SPIRITUAL DEMOCRACY?

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November...

“I am sorry to have to record that General Washington was not a Christian,” said our Founding Father’s neighboring minister. “He was a Deist.”

Meaning that, like all other Freemasons, George Washington held that the Universe too had a Founding Father, a Divine Architect who, once He had set the whole thing going under perfect moral and natural laws, had chosen to simply let it run its course without undue interference…and with no specific mention of the redemptive role of Jesus Christ.

Yet we know that Washington made a habit of prayer, and sought the guidance of “Providence” - a nicely inclusive name for the Creator which Abraham Lincoln also habitually used in his public references to God, as did Thomas Jefferson in composing the Declaration of Independence with its closing invocation - “…and for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

(The Prayer at Valley Forge, by Arnold Friberg)

(Sacred Honor: note that Jefferson gives the word an initial capital for emphasis. It seems an almost forgotten concept: that one’s word, one’s personal conduct, one’s reputation as a good man, were to be counted with one’s very life and worldly goods as the most precious and holy of possessions. Thus, it was once common to declare a thing was true, with the declaration, “upon my honor!”)

But I digress.

So the United States of America, by historical consensus, was never founded as a “Christian nation.” Protestants, Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews were among the founding patriots, and we may thank Jefferson for codifying the separation of church and state into the Constitution. It would have been all too easy for the breakaway English colonies to adopt the Anglican Church of England by its new Episcopalian brand as the established religion of the new nation. But Jefferson, child of the Enlightenment that he was, warned against the tyranny of priests and the oppression of unscientific dogma, pointing to England’s own bloody history of religious conflict in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and Henry VIII’s break with Rome.

The U.S., however, clearly came into being as what one might call “a nation of faith.” The colonies, particularly in New England, had become a refuge for those seeking religious freedom, and over the course of its history, America would experience periodic waves of religious fervor, from the Puritans to the Mormons to the Pentecostals to the Southern Baptists, down to the contemporary Jesus Revolution and the New Age movement.

Before a hundred years had passed after the Declaration, the national holiday of Christmas would be joined by the non-sectarian yet sacred observance of Thanksgiving, first instituted in the midst of the bloody Civil War in 1863 by President Lincoln with these words -

It has seemed to me fit and proper that (these blessings) should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

And then there were the American Transcendentalists of the 19th century - names such as Emerson and Thoreau, for whom the recent discovery by Western scholars of Sanskrit and the science of yoga expounded in Hindu scriptures such as The Bhagavad Gita led to the first stirrings of what would eventually become a transformational spiritual movement throughout the Western world in the 20th century, given a major boost when The Beatles went to Rishikesh in 1967 to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

And I am a child of all that, somehow. Raised Catholic in an old-line leafy Chicago suburb by New Age parents, there were books on reincarnation and yoga in our home - but we were all baptized, confirmed, and catechized. We also were schooled in clairvoyance, remote viewing, and self-healing via the The Silva Method (then called Silva Mind Control), so it was hardly the conventional religious upbringing. Always an avid student of history (rocked as an infant in a cradle which had once belonged to Ulysses S. Grant), by my mid-20s I had also committed to a practice of daily Kriya Yoga meditation in the lineage of the great master, Paramahansa Yogananda, ultimately choosing a path of “sacred activism” as the best expression of this dharmic stew.

So today, scant days, hours even, from the pivotal election of 2024, as both sides invoke the Deity (yes, Democrats too, as VP Harris recently mentioned morning prayer as part of her daily routine), and both sides prophesy dire, even apocalyptic consequences should the opposition prevail, I find myself, as usual, empathizing with both sides but not necessarily sympathizing with them. I can feel as they feel, perhaps, but not believe as they believe.

I do suspect, however, that both sides would readily embrace the implications upon hearing the term Spiritual Democracy - while meaning completely different things by those words.

When the Right speaks of “Spiritual” (I generalize, of course, but reasonably so, I trust) they can be said for the most part to mean the values of mainstream Protestant Christianity, or, in the case of Catholic supporters of Mr. Trump, the teachings of the Church regarding the sanctity of life, in opposition to abortion.

In practice, however, these values as expressed in the former president’s divisive rhetoric and policies, have little to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ - or for that matter the teachings of most of the world’s other great religious traditions - when it comes to essential Christian messages such as tolerance, charity, forgiveness, welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, and giving one’s wealth to the poor.

