Is Scott Galloway out of Touch?

For the first time in my life, I attended a Sunday service at a Unitarian Universalist Church, to see Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, in dialog with the pastor. I was curious to hear what this progressive Black mayor had to say to a progressive Northside (White) church.

The pastor began the service with an announcement.

“The Unitarian Universalist Church was established by and for people who do not believe in hell.”

“Whaat?” I was so startled I hardly heard the rest of the preamble. I don’t believe in hell. No one I know believes in hell. But I’ve never heard nor would I ever expect to hear such good news from any church pulpit.

But wait, there’s more good news! The “UU’s” reject original sin, believe in a God who loves and redeems all human beings, and trains congregants in social justice work. These are my beliefs too.

The bias I’ve had against the Unitarian Universalist Church stems from old thinking that Unitarianism is a heretical religion because they don’t display a cross. Where did I get that crap? Since I’ve been attending a Presbyterian Church for over 45 years, it must have slipped into my head when I was half asleep some Sunday morning.

Speaking of old ideas, on Friday, December 5, podcaster Scott Galloway responded to a young man who asked:

“How do I get more involved in politics?”

Galloway said “… because young people don’t vote, old people keep voting themselves more money, right? $40 billion child tax credit gets ripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120 billion cost of living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.

…our old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money, and the fact that people under the age of 18 don’t vote, the budget reflects values, and our values are that we don’t really love our children.”*

This is a typical Scott Galloway motivator: money. He will happily reveal how much he’s worth and how he manipulated the modern system to get there. But his statement pitting the young against the old using the antiquated idea that we old citizens are sapping federal dollars from the young shows a decided lack of sophistication and reality.

First of all, we want young people to succeed. We were young Pete Buttigieg’s biggest voting bloc, long before he announced his Gray New Deal in Iowa 2020. We vote for SNAP and child tax credits. We volunteer at food kitchens, tutor at public schools, babysit our grandchildren and are worried about ours, yours and future generations.

Secondly, we pay. We will pay the government $202.90 a month in 2026 for Medicare Part B, which covers doctor’s visits. That’s a 9.7 percent increase from 2025. We count on the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to offset that Medicare increase. But in 2026, the Social Security COLA is only a 2.8 percent increase, posing a hardship for Social Security recipients who live check to check in this era of (non) affordability.

Third, don’t we all know that the way young people get involved in politics is to volunteer? What? Is that just a Chicago thing?

After 40 years, curiosity brought me, 79 years old, to an unexpected new idea about the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Let’s hope Scott Galloway, 61years old, becomes curious enough to come to a new idea about how the real world works.

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You can find Scott Galloway’s email address here:

*The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway: How to Get Involved in Politics, How Scott Galloway Writes, and How He Follows the News, Dec 5, 2025https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-get-involved-in-politics-how-scott-galloway/id1498802610?i=1000739823645&r=196.38 This material may be protected by copyright.

Our President, Our Enemy

At Saturday morning coffee in downtown Chicago, a friend and naturalized citizen joined our small group. They work (or by now, worked) at a federal agency where half the workforce had just been fired.

“Are you next?” I asked.

“I wrote a list of things I can do to make money. Nothing to do with my profession but at least I have options,” they said, “I have EU passport and know some languages. My European colleagues are already strengthening connections between their countries. There’ll be jobs.”

Watching TV on February 28, I was like a six-year old sitting cross-legged in front of a life-size screen expecting it to throw itself at me. The Trump-Vance shakedown of Ukraine President Zelensky in the Oval Office presented TV reporters and viewers with a clear and present danger. The US just changed sides. We would now be the puppet ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The reporting immobilized me. What happened to Putin the mortal enemy? Another historical norm thrown onto the MAGA heap of used-to-be’s. Cafe societies the next day ratcheted up conversations about how to leave the country.

Our President was now our enemy.

How I want to write more about my friend! Their story about growing up behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War intrigues this nosy Midwesterner. But I fear exposing my friend to gotcha algorithms that worm around the internet. I even write “they/them” so the sex can’t be identified.

They said, “Big difference between here and country of my childhood. Before the breakup of USSR, you’d be killed if you wrote forbidden words.”

Alexander Dugin, a friend of Putin’s, on the day of Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaimed that “traditionalism won. Globalism lost. A victory for Russia.”

