Trump solves the basic ambiguity of Evangelical Christianity: With Trump, you get to keep your sin and lose it at the same time. Trump is unique in that he has no guilt, no shame….so, if you have no guilt, have you sinned? In the Catch 22 world of the Evangelical, Trump is a Christ metaphor who is in the world but not of it. He fulfills the Law by being the Law, so he is above the Law. The President as the Law cannot break the Law. Trump cannot sin.

From the outside, we can see this is totally insane. On the inside, it is perfectly sane, where you say: “I believe because it is absurd…I know it is true because the secular world says it’s false.” Catch 22

The GOP set the conditions for Trump by creating a moral Republican Party. Moral thinking is On/Off Thinking. You are either moral or your are not. So they painted Liberalism as immoral, anti-American, anti-God, even. This created a double-bind because Democracy cannot work when the other party is Evil; you cannot compromise with Evil. 

So the GOP created its own Catch 22 where in order to win it had to lose. In order to rise to the top, it had to go to the bottom. In order to make government work, it had to make government not work. Catch 22. 

So Trump came along as the totally insane answer. Tump gives the Catch 22 flesh and blood. He came to fulfill the Catch 22. Trump proves he cannot sin by sinning. Trump validates the insanity of the Catch 22 by creating it without guilt or shame. Trump embraces the insanity.

While I talk about Trump and Catch 22, this is a collective Catch 22, but we all have our personal Catch 22 where we are caught on a hamster wheel of assumptions. The assumption is that if I keep running I’ll get off the wheel. Running is the only option because I have to do something. I can’t just sit there! Catch 22 is being blinded by assumptions that are beyond question. Do you catch that?

My point this morning (if there is a point) is that understanding Catch22 is the means to understanding our historical Catch22, the Insanity of Trump and how insanity becomes sanity. The Catch22 is that in order to break out of the insanity that is sanity, you have to be insane, yet you cannot choose to be insane in order to break out of the sane insanity.

If you are caught in anxiety, negativity of any kind, you can use that as a clue you are caught in a Catch 22. There are some uninvestigated assumptions here. There is no anxiety in truth, in ground zero. The anxiety, the worry comes when we try to restore zero by adding or subtracting stuff from our life. Life is Zero; life is in balance always already.

A Catch22 is a whirlpool that keeps increasing as it tries vainly to get out of the vortex. All the whirlpool knows is force, so it must use its strength, which is force, to get out of force. Catch 22. 

Each 2 is trying to catch or kill the other 2 which would leave only One Two. You see? The very act of trying to Catch 22 creates the two 2s, the division of the original Two. The Catch22 keeps expanding the ripple until it is stretched so thin that it collapses…and that collapse is felt as a death, the death of one’s Catch22 world. Death restores the one when you cannot restore the One by a creative act….that Creative Act is Seeing through and through the Catch 22 you are caught in.