Some things, good and bad, never seem to die.  Although Adolf Hitler has been dead for many years, his legacy, in too many ways, lives on.  I refer to the existence of various Nazi parties in different parts of the West, groups of people who call themselves National Socialists and who insist that their respective nations are to be filled only with pure white Aryan people.  Anyone else is not welcome.
     Aside from the patent intolerance such attitudes convey, their existence carries a deeper message.  Though we in the West may pride ourselves at creating a world better than the one into which we came (and several studies done in recent years conclude that, on balance, the West is becoming progressively less violent), we cannot escape aberrance altogether.  We will struggle with it until the day we die.  We will struggle with it within ourselves, and we will struggle with it as a human community.  For all our wondrous glory, we remain deeply flawed beings.
     What to do?  We surely do not want a world like Aldous Huxley's 1984, a world of perfect test tube people, nor do we want a world like B. F. Skinner's Walden II, a world of people trained to respond to commands without thinking.  We want a world in which all of us can be ourselves while we look out for each other.
     We will never, however, find it in full.  But we keep trying.  And we should.  Nazi or not, we should keep trying.  Yet we should remember where we really are.  We live in a material world, yet a material world into which the immaterial, the spiritual, has irrupted and broken through, a material world whose fullest meaning we therefore only experience when we look to its deepest ground and agree with Jesus' words, as recorded in the third chapter of the gospel of John, that, "Unless you are born again, you shall not see the kingdom of God."
     This world will be as good as the extent to which we believe in the power of its richest meaning.