The U. S. Government (Republican and Democrat) preaches democracy, claims to believe in elections, but pouts like a spoiled child when the voters refuse to obey its suggestions as to whom they should elect.

The latest pout is the Bush administration's ban on U.S. citizens and corporations doing business with the Palestinian Authority because the Palestinians, in their exercise of the right to vote, rejected the utterly corrupt Fatah and put Hamas into power. Hamas has a rather peculiar (and unacceptable) view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict: if you are bombed and strafed, your homes bulldozed, your people deprived of water, land and the right to travel and treated like sub-humans, you are justified in taking up arms against your oppressors. What an outrageous notion!

I suspect the Palestinians have been reading our Declaration of Independence and taking it seriously -- not a smart idea, as too many nations have unhappily discovered. Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, East Timor, Guatemala, Vietnam--the list is endless--have discovered that self-determination is a luxury that can be enjoyed only by nations with overwhelming wealth and power.

Or nations with nuclear weapons.

In any case, the cutoff of U.S. aid and commerce will undoubtedly result in an even worse humanitarian catastrophe than the one which has been going on since 1967 in the occupied territories. As with the sanctions on Iraq during the '90s, one wonders what political objective is so important that to further it innocent adults and children should needlessly die from hunger and disease? More to the point, what vital interest does the United States have in Israel's oppression of the Palestinians and its illegal appropriation of their water and land?

But on this Holy Saturday let us put others' sufferings out of our mind (even though they result directly and deliberately from our own government's policies in support of Israel's desire for lebensraum) and think only of Christ's sufferings and death. Let us anesthetize our consciences with ancient rituals that grant us permission to ignore everything that does not relate to our own personal salvation. Let us lay out our Easter clothes in preparation for our celebration of the resurrection (and our affluence). Let us drive to church tomorrow in our SUV, a family idol the worship of which has led directly to the disaster in the middle east and is inexorably leading us to our own social and economic disaster here at home.

It is not too much to say that our nation, and perhaps our entire world, is spiritually dead. There are a few flickers of the spirit but they are faint. The death of our civilization will inevitably follow our spiritual death. The wave of fundamentalism enveloping the globe--Islamic, Christian, Jewish, even Hindu and Buddhist--are like the last gasp of a star that has burnt up nearly all its fuel and become a red giant on the verge of collapse.

I once heard Episcopal priest and prophet Michael Dwinell say that before there can be a resurrection there must be a betrayal. Our nation is being betrayed by its leaders. Worse, we are betraying ourselves by our indifference, our greed, and our willful refusal to acknowledge our role in bringing about suffering in the world. Dwinell could have added that for there to be a resurrection there must also be a death. Since we are on a downward and possibly fatal spiral, it is not out of place to speculate on the meaning of death in the context of contemporary civilization. In one of the finest poems ever written Dante represented the road to Heaven literally spiraling down into the depths of Hell, wherein we must face Satan, the archetype of betrayal-- the ultimate sin--appropriately set in a vast lake of ice. It is only by grasping the fiend himself and climbing up his hideous body that we are able to ascend.

Even though from a theological standpoint the souls suffering in Hell may fly straight to Paradise by simply desiring to go there, Dante's vision implies that for living humans there are no shortcuts. One cannot climb up from, for instance, the burning lake of the grafters in the Eighth Circle toward Purgatory, because Purgatory sits on the other side of the ice lake. There is no shortcut because there is no perfect contrition. The path from the Dark Wood of Error to Paradise inevitably leads through the deepest places in Hell. As Jung might say, to find light, one must accept darkness. Like Prospero, one must acknowledge the creature of darkness as one's own.

It is no accident that one of the medications most in demand today is the antidepressant, a sign that the universal psyche senses the approach of darkness but shrinks back from it with all its might. But as long as we individually and collectively refuse to acknowledge and even embrace the darkness within us and within our nation and society, we will remain unconscious on a course to catastrophe.