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          The wind howled at 45 mph sustained, the rain came and went like fits of tantrums, and my son and I were in a cabin with no computer or TV. There was the handy IPhone, however, which has a download function so that programs can be saved while in range and played later while out of range. Since the cabin is out of range for anything but a Sat. phone, we had our downloads and nothing but the downloads. And they were good.
 
            Podcasts. Were it not for my wife, I would still be using an Olivetti mechanical typewriter, and were it not for my son, I would still be listening to nothing but commercial radio. But saved podcasts we had, one being a several-hour-long stilted conversation between Joe Rogan and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. 
 
            Or Fetterwoman as he once called himself. It was this quirkiness that led Rogan to invite him on, this and the fact that Fetterman had suffered a stroke during his senatorial campaign – which he won - that had made him incoherent. Two years later, he is vastly improved, but still hobbled, having to listen to other’s conversation through a computer that turns spoken language into written language. He must do this because he cannot understand spoken language.
 
            My son could not understand this. Is he deaf? Rogan, too, was mystified, and so asked him just that: did the stroke make you (Fetterman) deaf? No, he replied: rather ‘I cannot understand spoken language. I can still reason and still read but cannot understand the spoken word.’ (paraphrase). The reason, Fetterman was finally able to describe, was that the part of his brain that took the sound of language and turned it into meaningful words was severally damaged. He could still read language and think in language but could not translate the vocalization of language. Very, very odd and very telling.
 
            It is telling like the magic goblet that we have seen since grammar school. We all remember: what do you see when you look at this picture? For most, the first thing they see is the oddly-shaped goblet. When we are told that there is something else there, sooner or later two faces appear, staring at each other across the space that holds the goblet. Huh. We can see one thing, and then something totally different by a simple change of perspective.
 
            Let’s look once again at the Old Testament and compare it to the New. In the Old, there was no heaven for anyone but the very special – like Elijah beaming his way into heaven on a golden chariot.  Hell was for all, but held only the ragged remnants of our earthly selves that would slowly dissipate into nothingness. God’s threats and rewards were made for the living, either as individuals or as family or tribe or nation. Thus the messiah was thought to be a remake of the earthly King David; this belief apparently was the reason Judas betrayed Christ, so that this great prophet would finally get his butt in gear and drive out the Romans. It was not only Judas, however, who had no idea about who The Christ really was. The other apostles remained completely baffled by the thought that God would die for humanity through his son and then rise from the dead. God dying? What the…?
 
            “…not the smallest letter of the law…shall be done away with…” Jesus said (Mathew , 5:18). However, according to Paul, “He is a real Jew who is one inwardly, and true circumcision is of the heart.;” In other words, the Law was to be fulfilled through its interior, deeper meaning, which is ultimately to love God with all one’s being and to love one’s fellow Man as one loves himself. In this we see that from the time of Abraham to the preaching of the Gospel after the death of Jesus – a span of nearly 2,000 years - a huge change of consciousness had taken place, with the Law moving from appearance into the conscience. With this, the Jews (and later the Christians) began to think twice about bashing in the brains of the babies of their enemies and selling off their women; they had now begun to see others as themselves and to court the love of God in their hearts.
 
            Almost all are aware of this change, yet we still fall short of living what we know to be true. On the one hand, we are like Fetterman after his stroke, able to understand the meaning of the Word in our minds but unable to “speak” it in our daily lives. The ability to do so is there, but only marginally. We need to practice what we preach again and again so that it might grow. We are still seeing the goblet rather than the faces even though we know that the faces are there.
            Translated into our vision of the cosmos, people of our age now know without a doubt that the universe is vastly beyond our grasp, a nearly infinite mystery of dark stars and black holes and stuff we cannot even imagine. But still we fritter. We still are hurt by the slights of others, hold resentments, have affairs for the thrill of it, and endlessly chase after money, prestige, and human power, even though, through our knowledge of the cosmos, we know that all these things are infinitely petty.
 
            On the other hand, linguistics and pictures are only the start. There might be – almost certainly are – realities around us about which we know nothing at all. To see these, we would need a teacher to tell us where and how to look anew. And then be given a new faculty by grace to see.
 
            I had this experience while visiting the museum of the scrolls in Jerusalem. There, at the end of the exhibit halls, was a partially unrolled Dead Sea scroll of the prophet Isaiah (who of all the prophets speaks most about the coming of Christ). I was standing before it and looking at its foreign writing without understanding when an elderly woman next to me asked, “Do you see the human faces in the words?” I answered that I did not until I took a second look. Suddenly – with the suddenness of seeing the faces in the goblet - I saw the heads of hundreds of different people in the Hebraic writing. They were as varied as a general population would be, most with longish hair and beards, all in black and white like the writing itself. In retrospect, the faces appeared much larger than the writing, although they were fully contained by them. This could not be. This was physically impossible. And yet it was.
 
