The Harried Mystic

Once again, the wages of wanton corruption and spiritual blindness parade boldly among the chronically deluded and unthinking.

Amazingly, the story of the worship of the Golden Calf was re-enacted live at the CPAC convention in Florida this weekend by Trump’s loyal band of miscreant followers and acolytes.

They actually had the audacity to fashion and roll out a golden statue of their cartoonish demigod. That said, it was hardly an impressive statue projecting any real stature. It can be more accurately described as a pitiful golden golem, a contorted Homunculus and,from that standpoint, a more fitting unconscious expression of the mean-spirited, ugly persona of its subject.

The so-called “Conservative Republicans” are clearly now completely enslaved in an “all or none” covenant with their much celebrated demon. Just when you think they have reached the nadir of personal debasement, they surprise us with yet another act of disgusting obsequiousness. This is part of the sad reverberating drumbeat of a rising tide of American Fascism.

The often unmentioned accompanying allegory in the Biblical story of the Golden Calf, fashioned by Aaron during Moses’ forty day pilgrimage to Mount Sinai, was what Moses did with it upon his return. Furious with what he perceived as the ultimate transgressive blasphemy, he had the idol burned and the gold ground into a fine powder. He then added that powder to water and forced the Israelites to drink it, killing them.

Not yet finished with his retribution, Moses then issued the Lord’s command for the Levite’s to slay the remaining idolaters by the sword, killing “10000 men” ( Exodus 32). So repugnant was the idolatry, that all (except the Levite’s that refrained from worshipping the bull) were put to death. Such was the intolerable immaturity and superficiality of the faith of those who tired of waiting on God’s time for word from Moses and instead cynically turned to a transitional object to adore.

The sin of the Israelites was in grabbing hold to any handy symbol that gave them a quick sense of power, identity and agency when so much was uncertain. Their impulse was to act in an adolescent and regressive grasping for anything to worship that was in their own control. Lacking in the vision that inspired Moses, they simply couldn’t wait on God and trust in goodness. They needed to exert their will having lost all patience waiting for an authentic encounter with the sacred.

One cannot help but wonder what awaits the ideologues on the far right who show such a thirst for the “cool-aid” of Trumpism to soothe their fears of any form of social change since the 1950s. I do suspect and hope that many will one day wake up from their Trump-induced somnambulism, feel ashamed at their folly and embrace a truer sense of America as an exemplary melting pot. Many will undoubtedly and regrettably play through their stupefaction with enough hyperbolic rationalizing to last a lifetime.

Meanwhile, we all need to keep watch. This may be the true and terrifying manifestation of the “ zombie apocalypse” that authors of both fiction and nonfiction have envisioned.

© The Harried Mystic, 2021 and Br. Anton, TSSF. Unauthorized use or distribution of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.