Globalism has been the hallmark of the devil in fundamentalist Christianity since before Jimmy Carter’s presidency. At my small fundamentalist Christian church in the 1970s, a friend pulled me aside one Sunday during coffee hour. She said Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on the Family was diabolic. We were both former hippies. We grew cabbage in our back yards. We made our own yogurt. We balanced our immune systems with apple cider vinegar. I thought I knew her.

A Christian convert, she’d been exposed to the idea that Carter would lay out his progressive American family values. Then spread those ideals around the world through programs like USAID.

“Carter is promoting globalism,” she said. “He wants all families to think like him.”

Preposterous? Yeah. I thought so too.

New York Times columnist, David French, is the original Never-Trumper. An evangelical Christian, French teaches history and the constitution. He explains Trumpism from a biblical point of view. Prophesying Christians, Pentecostals and traditionalists believe the Devil is the force behind globalism. Prophesied in the Bible. These Christians tell Trump he’s God’s man to lead America out of the spiritual darkness of globalism, especially because he survived a gunshot to the head. Trump’s leadership in anti-globalism, divvying up the world pie between the four leaders, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is victory over the Devil. Oh.Yeah.

Long before Trump, when insecurity and doubt began settling in my young joints, I was desperate for certainty. I fell for these biblical prophesies, these absolutes. I sobered up, married and mothered a boy. I worked in a stain glass factory and had a garden. Despite these, I fell into a years-long fever dreams submitting to charismatic prophesying men. When I woke, a Presbyterian preacher told me doubt was good, certainty wasn’t. Putting church friends behind me, I rejected the prophecies of Christian fundamentalism.

Strangely, I thought everyone else did too.

Anita Bryant’s Legacy: Gay Rights Activism

As I was about to cross the threshold toward the elevator with Elsa tethered to my thick gloves, I reached back for the handle to close the door behind me. At that moment, WBBM news radio announced Anita Bryant had died. Out in the park, Elsa tiptoed on the crunchy December earth — a slower walk leading to a longer think. Memories arose about Anita Bryant and her anti-homosexual campaign in the 1970s.

Anita Bryant, a Miss American pop singer who sold Tropicana Orange Juice on TV was so well-known in US culture that her startling attack on homosexuality betrayed her seemingly good-natured Christian persona.

Elders in the fundamentalist Christian cult where I spent a few years in the 1970s never addressed homosexuality. They also ignored any other moralistic culture clash that evolved because of Bryant’s media campaign. I doubt any of us in that community even knew a homosexual. Oh, there were instances of men going off on drug-addled toots and ending up in gay bath houses. They’d come crawling back to church asking forgiveness from an uncomfortable congregation that had no knowledge of gay life. I was never sure what we were meant to forgive since no sin was committed against us.

Bryant, sparked by a Dade County, Florida decision to protect sexual orientation as a civil right, created the Save Our Children coalition to build anti-gay public support. She succeeded. In June 1977, the Miami area voted against homosexuality as a civil right, an act that lasted twenty years.

Fresh from the Florida victory, Anita Bryant brought her teethy bigotry to Chicago to perform a white-bread repertoire including her signature “Paper Roses” at the Medinah Temple. She was met by 5,000 gay rights protesters.

Christian churches throughout the country were called upon to take a stand, including mine. Homosexuality was justified as sin through church elders’ literal interpretation of a few bible passages. It became a disqualifying dictum for church membership. I knew nothing about homosexuality. Shunning people, however, didn’t fit with what brought me to Jesus, namely the parable of the Good Samaritan, or love one another, especially the least among us. I’ve needed that Jesus all my life. Extending unconditional love is a hard practice. In fact, it’s really impossible. I’ve always known it’s required of me nonetheless.

Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign invigorated gay activism in the civil rights movement. We had a new cause. We boycotted orange juice. We attended Chicago’s Gay Pride parade that year. We mocked Tropicana’s tagline by wearing t-shirts that said, “A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine.” Gay rights, women’s rights, equal rights, all blended into one big active advocacy movement.

I moved on to La Salle Street Church, which made no small point of accepting all people. Founded by rejects from the Moody Bible Church down the street, these Christians were definitely descendants of the real Jesus. They left Moody because the church elders required blue-jeaned converts to sit in the balcony and wouldn’t allow them to receive the Eucharist. In the 1970s, no one wore blue jeans except anti-establishment long-haired hippies, known these days as Progressives.

