A God-Sized Hunger

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I’ve been thinking about the spiritual train wreck of the 20^th Century, and the opportunity that presents for us in this time. I’ll riff off the following texts:

Hebrews 11: 1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

From Jackson Browne, Looking East

Hunger in the midnight, hunger at the stroke of noon

Hunger in the mansion, hunger in the rented room

Hunger on the TV, hunger on the printed page

There’s a God-sized hunger underneath the laughing and the rage

There’s a God-sized hunger underneath the questions of the age

From Emily Dickinson, This World is Not Conclusion

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul

I’ll start with a story.

I remember clearly the cover of the of the April 8, 1966 issue of Time Magazine. Stark red letters on a pitch-black background asked what, to me, was a startling question: Is God Dead?

I was 13, just an anxious eighth grader, and I was genuinely shaken. I grew up in a rural Mennonite Church in Central Illinois. I did not realize until that moment how big a role the assumption of God as creator, presence and central actor played in my life, my world. Suddenly, the possibility loomed that existence was simply mechanistic, that things like love and caring were just coldly adaptive behaviors and that the end was, well, just the end.

But the reality of this death had been there for nearly a century, if not longer. In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche, in a moment of prescience wrote:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

For most of its brief history on this continent, leaders of the White Protestant Church, our historically dominant religion, had been duking it out over whether we were saved from damnation by grace or works. That fight continued powerfully in the 20^th Century between independent fundamentalists and more progressive mainline protestants. Meanwhile, another god had snuck up behind them both and, to this day, it has left them in the dust. You and I can change that.

By 1966, when the Time article came out, positive scientistic materialism had indeed killed God, killed him (he was him then) dead. We had learned to see the foundations of matter and manipulate it. But real science, the observation of all we can see in awe and wonder, began to morph into scientism, a dogmatic belief, a religion, that nothing beyond the material was real. We were becoming the gods that Nietzsche declared we must. We could solve the world’s problems on our own.

At first it looked pretty good. In the 1950’s my grandma innocently bought in. She started serving Cool Whip, oleo margarine and Sanka instant decaf coffee. That, a couple of new appliances and a polio vaccine pretty much cemented that the marvels of science were going to accomplish everything needed for our satisfaction and comfort. Better living through chemistry.

But a specter loomed – something like the opening of Pandora’s box, or the terrible fury that screamed forth at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. World War I did not end all wars and make the world safe for democracy. Right here on the sands of New Mexico, Robert Oppenheimer captured the horror of our becoming Nietzsche’s nihilistic gods as he watched the first atomic explosion. Quoting the words of Vishnu from the Bhagavad Gita, he uttered: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” And the company that soon after became IBM got its start by helping Hitler manage the tedious but necessary task of counting the Jews and other defective beings that must logically be eliminated to engineer the perfect human society.

Disillusionment began to set in. We had killed God and God’s replacement wasn’t looking so good.

Enter postmodern deconstruction. By 1960, the emptiness of the bloated illusion of material wonder began to show itself. Black folk began to speak up about the price exacted for white comfort. Flower children unmasked the god of war and challenged long-held sexual mores. Women gave the lie to millennia of misogyny. I thank and praise these prophets of change. OK the hippies kind of fizzled out, except here in Taos, and maybe Eugene, Oregon and Woodstock, New York. But women and people of color have persisted wonderfully. It’s been a long and weary haul, this necessary tearing down, with heavy prices paid.

White Mainline Protestant Christianity was one of the casualties. Recall the centuries long losses of Christian dogma to the advance of material science. The earth turned out to be neither flat nor located at the center of the universe. By extension, human existence on this tiniest speck in one of possibly many universes could hardly hold any real meaning. By the emergence of Darwinism, just the label of science, if no longer the real substance, was enough to scare the bejesus out of a church convinced that it would die if not on the progressive bandwagon. Theology, preaching, and practice began to be confined to limits that excluded mystery and magic. Down came the virgin birth as well as any literal acceptance of miracle. And resurrection could only be alluded to as metaphor.