When the Left speaks the word “Spiritual” they generally do so in what they believe to be a suitably vague, all-inclusive, non-sectarian invocation of the Golden Rule, laced with what they regard as a healthy distrust of the word “Christian.” Perhaps invoking Dr. Martin Luther King, Vice President Harris has adopted the neutral and unassailably virtuous word “Freedom” as her mantra, with the intention, we assume, to champion the reproductive freedom of women in the wake of the demise of Roe v. Wade, and to imply that the election is a choice between Freedom and Fascism.

In practice, however, the policies enacted by the Democratic Establishment (as the puppet of its hidden overlords in the financial elite) are in stark contract to “do unto others” and in fact include support of genocide, blatant censorship of any science that goes against the interests of Big Pharma, suppression of evidence of massive vaccine injuries, and gutless acquiescence in the agenda of the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned us against so futilely some sixty years ago. It’s worth quoting Bob Dylan here, in his stark masterpiece, “Masters of War:”

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

So now we come to it. The Fifth of November.

“Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I can think of no reason the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.”

(The Discovery of The Gunpowder Plot & The Taking of Guy Fawkes, Henry Perronet Briggs, 1823)

This November 5th may well be the most memorable since the year 1605, when those poor manipulated saps attempted to blow up Parliament and were so conveniently exposed just in time - leading to centuries of religious oppression. I fear the events of next Tuesday may be used in the same way by one side or the other. But my hope is greater than my fear.

In four days, we vote. We are a democracy - so we still believe. Republicans, of course, have strategically depended upon the suppression of voting rights for more than a century. This is irrefutable historical fact. When voter turnout rises, Republicans lose. They like to claim that they scorn “democracy” and champion The Republic. But one only has to dig an inch or two into the origins of this claim to see that it originates in the 19th century rule of moneyed property-owners - white males back in the day. Their mantra hasn’t really changed much - cut taxes for the rich, defund the social safety net, and wave the Bible a lot. In order to win, the GOP is required to use divisive social issues to win sufficient working class support - provided not too many of them actually vote.

Multiple factors now indicate a huge turnout and a Harris victory. If by chance Trump wins, we will face chaotic fascism. If Harris wins, we may well face a subtler but more effective systemic suppression of our freedoms (already well underway), and the danger of world war. This is not Harris’ intent, I believe. She may well accomplish much good in the limited way allowed by the puppeteers - but within the scope of their overall agenda of control and domination.

So where is God in all this? Watching from a distance, as the Freemasons proposed?

No. I am convinced She watches from within every human heart at every moment, seeing every thought and every action, because She is us in a very convincing disguise, animating every cell in our bodies on the long, long journey towards our discovery of Her game. History is made up of billions of choices by millions of souls over thousands of years. Each choice on every sunrise since the dawn of time may be said to involve a choice between Service to the Greater Good and Service to self. So long as we believe our self is separate from Her Self, so long as we believe our neighbor is someone other than the Deity in disguise just as we are, so long will we continue to seek selfish domination and the pointless acquisition of more toys than our neighbor before death takes us.

(President John F. Kennedy)

That said, I still have the political genes of a Kennedy-era, Chicago Irish Democrat. Like RFK Jr., I look back to the old Democratic Party from the days when his uncle, President John Kennedy, stood up to the overlords and planned to disempower the Federal Reserve cabal, reform the CIA, and de-escalate the Viet Nam War (the primary reasons for his death). I glimpse the lingering embers of a Service to The Greater Good ethos in the movement that has sprung up around Kamala Harris. She will soon show us whether this is merely a pose, will soon show us how obedient a puppet she is to the elite agenda of Big Pharma and the war machine. She has already stated that the First Amendment does not apply to protection of “misinformation” about the virus and vaccines - by which she means the sharing of any scientific evidence that goes against the interests of the major pharmaceutical companies, which have reaped billions from the rushed vaccines. We shall see. She deserves a chance - and God knows we need to turn the page on the toxic clown.

In the meantime, spirituality remains simple. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy mind, and all thy soul, and all thy strength…and thy neighbor as thyself. Give to the poor, forgive trespasses, and remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

Chances are that with these beliefs you’d be labeled a liberal snowflake Democrat. That’s fine with me.

blessings,

Michael