The noise generated by the blue-jeaned Christians galvanized the nascent Christian fundamentalists, known these days as White Christian Nationalists.

I’m not sure what happened to separate the civil rights groups. Gay rights, abortion rights, voting rights and anti-violence organizations eventually established their own fundraising machines side-by-side with their own causes. Everyone started marching to a different drummer. We came together to protest the Iraq war and for the pink-hatted Women’s March after the 2016 election. But not all my friends showed at the NATO protest in 2012.

As a straight white old lady, I’ve recently tried with scant success to advocate against ageism. I no longer wear blue jeans. Dress codes are almost extinct. This is evident by Elon Musk’s t-shirt, MAGA hat, and long, black, steampunk coat at an Oval Office press conference.

Anti-ageism is the most difficult cause to rail against. It’s an implicit or subconscious bias, practiced by those who are discriminated against and by those who do the discriminating. Dismissing Elon Musks’ functionaries as teenagers and constantly stating their ages is a display of age-bias. The same applies when stating Joe Biden’s or Donald Trump’s age. Or mine.

“You don’t act like a 78-year old,” remarked a friend last week.

“Yes I do. This is what 78 acts like.” I shot back.

It’s not that age isn’t a good descriptor to place people in their lived experiences. But age as a descriptor is most often used to put people in their place. The unchecked functionaries have stolen my Social Security records inside the US Treasury Department. They are no better or worse than me because of age. They are wrong no matter how old or young they are.

As happened with Anita Bryant, is it too dreamy to imagine a galvanizing backlash? Is a movement forming to neutralize the extreme bigotry falling out of the dirty mouths of Washington DC?

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Click to see Anita Bryant sing, “Paper Roses” https://youtu.be/0UoRKstI8Q4?si=3ar2deoIWIu6YwVN

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Black Hole Jesus

First Holy Communion is a right-of-passage ceremony in the Roman Catholic Church where a seven-year-old is initiated into eating the body of Jesus Christ. I learned the elements of the Catholic service, the Mass, with my classmates in the second grade. The priest transforms the bread into Jesus’ body and the wine into Jesus’ blood. The wine, the blood of Jesus, is reserved for the priest. We the people eat paper-thin white tasteless wafers, the body of Jesus. Catholic children all learn that after we make First Communion, it’s expected we’ll eat the body of Christ every week for the rest of our lives.

“Let it dissolve in your mouth,” the nuns instructed, “It’s a sin to chew the body of Christ. And don’t touch it!”

The pomp and ceremony of my First Holy Communion overshadowed any eww!-ness related to eating Jesus’ flesh. Prim little girls wore white crinolined lace dresses, white shoes and socks, white cotton gloves and angelic white veils. Like brides. Squirmy spit-polished boys wore ill-fitting white suits and ties. Children sang a Gregorian chant, Tantum Ergo, in Latin. The ceremony shined as if the light of heaven broke through the ceiling and blessed us with all good things forevermore.

In the early grades, if anyone questioned how Jesus’ body and blood changed from bread and wine, there was only one answer.

“It’s a mystery,” they said.

I fell hook line and sinker into this ethereal mystical world of Jesus-eating. He was inside me, outside me, all around me, all the time. Jesus, my imaginary friend, was under the bed with me when my parents’ raging drunkenness woke me in the night. And when long-fingered nightmares reached their talons in through the screens, Jesus saved me.

At Jesus’ Last Supper (and his First Communion) before he was tortured and murdered, he broke bread, sipped wine and said, “The is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” Surely Jesus and his father knew what a theological shit storm this would cause for all time. There is no earthly world where anyone could possibly digest all that’s been interpreted by those simple words.

In the upper grades, Catholic clergy gave fuller answers for Holy Communion, the Eucharist, they called it. Explanations always ended with, “It surpasses understanding.” When I joined a non-Catholic Christian church in my twenties, I learned that Protestant Communion is a public display of piety, not a mystery at all, a non-binding sacramental tradition.

Jesus, like the simple chassis of a computer, hides his infinitely more complex workings from the young in faith. It’s good he came as a baby. People love babies. I would have settled for a dog since I love dogs. This human Jesus soothed me as a child. In the second half of life I’m soothed by and troubled by the man or the myth at the same time. Jesus, a synonym for love, is comforting. His hidden complexities are troubling. Questions arise, starting, but never ending with, “Are you real?”

In Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar, a concrete love story moves in and out of a celestial black hole. A black hole forms when a star collapses in on itself, eventually creating a singular point of irresistible gravity. All matter, light, space and time are sucked into it and all instances of time become the present moment.

These days, at my Presbyterian church, I sit motionless at traditional Communion, the Eucharist. When I hear the minister say Jesus’ words ‘do this in remembrance of me’, if I’m aware, I contemplate the past as present, as if in a black hole. The story of the Last Supper reminds me to honor the original Twelve, and others, who were in the room where it happened. They come through a black hole to my pew, in the hope that I see that the whole of the story is swallowed up and Jesus is the present moment.

The veneer of the Communion tradition, like the computer chassis, hides the paradox of a simple complexity. Non-traditional Jesus, that black hole of pure love, that present moment, issues the most complex inhuman commandment, ‘love your enemies.’

The Big Freak Out

Metaphors have frittered away from me. To be fair, they hadn’t much choice. In conveying messages to contemporaries over the past few years, whether speaking, emailing, texting or DM’ing, I’ve developed a necessary plain spokenness, lest the meaning be misconstrued, misunderstood or confusing. Fallout from this mind-bending prosaic language is living at a level of plain thinking, another aspect of old age (I’m 78) that I wish I’d been warned about.

While watching Joe Biden perform at the now-famous CNN debate in June, I came unstrung in the grip of knowing that Biden’s plain-thinking, plain-speaking style was killing any chance of beating Trump in the November election.

“Oh. my. god. He’s like my neighbor Ray,” I thought. Ray, who used to converse like a college professor and remember your name like you were his student, but now he talks only sports and weather. Ray, who cannot grasp metaphors unless they’re baseball sayings he’s used all his life, like “on the ball” or “step up to the plate” when he motions for you to exit the elevator before him.

On an unsually quiet afternoon, that is to say, no sirens, no gas-powered lawn mowers, no garbage trucks beep, beep, beeping as they backed out of the alley, I was studying David Montero’s new book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations. My book group decided to read two chapters at a time in order to absorb a history none of us had ever known. The premise that the intellect is stimulated through awe and wonder has proven true in this group, with this book. Montero’s research thoroughly tracks how the free labor of Black people in the South became the basis of the entire US economy and her dominance over world markets. His writing is loaded with similes and metaphors.

“The energies of three million enslaved people were organized into an industry, industrial enterprises were increasingly fertilized by slavery, and the output of the system was shipped across the world.”

(All of a sudden, a swift “click-clum” in the room interrupted my reading. I turned and saw a ragged chunk of dried-up old paint on the floor, fallen from the ceiling. Surely there’s a metaphor here. Chip off the old block? Chip on your shoulder? Paint the town red? Naw. Nothing. I got nothing.)

In the chapter, “The Union Must Perish,” Montero included a white abolitionist’s account of his travels to the slave market of Virginia. Published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1850, part of it reads:

“…this was the most heart-sickening sight I ever saw. I involuntarily exclaimed, “Is it possible that this is permited in my own native country—the country I have loved so well, and whose institutions I have exultingly pointed to as an example for the world. If this is Christianity, don’t call me a Christian.”

The emotons expressed are precisely what I feel now that the Trump-appointed United States Supreme Court ruled that the President is unbound from the rule of law and can freely engage in criminal activity. Our Christian Nationalist Supreme Court looks forward to the next president closing the borders to anyone but White Christian Europeans, slashing gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights, and requiring biblical education in public schools. Echoing the 1850 abolitionist, if this is Christianity, don’t call me a Christian.

There ain’t no metaphor for that.

Sensemaking: The Eclipse

From my window, I can see Lake Shore Drive’s curve at Oak Street, an “S” curve fraught with danger. Some days, as many as five separate car crashes occur from unsuspecting or inexperienced drivers speeding toward the curve and sliding off the road. Heavy gauge ribbed steel barriers prevent errant vehicles from jumping the curb, flying off across a small park, and crashing into the Drake Hotel and vintage apartment buildings on East Lake Shore Drive.