It’s true, when the scientistic god abandoned them, mainliners kind of jumped ship to social justice. But how is your social justice anything uniquely special if your god is dead? Who needs a church for that?

Numbers, my friends, have been declining and average age increasing steadily in this miasma.

As one empty god withered, another was ready to take its place.

By 1980, newly popular Evangelical alarm bells began clanging wildly in response to desegregation, the peace movement, the sexual revolution, and ascendant feminism. Politically this was expressed in renewed anti-communist fervor, this time paid for by the blood of the impoverished of Latin America. It also came in a return to bootstrap economics with its trickle-down theory of social progress. Make the rich richer and there will be more scraps under the table.

But this new god has indeed shown itself to be little more than a thin wallpaper of morality issues pasted over a gospel of prosperity. Follow my rules, fill my offering plate and you will prosper. And, if you had any doubts, it is the American way: Life, for the rich; liberty, for the rich to extract all they can from anyone they can; and the pursuit of happiness, for the rich alone, regardless of the expense to others or the looming collapse of the ecosystem.

Its stock has been booming, to the point that it is now clear that we have two very separate economies. One economy paves the way for the rich to get mind-bogglingly richer, and the other, aptly named the service economy, offers just enough for the inconvenient servants of the rich to avoid starvation.

Recent events are beginning to expose the doorposts of our temple to this modern become postmodern god. What we find there in large golden letters is Narcissistic Nihilism. In its most subtle, though not least destructive form, it fills the hole in our hearts with the distraction of smartphones that spew only the messages we think we want to hear, while Google algorithms are there to meet our every need before we can even name it ourselves.

We have witnessed in recent days what I pray to be hints of a turning, the beginning of a death rattle of this nihilism’s most blatant form. But reactionary movements seem prone to violent ends.

Whether in dying modernism or rising postmodernism, the 20th Century ended with one certain truth, a single offering for the hole in our hearts. That offering is the question mark. God was clearly ruled out along with a cynical position that any answers were only provisional, relative to the situation and at best temporarily useful. And if that bothers you, hey, text, tweet, Instagram, repeat. It’ll numb you through, at least until the next new iPhone comes out.

Jackson Browne captures so powerfully the yawning emptiness and despair that underlies all of this.

So why has the church – mainline and evangelical – failed? How did they let this monster creep up and so thoroughly overtake them? I’ll tell you. In their distracted battle about faith and works, they were duking it out over the entirely wrong question. The question at the bottom of their fight was, how do we receive salvation. Is it by grace through the blood of Jesus or by the good works of copying what he did?

Jesus never posed that question or presented either of those choices as the answer. Jesus time and again just pointed us to the God we had forgotten. And when we forget, there is a hole in our heart that cries to be filled. We can stuff it with all the wrong things, or we can let it be healed with faith – faith that we were spoken into being and are part of, one with, the infinite and eternal source, beauty, and power of everything.

You and I have a tremendous opportunity in this time. The old gods – the gods of bloody sacrifice, the gods of just say my name in time to avoid getting sent to hell, the gods of work a little harder, do a little better, we’ll decide in the end if it’s enough, and the massive horrendous deadly god of scientistic materialism – they are all dead or at least dying.

We have, we hold and when we are faithful and willing, we offer the one thing that truly satisfies the hunger of the ages.

There is a Spirit, a Creator with intention.
While It can never be adequately named or fully known through our limited consciousness, we have learned that Its essence is love.
Our embodied selves are a material expression of that Spirit.
We have been gifted a certain consciousness and free will to act.
When we rest in, trust and act in connection with that Spirit, we are one with the creation of amazing things and beautiful relationships. And there is enough, enough for us, enough for our neighbor, enough for our world.
When we are not connected, we are bound tight within the confines of our isolated and very hungry ego. We delude ourselves with arrogance in relation to creation and to others.
When the bluff of that arrogance is unmasked, we find death staring us in the face. And we believe, we actually have a sick and twisted kind of faith, that our lives mean nothing, progressing only to a vacuous nihilistic and purely material demise.
It is no wonder that our response is anger, addiction, violence, greed, hoarding and abuse of relationships, individually, globally, environmentally.

