible says, but it is not the wind.  It might come as a vision or as a storm, but most often it comes softly, and almost tickles with its possibilities.  It is often so subtle that one almost ignores it until one sees that, oh, it is like nothing else.  And then one sees, almost as a mirage, that within it is everything and much more than anything we can imagine.  And with that it leaves us, because we are human and cannot remain human otherwise.  But it draws us, and wants us.  The apostles, who understood this as no others, called this wanting “Love,” although this Love is related to our love as our thoughts to the thoughts of puppies. 
 
As Thomas Aquinas said of his many brilliant writings near his death, “all is straw.”  So are all our works.  All we know is a salt shaker or a bottle of hot sauce on a cheap Mexican café table.  It might seem that Spirit is simply not worth the hassle, but the apostles would disagree.  And besides, sometimes we are not given the choice.      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For today, a new essay, "Ricker's Mountain," under Essays in the website.  FK