On eclipse day, April 8, 2024, an East Lake Shore Drive building was an arrival point for President Joe Biden’s visit to Chicago. To augment the threat of car bombs speeding down Lake Shore Drive and intentionally barreling off into the building, city salt trucks lined up bumper to bumper on a half-mile stretch of the S curve that hugs the small park on one side and Lake Michigan on the other.

At 2:07 pm, the moon blocked the sun by 94% as I waited in the park with my dog Elsa. A few other dogs tethered to humans stood nearby.

“Is the eclipse happening soon?” I called out to one.

“Yes, right now,” a neighbor announced.

“Here!” He rushed over and handed me his solar glasses so I could see the shadow of the moon crossing the sun.

“Oh, there it is,” I whispered, “I thought the sky would be dark.”

At 94% sunshine, the sky doesn’t turn dark. Even a tiny sliver of the sun is so bright it can light up the sky. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the details of the solar cycle or lunar eclipses. I knew light from that 6% sunshine is so intense it can fry your eyeballs, but I didn’t know that 6% sunshine gives off an intense, vibrant light capable of eliminating shadows.

As I handed the solar glasses back to my neighbor, I looked down at Elsa, standing in the projection of overhead tree limbs. April brought out buds, but still no shady foliage. The images of the boughs, branches, and twigs on the ground were as clear as they were on the trees, like a photo. A perfect mirror image of the deep brown arbor architecture above. Nothing in my memory compared to this. I sensed, though, a deep knowing, as if ancient benevolent familiars had brought me the seeing of a thousand ancestors.

“The sun is about a million times brighter than the full moon,” explains Angela Speck, an astronomer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, “So if 99.9% of the sun is obscured,” she says, “there will still be a thousand times more light than the full moon.

I read that in the days before the eclipse, but it held no meaning and slipped my memory. I still had a preconceived notion that the sky would turn black. Experiencing the solar light on the ground, mine and Elsa’s ground, in the valley between the salt trucks and the highrises, revved up my consciousness.

Now it makes sense.

Seeing Jesus

In 1949 the Soviet Union started the Cold War by detonating its first atomic bomb, blockading Berlin, and pushing its way into Poland and Eastern Europe. The voices I heard swirling above my head at cocktail hour in our Washington home implied the Russians were coming for us. Everyone acted like this was the worst thing that could ever happen.

Air raid drills were concocted by the federal government through the National Civil Defense Administration to protect people from incoming A-bombs. Common folk-wisdom said only cockroaches would survive a nuclear attack. Nevertheless teachers were required to conduct impromptu air raid drills. They shouted, Drop!—a signal for us to jump out of our seats, crawl under our desks, fall over our knees and cover our heads. The nuns added the instruction to recite Hail Marys aloud while on the floor.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

At seven, I didn’t understand the difference between a drill and the real event. I went to my death every time I huddled under that desk. I feared the A-Bomb was the worst thing that could ever happen. But, I was not. afraid. to die.

This is it, I’d pray. This is the day I’m going to see Jesus.

I believed Mother Mary would grab me in her arms like she did baby Jesus and take me to heaven. Why did we practice to avoid such ecstasy?

By the time third grade rolled around, I got used to not dying under the desk. Images of children who lived after their exposure to the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared on our small black and white television. I saw that there were worse things than death.

Our Catholic school teachers taught that Communists who ruled Mother Russia prohibited the celebration of the Mass. The clergy declared this was the worst thing that could ever happen. We prayed for Catholic Russia.

At home, my two sisters and I made our own breakfasts and school lunches because my mother’s alcohol intake rendered her unconscious in the mornings. We often gathered around her bed trying to figure out if she was alive. Holy Mary, Mother of God. One of us would place a finger under her nostrils to feel her breath until, with one exhale, she’d confirm that the worst that could’ve happen, hadn’t—and we’d be off to knock on neighbors’ doors scrounging rides to school.

Those early almost-worst-that-could-happen memories have inoculated me against the mau-mauing of present-day alarmists, naysayers and fear-mongers who sermonize about the death of our democracy. Yeah-but’ers and tsk-tsk’ers want us to heed their cynical creed that our country is hopelessly overrun with insurrectionists, sexual predators, corrupt politicians and gun-toting scofflaws.

And what if these are apocalyptic times? So what? So were the 1950’s. I’ve been here before.

Mother Mary may be out of commission these days, but I still dream of seeing Jesus.

