I bring the Ken Burns Vietnam to a close this morning ending with the Wound that both heals and doesn’t heal. This open scare in the earth still bleeds in American history, in our Cultural Body as our cultural divide. When the One is divided, that is a wound. That becomes a cultural Pain Body. And in our efforts to heals the wound we just keep opening it, trying to heal the wound by stabbing the other side of the wound.

At some point in all efforts, a saturation point of pain is reached. “I can’t take it any more.” A Mass Shooter is such a saturation point where there seems to be no choice but death. Death becomes the only Single Idea that heals the wound that won’t heal.

In the modern world History is the Holy Book where the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is acted out in real time. But we are unconscious of this and don’t know what we are doing. We think, according to Culture, that Jesus was in the past and the crucifixion happened on Golgatha. No….this moment in our history is always already Golgatha. But Culture frames reality in time, so Jesus is either in the past of in the future when he is coming again….but not now…not now…and above all we are not Jesus Christ. The Culture Church made Jesus a god so he is safely removed from our own heart, our own awakening heart. And one can’t find the resurrection from the crucifixion in time. The Resurrection is not tomorrow…but now…in the open wound of Jesus in the side of the American Body that is hanging from the Cross of its own history.

Ken Burns did a masterful job of opening the wound and then closing it, healing it. The message of Jesus is healing through suffering, the ability to willingly suffer, to choose death, to “make the horror your friend.” (Apocalypse Now). To fully enter into this moment through the heart and mind as One. When we separate the mind (as culture time) from the Heart (which is always already now)….we suffer on the cross of our own making.

What was Vietnam but a Culture gone mad, a negative force field that had its own insane purpose of maintaining itself no matter what the cost. American Culture cannot lose, the force field says, no matter what the sacrifice, IT will win…..but it didn’t. Even as an unconscious physic organism, there is a pain saturation point when the heart of the people will not take it anymore. That is always the Turning Point where the shift happens and the cultural paradigm collapses.

But when culture collapses, culture is also the First Responder and comes rushing back to put culture back together again, making its shell stronger. But always, always there is the open wound that can only be healed through individual hearts that willingly go into the heart of darkness, into the wound itself and feel its pain without blame. Life is Suffering, says the Buddha. We have to willingly go into the cross, into that cuffing in ourselves in order to heal the wound that will not heal.

Have you noticed that America loves its wounds from war. Virginia my state is marked with the footprints of battles where men died. in India you can follow the foots prints where its god have stopped, the footprints of Shiva, but here in our land we make the foot prints of war our sacred grounds. Some has to die in order for us to create the sacred. Even the spot where someone dies in a traffic accident becomes the sacred; you see crosses with flowers along the side of country roads where death happened. It seems we both hate and love death.

And look how many we have sacrificed to our God Freedom. Today if you look at our cultural wars it is all about sacrificing to this God Freedom. Both sides of the divide, both sides of the wound sacrifice to Her.