A magnificent morning.  The social distancing, self quarantine precaution against coronavirus does not mean that sunlight, green grass, the budding trees cannot be appreciated.  Indeed, for me this is the foundation of religion.  I am alive.  We are alive.  We, the human community live, in relation to the cosmos, sky, land, the red tulip, and the muskrat swimming in the creek.  You and I could add to this list without limit.  Why should I be here, now, observing this beauty?  This is a matter that reason recognizes, but fails to comprehensively “understand” with such finality that satisfies us that we are in control.  Reason is a useful tool, but not the tool that we need when it comes to what we recognize as mystifying phenomena.

I read an essay yesterday entitled, Why Religion is Not Going Away and Science Will Not Destroy It. The author reflected upon the notion that the advance of science would make religion obsolete, religion felt to be unessential.  I am acutely aware that my own religious sensibility has grown more robust with the passage of time.  I have also observed how on the one hand religion has morphed into a crass tool for harnessing the insecurities of masses of the formerly middle class,- now precariously employed to align with a nationalist and racist political movement.  On the other hand the more liberal wing of the old line Christian denominations have been relegated to irrelevance.  In a past time, they offered a humanizing point of view of what we might become as a nation.

Science has not displaced religion.  A society that has the prime directive of profit, *Profit Über Alles according to the bare knuckle principle of capitalist competition, — makes the logic of religion absurd, obscure to unintelligible.  A society that by and large does not weigh human well-being, along side profit, is a severe, cold-hearted place to live.  I would not want to work in a MEAT PROCESSING PLANT for example.   This attitude, this modus operandi, is what has desiccated the traditional religious sensibility in our society.  Our bid for empire ends in a logical and moral cul d sac that makes the mythic stories appear anachronistic, a round peg in the square hole of the life we now must live.  A diminishing number of our fellow Americans have any familiarity with the creation story, the tales of Abraham and his sons, of David, of Sampson and of Jesus and what happened to him.

We bought a Bonsai tree yesterday.  My daughter and I selected a Japanese maple from BC Bonsai in Wheaton.  The tree is already 20 years old.  It has been watered daily, fed, pruned, repotted to become the gem that we recognized it to be.  The discovery of the tree was a religious variety of experience.  We recognized, were sensitive to something that spoke to us from this particular tree.  This tree seemed the right tree to embellish, to be at home with the other plants in our backyard garden.

Religare is a Latin word which means to bind together.  It refers to a manner of observation, a perspective that binds everything together.  It means that together, with you, I am more than would otherwise be possible, becoming all that I can be as an individual.  By mutual, reciprocal diligence a future that we’d agree is “good” …. becomes possible.

The photos are of the tree which we purchased.

What do you think?   Your thoughts are welcome.

*Deutschland, Deutschland über alles“ Germany, Germany above everything, was made the national anthem by the Nazis during the Third Reich