I invite us, as individuals and together to abandon the question mark, especially the one at the end of the wrong question. It’s a hard lie that seems so real but remains a despairing charade, a sharp-edged misfit for the soft borders of that hole in our hearts. Connected love is the perfect fit, the eternal word and light of creation, acknowledged and affirmed by all the great traditions. We cannot see it. We cannot grasp it. And yet, its light leaps within us and enlivens us with the knowledge of eternal relationship and the power of all creation. We know it by faith.

Never has it been more important to be more true, clear, and invitational in the sharing of that confidence.

For faith is indeed the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The act and embrace of faith answer the God-sized hunger underlying the questions of the age. And the narcotic of nihilistic material narcissism can never still the tooth that nibbles at our soul.

Stand Down, White America

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

In his book Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power, my friend, mentor and NYU professor Lawrence Mead presents a convincing argument that distinctive Western culture, in a progression through its Northern European, British and now American iterations, is the true basis for the wealth, power and dominance of the United States in the world. More specifically he asserts that individualism, which he traces to roots in Protestant Christianity, versus collectivism is the chief driver of this wealth and dominance. Secondarily, he suggests that internalized moralism, rooted in the freedom that came with the Protestant Reformation and expressed in our democratic governance, provides the necessary check on both capitalism and potential social abuse.

There is, I believe, significant truth in these assertions, including the undisputed wealth and power that resulted. While the expansionist Catholicism of Southern Europe opened the doors for European dominance, the thought and initiatives of Northern Europe created the economic productivity and its ultimate expression in a consumer economy.

Spain, for instance, was only an early actor. As a Southern European and very Catholic country, it invaded the Americas with a papal mandate to claim territory and convert all inhabitants, collectively, to Catholicism. Anyone who did not convert was to be treated as property, less than human, to be used in any manner the conquerors saw fit. The mandate resulted in gross subjugation and abuse of the conquered populations and reckless extraction of resources.

But Spain experienced little lasting benefit. The patriarchal/hierarchical culture focused primarily on the accumulation of wealth for the church and its designated political representatives. Holding, rather than investing, was the order of the day.

The true economic winners were the Dutch and British, countries with more individualistic/entrepreneurial cultures. The Dutch prospered through trade and transportation, the British even more so by adding value through the manufacture and sale of consumer goods using the raw materials acquired from the conquerors. It is obvious where the United States has gone with this, driving individualist consumer culture beyond the wildest imagination of the early capitalists.

Material wealth and economic and military dominance have, indeed, been the products of this culture. These are indisputable realities.

The unanswered, or perhaps just unfaced question, which looms especially large today, is whether the individual moralism of White Protestant culture ever held or now holds sufficient sway to keep us in check from global destruction caused by the social and environmental underbelly of this material behemoth.

On the moral front, the capitalist success of individualist Western culture depended, and still depends, heavily upon cheap labor and unfettered access to extractable natural resources. Slavery, for several centuries, was the blatant expression of this market mandate. It continues today, less visibly, in child and quasi-slave labor in impoverished areas of the globe where raw materials are mined and consumer goods are manufactured.

In the US, internalized moralism eventually held sway in the abolition of slavery. But the drive for cheap labor and an unchecked amoral scapegoating process quickly reasserted itself in both the sharecropper/Jim Crow south and the industrial north. Competition for wealth and social position fanned the flames of hatred among poor Whites and European immigrants, once again scapegoating the Black population. Hatred of color remains the distracting diversion for less-educated economically challenged Whites in the United States. The fires burn hot today, fanned by elements of power that are happy to see these flames curtain off the unfettered dash to accumulation at the top.