            This is where I believe we are today. We have been given the scroll and the words have even been interpreted for us, but we are missing something to understand them better. Within this scroll is a living reality that is beyond our current ability to see. We are like the Jews at the time of Christ, aware of the prophecies but unable to perceive what was truly meant by them. God will die and rise again? But these were not the Jews of the Old Testament. Time had altered them, allowing some to begin to perceive. The Way had to be pointed out to them, but they were ready to receive the grace necessary to understand the rest, to work upon the human potential that had been so long hidden that would allow them to understand.
 
            This new understanding is still being fulfilled in our time, but it seems that this phase is coming to an end. It is not just the Christian faith that is dying in the very land that it came from, but the truths of other faiths as well. In a manner of speaking, we have all been given a spiritual Testament and have understood and practiced this as far as we could. Now there is a timely need for the pointing of another finger, and for the gift of grace to allow us to understand this new thing that is being pointed out. 
 
            This seems to be happening at warp speed, just as a new era of materialism is rocketing upwards. Where is the force to counter the belief that AI is about to become a superior form of humanity? Where is the power to counter the belief that humans can create this new Frankenstein with technology, eliminating the need or even the thought of God? In another manner, such crucial questions as these were being asked by the Jews 2000 years ago: where is the force that can counter the pagan Romans? Where is the new David that was spoken of in the Old Testament?
 
            He came then, but not as expected, just as it is a near-certainty that our new David will not come or be as we expect. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, and he allowed himself, King of kings, to be tortured and killed like a common criminal. No one of that time could have seen that coming, even though it was clear for all to see in hindsight that Isaiah had described him perfectly. So what are we missing now? What faces in the goblet have we not seen? And who will point this out to us? Because of a dire need for a counter force, I believe we will find out soon. We wait in fear and hope.
 
 
 
              
 
 
 
             

 
            The German word “volkgeist” has some pretty heavy baggage but carries a worthy idea, meaning in English “the spirit of the people.” The word became common knowledge after the Nuremburg rallies in Nazi Germany, where one was infamously filmed in all its astounding and frightening glory in the 1934 epic “Triumph of the Will.” Hundreds of thousands of Germans attended the festivals that ran annually until 1938, along with tens of thousands of helmeted troops, often lit up during the night with blazing torches illuminating giant swastika flags. Hitler’s speeches were nearly hysterical, and the people clung to them like drunken fans at a rock concert. The crowds and the leader were one. They shared a terrifying volksgeist in a frenzy of national unity.
 
            We are all aware of our own segments of volksgeist. A rock concert was mentioned above, but we also feel it at sports games and revival rallies and, yes, political rallies. This feeling of the “folk will” can be small or overpowering, long-lasting or evanescent, dark and scary or light-filled and hopeful. We had our own frenzy of national unity after 9/11, which led to major, even drastic changes in domestic and foreign policy, including the implementation of a few “forever wars.” We are now having these frenzies in a divided nation beneath the shadows of the coming presidential election. Harris benefitted through the Democratic Convention, and now Trump has it, the frenzied spirit, in lieu of a few assassination attempts and what- have -you. It may not last, just as the initial Harris “vibe” did not last.
 
            This thing, this spirit of the people, is hard to maintain through intentional force, although people and groups of people try. Hitler did it very well, aided by a set of disastrous events in the past followed by a startling succession of successful conquests. In such cases, failure is the quickest way to neuter the buzz. In this country today, the opposition to Trump is trying to stomp out the momentum with buckets of everything thrown against the wall in hopes that something might stick. Something might. A buzz is usually not based on tangibles (although Hitler’s initial success was very tangible), and so can rise and fall as easily as notes on an amped-up electric guitar, even on a national scale.
 
            My first realization of a serious national volksgeist came during the most profound era of change in recent American history: the 1960’s. The younger audience might laugh or yawn, but the repercussions were tangible and profound. From sexual mores to government programs to race relations, everything changed, for better and for worse. I wrote about it in the beginning of my hitchhiking autobiography Dream Weaver. For the young, the vibe was magical, a siren call to utopia that was so overwhelming that the impossible seemed inevitable. It fizzled away in the 70’s, but left us with the world tremendously changed.
 
