Born again as I am using it is seeing everything for the first time, fresh and new, like when cataracts are removed. The cloudy vision is gone and everything is original, first born. But in the context of the President and having to die into that office, leaving your personal shoes at the door to be picked up when you leave, that too is seeing everything fresh from the view of the White House where you are the Son of America, the One who has no second.
But here again, unlike the religious view, being born again does not mean a permanent state, but a way of being in the world that is constantly dying to the old and accepting the new moment just as it is. Being born again is a verb, not a noun. Being born again means giving up one’s permanent sense of being a thing, a noun that is defined, giving up defining yourself. It’s like music. You don’t hold to one note.
So is America itself going through the process of Being Born again? We have to. Life that is not born again dies into permanent death and decay. The only way out of our trials is to reinvent ourselves. But we don’t know what that new America will be. We can’t go home again to past Americas. Life dismembers itself so that it can be born again, so that it can renew itself. But first the old must be broken up, at it seems we are doing that just fine. Trump comes with a sledge hammer, but as the destroyer. He will not be the role of the creator. Trump plays the role of the tyrant-monster, the hero who refused to make the sacrifice of his personal self aggrandizement which he seeks through the office of the President. Instead of being the Uniter, which is the function of the Office, he becomes the disuniter, which is the function of the Destroyer or Death.
It’s all in mythology playing our right before our eyes. We have a front row seat.
When a people cry out for the Hero with the shining sword, he will appear. He might look like Sanders, or some other unknown who has yet to rise out of the murky depths of the future. Many thought Trump was the Hero; many thought Obama was that Hero. But what the hero restores is never permanent. The Promised Land is never static; it is never that land of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Life is an ongoing waterfall of creation. Tomorrow is always behind the veil of the water.
But we all sense a tremendous break up of the ice and the log jam coming. The religious say its the end of times. Well it is. The end of a stint in time that has been frozen. America has been frozen against the changing river of time. We are time, but we resist and hold back, trying to dam up the river. But the dam is being breached. The beavers are panicking. Both Trump and Clinton were old times. Both rigged the river to flow their way. The times they are a changing.
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