Extraction of resources from under the feet and homes of indigenous populations remains a global reality, feeding the hidden furnaces of material comfort for predominantly White America and the capitalist wave worldwide. The onslaught pushing these native populations to less productive lands is only exacerbated by climate change, another byproduct of insufficiently checked individualist development of the West, the United States leading the charge.

A death knell is ringing for White American culture and its global pigmentocracy, built on the backs of people of color and the unfettered extraction of resources. On its current trajectory, the end seems certain in one of several ways: the nuclear genie used to pacify the globe will escape its bottle and blow the world to oblivion; narcissistic individualism uncoupled fully from collective responsibility will continue its descent into social chaos; the climate crisis and all its ramifications will take humanity the way of the dinosaur; artificial intelligence will subsume a human culture which is moving steadily along a spectrum from being served to being controlled by the algorithms of super computers. As we approach the brink of any of these disasters, the global poor (BIPOC) will be further and further marginalized. Violence of desperation will balloon. Borders will be closed. The genocide of proxy wars will increase and, when push comes to shove, more blatant forms of extermination may well be deployed.

Donald Trump’s angry America is all about this. The president of the United States of America, the country held out as the bastion of individual freedom and opportunity, has carried individualism to its narcissistic zenith. He has turbocharged the concentration of wealth at the expense of the environment and the common person. A consummate master of illusion, he has convinced his base – a populace less and less useful to him and other accumulation elites beyond the economic benefits of consumerism and the votes needed in our inconvenient democracy – that their troubles are caused by – shazam – people of color and, of course, godless un-American socialists. Why should we expect something new? It’s the time-tested and proven American way. License the White poor to shoot the Black despised and the pink socialists, while all but the few are stripped of the means to prosper.

The middle class, as it erodes, is thrust down into this violent emotional maelstrom of self-destruction. No need to worry about the White upper middle class just yet. They remain numbed and blinded to complacence by their material comfort. In the words of the Wicked Witch of the West, “All in good time, my pretty, all in good time.”

We now face a spiritual crisis of existential proportions. The Protestantism that added at least some check of individual social responsibility to the American capitalist and expansionist mandate, has given way to a much more individualistic but increasingly less moral Evangelicalism. Only the thinnest valence of hotly disputed morality issues are now employed to distract from the mad and overwhelmingly blind dash toward the concentration of wealth and resultant global extinction.

It is questionable, in America, whether individualist moralism was ever sufficient to bridle the ultra-productive but amoral energy of capitalism. Current concentrations of wealth and power would say otherwise. Neither the right nor the centrist left have mustered the moral courage to treat workers fairly, harness productivity for the larger social good or tackle environmental realities in a meaningful and effective manner.

It’s a simple thing, really. For the American experiment to grow out of this narcissistic and deadly adolescence and into full and successful maturity, humility must displace arrogance in the dominant culture. But White America has been, collectively, arrogant for so long that we (I am White and male.) cannot see it. The world, the universe, is holding the mirrors to our face. Greta Thunberg speaks to the United Nations. George Floyd whispers “I can’t breathe.” Wildfires scorch and super storms flood. Private violence is advocated as a valid adjunct to police brutality.

What we need, truly, is a new religion, or more accurately a new spirituality, more deeply and individually internalized than anything currently available. The general social obligations presented by traditional Protestantism have morphed into a primarily externalized pursuit of social justice. Its energy is consumed butting heads with an Evangelicalism promoting narcissistic accumulation behind a mask of holier than thou morality. In the meantime, the amoral capitalist juggernaut skirts them both with its increasing control of the political and economic apparati. All slide blindly together toward the brink of extinction.

The major religions of the East (Hinduism and its Buddhist offspring) have mastered the understanding of ego and connection to the whole, as have many indigenous religions that understand and celebrate a balance between needs and respect for resources. All, to greater or lesser extent, advocate for abandonment of ego, the driving force of individualist capitalism, in favor of the connected realization of the higher Self. They fall short in the recognition and celebration of individual energy and productivity. They get the seamless connection to whatever it is we call God. They miss the active participation of that spiritual force in the creative energy and expression of the individual.