Shutdown Week 7: Unknowing

The first change I faced for the Covid 19 shutdown was the suspension of classes and groups for older adults at the Center for Life and Learning (CLL) in my neighborhood church. The cancellation announcement infuriated me. For an entire day, I thought it was the only shutdown announcement, the only group activity suspended.

The media had been continually reporting that people over sixty were more vulnerable to coronovirus than the rest of the population. Shutting us down was our best protection. My wounded ego jumped to the conclusion that we, as a group, would be thought of as weak, defeated and sick, putting a frame around the ageism I struggle to define in myself

a75f6596-2b75-494a-8c9f-14cde7f7646e — Mammoth Mountain Sky by Sharon Schock Sharonschock.com

and in the public square. I stuck myself in a cloud of unknowing.

It was mid-March. I bundled up to walk a long way around to the church for the last event before the shutdown, the CLL yearly Art Show.

How to express my agitation? Old people were being singled out. Excluded.

That’s when I ran into one of the pastors on his way down the street to the Red Line.

“We’re cancelling services.” He said.

“Huh? How long?”

“Unknown. It’s all going to be livestream. We have to figure out Zoom for other gatherings.”

His worried expression hit me like a ton of bricks. He didn’t crack his normal smile, nor did he put a jokey spin on the situation.

“It’s serious.” He said.

“So, It’s not just old people?”

At the Art Show I gathered with friends and reported the news .

No Sunday services.

I eavesdropped on other conversations. Eavesdropping has become one of the social distancing casualties I miss the most.

“They say we might have classes on Zoom.”

“What’s Zoom?”

“Some kind of computer conferenceing.”

“I’m not doing that. I’m sick of technology.”

“Me too. I don’t want to learn anything new.”

“Well, it won’t be for long. Maybe a week. Maybe two.”

We’re in the seventh week now.

I fell victim to the fear of the unknown and refused to learn Zoom for about six days. But I longed for the energy of the collective silence in my meditation group. Others did too and meditation became the first Zoom hosted by CLL.

About fifteen of us spend twenty minutes each Monday and Friday sitting in silence in our Hollywood Squares with our eyes closed. Afterwards we each say a few brief words. We know a smattering of particulars about each other.

What could I possibly miss that I can’t do on my own?

In The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth century monk teaches when we know enough and we don’t need to know more, an opening through the clouds to the sun or the moon brings us to an endless, wordless, deeper knowing. Contemplatives call this love.

This is why I yearn to sit in silence with fellow meditators. We know each other through the clouds of our own wordless unknowing. I call this love.

Shutdown Week 5: Masks Unseen

Until the beginning of April, the Center for Disease Control, health departments, doctors, scientists and pundits advised us to wear a mask only if we had symptoms. Then the message changed. We learned there were people with coronavirus who have no symptoms. A cloth face covering is recommended for everyone now to prevent us from giving it to and getting it from each other.

All of a sudden everyone wore a mask. For about ten days.

On a mid-April Saturday, Henry studied the sudden arrival of daffodils, marking his spot. We’d walked less than a half a block before I breathlessly yanked my homemade mask off. The lightweight cotton had turned into a heat chamber about to asphyxiate me. I wasn’t the only one. Everyone’s mask was askew or nonexistent in the warmer weather. And that was the end of widespread mask use in the neighborhood.

The inconvenience of non-essential work has come upon the privileged. A neighbor can’t get her dishwasher fixed because our building management has deemed it a non-essential repair. I tried to replace a light bulb in the lamp by my reading chair and it broke off, leaving the guts screwed in place and me holding the glass bulb. The maintenance man said “no”. Even though I played the old lady card, it’s not essential that my aging eyes have light to read. “Watch TV,” he said.

We’re not exactly on Cormac McCarthy’s Road, or settling into deprivation. But ordering groceries online has taken a turn. There are no delivery times available for the old stand-bys. I’m told to “check back later.” The store with the only coffee beans I like isn’t accepting online orders “at this time”. “Check back later” has taken up residence on my computer screen.

My computer screen is where I go to church. It’s livestreamed. Only it’s not exactly live because the preacher last Sunday admitted to recording the sermon. When the artificial worship service came into view the livestream accentuated all the elements of church I despise–the dead symbols, rituals, robes. And then the preacher delivered a walloping good sermon about “thriving in belief”.

“For now, caring for our neighbor by sheltering in place is believing in the unseen.” he said.

