You Just Can't Get There From Here!

Close your eyes. What do you feel? Distress? Worry? Anxiety? Those are feelings that we commonly feel these days. It takes a saint to be happy in these times, especially if you read and watch the news every day! Swine flu. North Korea threatening the world with nuclear war. Iran developing nuclear weapons so that it can threaten the world. An economic depression that approaches the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In some ways the situation of the world is like the insurance salesman from Des Moines on a drive throughout the country side without a map or GPS. He gets lost. Seeing a farmer on his tractor plowing his field, the insurance salesman pulls over his late model Mercedes and hails the farmer. The farmer turns off his tractor to hear. The city slicker from Des Moines asks the way back to the city. The farmer sits back in his seat, rubs his chin with his hand while chewing a blade of grass. "Well, seems to me, you just can't get there from here."

How much that is like us! We want to get back home but seems like we just can't get there from here! At least the Insurance salesman knew where he wanted to go. For us, we can never go back to better times. We have to go forward to a place we have never been before. That's really scary.

So, where are we and where do we want to go? What are the times asking from us and what are the opportunities that await us?

There are some who believe that 2012 marks the end of history, possibly the end of the world. I do not believe that the world will end or that our daily lives will change that much by 2012. But I do believe that we will experience a gigantic turning point in history. Especially two events will take place of monumental importance.

First, the Islamic nations of the Middle East will embrace democracy. President Obama's Cairo speech marked the beginning of a new era between the USA and Islamic nations. The recent protest demonstrations against the hijacking of a democratic election in Iran indicate an undercurrent of support for democracy in the Middle East. Iraq, on June 30th, celebrated a day of national liberation.

Iraq will experience many ups and downs in their democratic life. Democracy is messy. It is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. My money is on democracy, Islamic democracy, winning in Iraq over radical Islamic terrorism. They are walking a path pioneered by India. India recently held the largest democratic election in history with Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew and Christian participating. If only Gandhi's efforts had succeeded in keeping Pakistan within Indian sovereignty we would have an even greater example of democracy among many religions.

Second, North Korea will collapse under the weight of the United Nations resistance to its nuclear terrorism. Korea will be united by the end of 2012 not by the force of North Korean nuclear weapons but through a collapse of their already bankrupt financial system. A tyrant can afford to starve his people as long as he feeds the military and arms them. North Korea is facing an immediate future without an inflow of supplies or money from other nations. That is the reason for the insane threatening of the world with nuclear war. They are dying, the regime is crumbling on the eve of the installation of Kim Jong-il's son.

So, where will we be on New Year's 2013? Rest assured, we will wake up and see the dawn of another day! The world will not end and our daily lives will continue. But we will have entered a new era, an era of building peaceful relations among the nations. Islamic nations will have crossed the threshold into democratic Islam. Korea will be reunited and posed to help East Asia and Southeast Asia enter a golden age.

Our generation and the next generation will have a tremendous responsibility to take the next step. Religious leaders, saints, and lay persons in every religion will have the great responsibility to live the teachings of their religions, to create a parliament of world religions. The generations following will have the task of creating one world community governed by a new world Constitution and government.

This would truly be impossible if we relied upon our own talents and abilities. The task lay beyond our talents and abilities. But God and the Heavenly Hosts have always helped us in the past and they will in the present and the future. We are moving toward the Kingdom of God on earth, the fulfillment of every religious person's dreams and hopes.

So, maybe we can't get back home from here. That's good. Because the new place where we are going together, the place we will create together, is much, much, much better.

The Ghosts of Woodstock

August 14 to 16, 1969.

I wonder if you have noticed that this year is the year of Anniversaries? 400 years ago, Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River. 200 years ago, Robert Fulton sailed The Steamship along the same Hudson River. And 40 years ago today, the three day Peace Fest began in Bethel, NY, named Woodstock. All those events took place just outside my Window on the Hudson.

When Hudson sailed the Half Moon up the river that now bares his name, Native Americans who had lived in the region for 12,000 years saw the strange creature move up the river like an ancient sea monster. His voyage marked the beginning of a new age in the New World, the age of European colonization in the region.


In 1809, Robert Fulton received the first patent for his steam boat. In 1807, he had sailed the Clarmont up the Hudson River claimed by the newly founded United States of America, wrested from the sovereignty of the British just twenty years before. Fulton's voyage heralded the beginning of a new age for the New Nation, the age of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1969, August 14 to 16, another epic event nearby the shores of the Hudson River, the mega outdoor peace revival in the tradition of the camp revivals more than a hundred years before, took place. Hundreds of thousands of youth gravitated together in the quest for peace in a three day music fest. That event launched the voyage of a million ships, people throughout the world who had been awakened to the hope of peace in our time. That marked the beginning of another revolution in the USA, the Peace Revolution.


I lived during the Woodstock event in another place so today I see the ghosts of Woodstock rather than real memories. The ghosts who hoped for peace, yet sought that through unbridled license. During the time of Hudson, and the time of Fulton, Asia knew the kind of peace that the ghosts of Woodstock sought. They sought peace through the use of opium and courtesans. The peace of the Chinese aristocrats, sexual freedom and opium, had become the peace of American youth.

How in the world did we get peace and freedom confused with drugs and illicit sex? How in the world did we become so very confused? Why did so many of us cast away common decency in the name of freedom and love and peace? What set the conditions for that great delusion?

Peace had been in the air. Our parents' generation had been engaged in a life and death struggle with Fascism in Europe and Asia. They had no illusion about the way peace would come to the world. Peace would come through the barrel of a cannon and values worth living and dying for, not through the hashish water pipe and sexual abandon. After victory had been declared over the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the world geared up for another war, a more subtle and difficult to understand war. The war for peoples' hearts, minds, and souls erupted in the life and death struggle between international communism and democratic capitalism.



Here came the rub, though. The sermon of communist preachers---that we are all brothers and that we should do away with greed, ownership of property, and live like saints, giving to others according to our ability and receiving according to our need---struck a cord with what the Woodstock generation knew to be true. What is, indeed, true. God implanted that desire in every person's heart!

Yet, although we believed in our hearts that message, something seemed wrong about the preacher. Like Elmer Gantry, preaching with a tongue of fire while living a life of selfish seduction, the communist preachers seemed to have another agenda. Rather than set us free from our chains, they desired to chain us. Rather than free the people from opium that befuddled us, they sought to befuddle us with opium. Rather than show us the way of love towards all people, they showed the way of infidelity and broken hearts. They offered a dream of peace, love, and freedom but gave us a nightmare of murder, death, and slavery.

Yet the dream still lives because the message is true, although the messenger was a false prophet. In our hearts we know that peace, love, and freedom are the highest ideals. Our hearts did not betray us, we betrayed our hearts. The ghosts of Woodstock would have us believe that drugs, free sex, and communism will set us free, will bring us peace, and will blossom love in our hearts. How very, very wrong they are. They gave us drug addiction, broken families, and lives of unbridled license.


Banish those ghosts! In their place, let the heavenly hosts enter triumphantly! They herald a peace, love, and freedom that comes through holiness, through living as the children of God. The Heavenly Hosts will usher us into another Revolution on the Hudson. They speak to our knowing hearts of love between all people of all religions, of all races, of all ages, of all nations. Not a love couched in drugs and illicit sex, but a love embracing the sanctity of families as well as the sacredness of the person. There we will find the cornerstone of peace, love, and freedom, not in the ghosts of Woodstock.