A spiritually mature humanity might draw from both the European and Eastern understandings to find what I would call a connected individualism. The West neither could nor should become mindlessly collective, abdicating all freedom and authority to the state. But we could certainly benefit from a more Eastern view of ego and individualism. Our productivity needs a more powerful and deeply internalized moral compass. We need an ego that is connected with humility to the whole – human, all of creation, all of the cosmos.

American individualism, arrogantly uncoupled from a mature spiritual connection to the rest of the earth and its human community, must be reined in before it kills all. White America, specifically, needs to stand down. It need not disappear nor abandon its gift for productivity. But arrogance must be abandoned in favor of listening and a willingness to become partnered with, indeed led by others into a process of restoration and a new path of holistic progress.

Lawrence Mead is right about cultures. They shape global community. White American culture, to this day leading the world, is now at the apogee of a trajectory of individualism disconnected and run amuck. Global community is paying with its life. Abandonment of creative individual energy is not the answer. What is needed is a humble and celebratory understanding of the unfathomably vast and unselfish source of that energy, with its will and urge to express itself for true creative advancement through the hands and efforts of the connected individual.

There were two special trees in the Garden of Eden. We have lived as isolated individuals – scared, hoarding, and violent – for far too long under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Come home, come home, America, to a place of mature, humble, and truly bountiful connection under the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell, Taos, NM, blogs on contemporary American spirituality at www.twotreesinthegarden.com.

If you like this, please follow and share far and wide.

The Prayer As I Hear It

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creator of all, with realms beyond imagination, blessed be your numberless names. Your community come, your way be done, right here, just like you intend.

Open us today to your gift of enough. You have forgiven us. May we forgive ourselves and each other.

Keep us from lashing out in our isolation and fear. Deliver us from the lie of separation.

For we and everything seen and unseen are yours. Your beauty, your joy drive creation. Love wins.

Amen

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by online video at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Resurrection 2020

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

We ended 2019 with the Advent of the novel coronavirus and kicked off 2020 with the Epiphany of COVID-19. From there, the Lent of social distancing devolved quickly to the tomb of quarantine.

It’s Easter today, which holds out the memory and promise of resurrection. Yes, there is the original story, the powerful assertion of no to death, no to empire, no to religious oppression. This season, if we are awake, there is, as well, another resurrection that remembers a not so distant past: a past in which the air was clear and wildlife was abundant; species were multiplying and not declining; carbon dioxide was not spiking toward an age and an agony that will make COVID-19 a mere John the Baptist before the coming of Jesus.

COVID-19 throws so many stark images on the screen. Hollow and narcissistic leadership (an oxymoron, that) waffles daily between self-adulation and the promise that our consumptive economy is rising soon to save us. The exploding gap between the haves and have-nots jumps off the spreadsheet and into the images of real mass graves, here in these United States, and the sudden mortal certainty for the many who cannot find or pay for healthcare. Even those with means are jarred awake when there is no ventilator for a loved one, triage means choosing who will live and who will be abandoned to death and all other medical care must be put on hold – as unthinkable as the closing of all my favorite restaurants and the cancellation of my trip to Europe – just like that.

In his song Looking East, Jackson Browne asks, “How long have I left my mind to the powers that be? How long will it take to find the higher power moving in me?”

How long? How long must this pandemic last to awaken us to:

the reality of two economies, one reflected in the Dow, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 and the other so much more real for the mass of service workers in America, an economy with all its accoutrements like no health care, no affordable housing and no living wage
the gross immorality of our military budget that bankrupts our ability to nurture and nourish our population
the truth that when we drive less, fly less and consume less, the earth heals itself, visibly, tangibly, in not so very much time

Contrary to the powers that be, lined up daily in the White House briefing, the Dow, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 are not the measures of our health. More accurately they chart the rate of our mad dash to global social and ecological annihilation.