That’s me. You’re staying home for me. And I you. I believe this unseen selflessness will protect me, and you.

Do I like this virtue being forced on me? Not one bit. I’d rather make my own choice. I know what those protesters are up to. This is America. The government can’t tell us to stay home. It’s the Screwtape Letters in action. The master devil is telling his student to tempt us into saying God is on our side while tricking us into believing only in ourselves. If Granny gets sick and dies, it’s not because we gathered together in church, at a barbecue or a cocktail party. It’s God’s will.

That’s me, too. Belief in the unseen reveals my secret selfishness and depravity. And it allows me to self-correct, sight unseen, to receive the virtue. I don’t know how that works. I simply thrive in the belief.

O Vanished Bethlehem

In the 1950s nuns and priests filled the air with Jesus stories. As soon as we stepped on the threshold of our first grade classroom, we were required to memorize lessons from the Baltimore Catechism, the defunct and now-discredited school text of the Catholic religion.

Baltimore Catechism Lesson 75: Q. On what day was Jesus born? A. Jesus was born on Christmas day in a stable at Bethlehem.

The first town I’d ever heard about other than where I lived and where my relatives lived was Bethlehem. As a child, I dreamed of living in the inn next to that stable where Jesus was born. I longed to be with the donkeys and the sheep and the three kings on their camels. I really wanted to ride those camels. When we sang O Little Town of Bethlehem I pictured a serene knob of a place full of kind and loving people ready to temper my fears and fortify my hopes.

A classmate once showed us a tiny glass vial of soil her grandmother had brought back from Bethlehem. She said it was blessed by the Pope, adding gold-plated authenticity to its importance. This was my first inkling that Jesus’ birthplace still existed and that I might be able to go there myself someday.

Nearby Jerusalem? It was never on my wish list. Memorization of passages about Jesus’ suffering there left me repulsed by any thoughts of visiting Jerusalem.

Baltimore Catechism Lesson 371: Q. When did Our Lord suffer the “bloody sweat”? A. Our Lord suffered the “bloody sweat” while drops of blood came forth from every pore of His body, during His agony in the Garden of Olives, near Jerusalem.

Bethlehem was the object of my affection. The Church of the Nativity in Manger Square sits on top of a grotto, the Holy Crypt, where Jesus lay swaddled. This birthplace is disputed from time to time, but as a child my enthusiasm never waned. I wanted to see Bethlehem.

Two Palestinian refugee camps arose in Bethlehem in 1949 after the Palestine Partition drove Arab families from their homes. Six generations later they’ve not been allowed to return. Armed Israeli forces frequently raid the camps on the pretext of searching for “wanted” Palestinians. Young Palestinians exact revenge and risk their lives with the most ancient of weapons—rocks.

When Israel took Bethlehem from the Arabs after the Six-Day War in 1967, I thought Bethlehem would be destroyed forever. But all the wars, terrorist bombings, intifadas and violent protests didn’t stop grandmothers from visiting the Little Lord Jesus’ birthplace and bringing home souvenir vials of sacred dirt. I had high hopes I’d visit someday.

Israel relinquished Bethlehem to the Palestinians in 1995, promptly erecting a wall cutting Bethlehem off from Jerusalem. Palestinians are restricted from entering Jerusalem. Israelis are barred from entering Bethlehem.

Baltimore Catechism Lesson 259: Q. What other effects followed from the sin of our first parents? A. Our nature was corrupted by the sin of our first parents, which darkened our understanding, weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclination to evil.

A few weeks ago, on January 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem. Abbas informed Putin the U.S. can no longer play a role in the Middle East peace process. Seven days later Donald Trump announced his anti-Palestinian “Deal of the Century” for the Middle East. Bethlehem erupted in a “day of rage”.

Baltimore Catechism Lesson 1155: Q. What are dreams and why is it forbidden to believe in them? A. Dreams are the thoughts we have in sleep, when our will is unable to guide them. It is forbidden to believe in them, because they are often ridiculous, unreasonable, or wicked, and are not governed by either reason or faith.

They say tourists get into and out of Bethlehem safely. But fear invades my deep and dreamless sleep. Thoughts of seeing Bethlehem have matured into my childhood imaginings.

And my dreams have gone the way of the Baltimore Catechism.

Vanished.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: Faith