            Fizzled away; to those who were political actors in the 60’s, the volksgeist was purposefully infiltrated and worked out exceedingly well, but for the rest of us young dreamers, the vibe erupted, burped, then slipped into a pair of flared white double-nit hip-huggers to dance the Disco. Yet there was an expectation that this 60’s vibe was the beginning of a new era, the Aquarian Age, described by another German word, the “zeitgeist,” or spirit of the age. This supposedly is to have much deeper roots than the volksgeist and should carry us through the next 2,000 years, just as Jesus carried the age of Pisces, the fish, for the last 2,000. What, though, can we say of the meaning of numbers? While past civilizations thought numbers were magical, we do not; they number things and that is it. 1,000 or 10,000, they are simply human constructs, nothing more than digits that can run through a super computer like pizza through a frat house.
 
            But there are things that are happening that are creating a world-wide vibe at “zeitgeist” levels. We have spoken here before of the supposed words and prophecies of Our Lady (the Virgin Mother of Christ) at Medjugorje in the otherwise bedraggled nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Within the lifetime of at least some of the 6 children who were and still are being given visions, an era-changing event is supposed to happen (the children are now mid 50’s to 60). Supposedly, a sign of Christ will appear in the sky, and everyone will be subject to a life-review, something that is usually given to each of us at our death. Some will die from fright, but others will see themselves as God sees them, and because of that they will fundamentally change their lives. We can only imagine the magnitude of this change. It would truly bring a new era, a new zeitgeist, a new age, just as we felt was certain back in  the 60’s, and just as the astrologers have predicted for two thousand or more years.
 
            Predictions are easy, however, and we have seen so many pass by unfulfilled. In the first millennium, whole towns in Europe stopped work and hunkered down for the new age. It did not happen, and it is probable that many starved to death following that cold New Year’s Day. Another end of an era was expected after the bubonic plagues of the 14th century. In retrospect, a new age – the modern era of individualism, secularism, and capitalism - did come to Europe, heralded by the Renaissance, but such changes occurred over centuries as a “process” rather than as a singular miraculous event. There certainly were sudden shifts in places like Milan and Florence, but they did not impress the whole continent as a new age.
 
            Regardless, a millennial-style shift seems to be embedded in our DNA, and such things have occurred. The appearance of the Spanish galleons off the cost of Mexico in 1519 comes to mind. The Aztecs had expected it from their own prophets, just as all of Christendom has been taught to expect a second coming and an apocalypse as well. Such was first predicted by Christ for the Jews, and it did occur with the diaspora and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans some 40 years after his death. But for the rest of the Middle East and Europe, the complete rise of the Christendom – and the new era – was not really fulfilled until the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day of 800. It took a long time to get there, and I don’t believe it was taken by the masses as a shining new age. Should we expect anything different?
 
            There is more news from Medjugorje. A large group of Catholics went there just weeks ago, many of them friends of ours. One spoke to a priest established there who is known for his great eloquence. Decades before, he had received his M.D. from Oxford and was on his way to a comfortable living when he was mysteriously called to Medjugorje. There, he had various visions and locutions from Mary, along with (if I remember correctly) hauntings from demons, all leading to his becoming a priest and great evangelizer. With such credentials he is well respected and not to be taken lightly. So when he said the following (purportedly) to my friend, she took notice: the great change, he said, the new era, the time of the illumination, all of that spoken of by Mary at Fatima and Medjugorje and Akita (Japan) and Kibeho (Rwanda) and other places will occur within the next 2 years.
 
            Of what we know, the change will not be subtle nor take centuries to manifest. The world has been exposed to the conscience-changing spirit of Christ, and now the time to complete the first phase of this history, this “age of Pisces,” is upon us, which will lead suddenly to a new age. Coincidentally, this would be right on target according to numerologists - almost exactly 2,000 years after the resurrection of Christ and the exposure to the world of the Holy Spirit.  
 
            What should we make of this? This prediction is recorded here, and if nothing happens in the next two or three years, we might dismiss our priest’s prophecy. If nothing happens in at most 40 years towards this end, we might be able to discard the whole lot of the Marian prophecies.
 
            So: on the cusp of this great event or great fiasco, I have to ask everyone: do you feel it? Many boomers felt the ‘60’s vibe, many reading this felt the Obama vibe, and we have recently experienced the blip in vibes of our two presidential candidates. But this event is so much bigger. Perhaps we should sense it as wild animals sense the coming of earthquakes. The priest in Bosnia felt it, and I, not gifted in this way, do as well. Many Christians are biased towards this belief, but whose world view isn’t in one way or another? And could not a bias held by so many severally affect reality?
 
            But we are not talking about a movement of social phenomena here. A miracle has been promised, and there can be no taking it back with hedging and excuses. The visionaries of the last century and then some were and are either off their rocker or were and are speaking the word of God through Mary. So I ask again, do you sense the coming of the new zeitgeist? If so, we have been told how to prepare. If not, if it is all hogwash, we will all die someday and should still prepare. That last prediction you can take to the bank.   
 
              
 
 
            
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