Don’t be fooled. The service economy is just that. It serves at the pleasure and solely for the benefit of the few with the most, those whose wealth is measured in the buckets of Wall Street. If those few could figure out a way to have it all without the nuisance of the masses that make possible their daily comfort and pleasure, rest assured that they would simply exterminate the hordes they already make invisible. It’s been tried before.

We are all complicit, mostly in our complacence. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are not mad folk. They simply shine a light on reality. Will we be shaken awake?

There will, with certainty, be a resurrection. But what will emerge this year, in the coming years, from the tomb of COVID-19? Will it be the phantasmagoric specter of the Dow, ballooning toward imminent global extinction? Or will it be a new economy of a different scale, a scale marked in increments of relationship, compassion and love for all of life?

No one decides but us. There is no hiding from the images presented in this time. We can see the despair. We can also feel the healing of moving more slowly and consuming less. Will we connect both of these images to the choices we make about national budgets, business models and where we invest our wealth? And will we have the grace and courage to shift our daily priorities away from consumption and toward relationship?

There were two special trees in the Garden of Eden. Death was the nature of Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, where fear bore the fruits of greed and the violent abuse of power. Redemption and resurrection are the essence of the Tree of Life, with fruit enough for all and its leaves for the healing of the nations. COVID-19 serves to clarify these two realities. May we choose true resurrection, the Tree of Life.

Worthy Is the Lamb

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s the Holiday Season in the United States. Lights, music, trees, the gusher of retail dollars and – Messiah sing-alongs. Yes, as a member of the Taos Community Chorus (tenor until faced with a high A), I am participating. How many times, how many places? And yet these texts from Isaiah and Revelation, set to Handel’s exuberant music, continue to inspire and thrill. May the abuses and domination of all twisted religious expression wither and perish. Please, dear God, save this glorious music.

One of the most powerful choruses is based on a surreal image from Revelation 5:12: “Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” (NRSV) Or in the King’s English used by Handel, “Worthy is the lamb that was slain.”

The obvious reference here is to the glorification of Christ, crucified by the threatened powers and resurrected in an immutable assertion that life as intended, the true spirit of love and compassion, can never be conquered, whether by evil intent or physical demise.

But it seems to me there is more in the phrase. As we journey from our experience of scarcity and fear under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; as we begin to know and trust it as the Tree of Life, there is always a lamb to be slain. The Buddha asserts with certainty, life is duhkha. We will suffer. The innocence of the lamb will be ravaged. We can delude and harden ourselves. There will be sickness. There will be abusers and victims. There will be war and hunger and loss of loved ones. And in the end, we will die.

No lamb avoids the slaughter. Worthy is the one that faces and embraces it. It’s not that some perverse deity requires blood to be satisfied. It’s that we don’t pass the test of life without dying to the lies.

We can paste over it with Christmas presents and walls of security and comfort. We can mask it with youth and pleasure. We can pretend to fend it off with walls and guns and warehoused kids at the border.

Or we can make a different choice. We can die right now and get on with the real thing. Die to fear. Die to domination. Die to greed and anger, our selfish anxiety and hoarding. In the end, it avails us nothing. Why not end it now? Why not make the choice, today, to shed all of this and replace it with the giving and receiving of blessing, honor, glory and power?

So let’s sing it, clear and strong. Worthy is the lamb, the lamb that is slain:

The family turned back at the border. Worthy is the lamb.
The youth taken by opioids in the towns along the Ohio River. Worthy is the lamb.
Christine Blasey Ford. Worthy is the lamb.
The “deep state” public servant, courageous enough to blow the whistle. Worthy is the lamb.
Jamal Khashoggi. Worthy is the lamb.
The Walmart shoppers in El Paso. Worthy is the lamb.
The Syrian hospital patients in the sights of the Russian warplane. Worthy is the lamb.
The indigenous environmental activists killed by governments and corporate thugs in Latin America. Worthy is the lamb.
The young women lured to hotel rooms and private jets by promises of open doors to the future. Worthy is the lamb.
You and I, friend, when we die to all of this, die to our comfort, our greed, our fear and embrace the cross that leads to real life. Worthy is the lamb.

