THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN YOUR LIFE

I realize making a claim about the most important man in your life is not easily authenticated. And yet the only man who can dare to wear the claim is the Galilean preacher of 2000 years ago. More books and music and lives and deaths have been attributed to him than any other person in Western history.

But that's not the end of our story.

In this same month that his birthday is being celebrated in churches, another preacher of sorts is being celebrated in film. The British Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep. Everyone understands Jesus preached a message of inclusion. Thatcher, as British prime minister, rejected much of the inclusionary spirit of the emerging European Union. She argued that "world orders" are artificial creations that cannot take the place of soil, blood and race. Today's fragmenting EU appears to prove some of her warnings.

Interestingly, her fears are in some ways the same fears of millions of Fundamental Christians who pore over the Bible, Nostradamus, and apocalyptic novels like the "Left Behind" series imagining the arrival of a global-uniting Anti-Christ followed by the Second Coming of Jesus.

It would seem that humanity still has a problem trusting humanity. Especially any parts thereof which are not of the same soil, blood and race. And so we persist in living in ruthless fear of anyone or anything that is not made in our own image and likeness. Be they local, regional or global.

It's a good guess -- more than a guess, a strong likelihood -- that no member of humanity can authentically experience the imperative of consensus except those few who we have honored as Astronauts and Cosmonauts. They -- unlike Thatcher, more like Jesus -- have seen humanity as it really is. A bickering but beseeching troupe of wanderers on a very small blue planet...

...who may someday say with awe what Steve Jobs did as he looked up from his deathbed: "Wow, oh wow, wow!"