Worthy, worthy is the lamb that is slain. Blessing, honor, glory and power be unto her.

Worthy.

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Hard Rain

Posted on June 29, 2019 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

President Trump of the United States kicked off his 2020 campaign last week, pouring fuel on the flames of fear, mistrust and anger to reignite the hurting and fevered base that would assure his re-election. During the same week, more environmental regulations were rolled back in the face of the science that overwhelmingly points to a warming planet, with disastrous consequences for not just humans, but all life.

In another cynical gesture, Guatemala, among the poorest of countries in the hemisphere, with leadership grounded in corruption and abuse of its people, was forcibly named by the United States as the designated refuge of asylum for migrants fleeing gang or narco-violence and drought in Central America, particularly those from the neighboring countries of Honduras and El Salvador. This comes as the number of people fleeing Guatemala, for the very same reasons, is at its own peak level.

Wall Street waits on the sidelines, up a little today, down a little tomorrow, fluttering anxiously on the tails of the latest presidential Tweet. It is stunning to consider that the markets of the most sophisticated economy in human history rise and fall with so little rationality.

And someone somewhere thinks that yet another manufactured war in the Middle East will line enough pockets to make it worth the lives of countless unarmed citizens on another side of the globe and a few thousand dead or traumatized soldiers of our own.

We seem the epicenter of a newly unleashed global permission to hate.

But hatred is a thin veil for the underlying reality. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated at the top, the masses turn to misguided anger. It is always easiest to hate someone who poses no threat beyond being somehow different. And the devil in power loves the opportunity to fan the flames in a sleight of hand to mask its ballooning greed.

We can delude ourselves with the religion of false morality. We can vent our frustration in political mudslinging. We can beam our positive energy out to the universe. If we don’t change our ways, “well it’s a hard, hard, hard, hard, it’s a hard rain gonna fall.” (Bob Dylan)

We don’t need a nasty god to judge us. We are doing a fine job of creating our horizon of hell.

Wealth is not the issue here, nor is power, though the mad grab for both is symptomatic. Human hearts that misunderstand their connection to creation, their responsibility to compassion and beauty; shrunken hearts deluded in belief that they are the majestic pinnacle in the unimaginable scope of all that is; hollow hearts certain that money can buy happiness, eternal life and the exit from all misfortune — these furiously pave the way to our collective demise. So many comfortable people, trailing just behind in the bell curve, would rather not know, turning a blind eye. The newly poor flare with misplaced anger. The truly downtrodden migrate in desperation for the next scrap of bread.

Dylan’s blue-eyed boy knows nothing of hard rain. Rather, it is the global masses in the path of rabid extortion and extraction, fleeing violence and hunger, the hidden but real costs of the low prices paid by the white north for food, clothing, energy, transportation and daily security. These, the most with the least, are the ones who know the storm. Their desperate lives are nothing but.

The headlong greed of the top and the complacency of the shrinking class we call middle (screaming rich compared to the displaced and suffering masses), have now traversed a height of slim escape, speeding blindly along a precipitous and razor thin ridge. The depletion of the earth’s resources, the warming of the atmosphere, the increasing likelihood of massive system failures, the insane stockpiling of sophisticated nuclear weaponry, these loom large and imminent on a rapidly approaching horizon. Yet money-madness and lazy comfort hold pedal to the metal, throwing up their flat screen charades, a vomitous spew of digitized misinformation, fooling themselves that all is well. America is now great again.

We have taken so much more than enough. Yet seeing only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we sap and burn the Tree of Life, sucking up even the water that feeds its roots in our insatiable appetite for the things that were never real. America, America, it’s a hard, hard rain that’s going to fall.

Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078.

Creation

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creation is amazing. Things keep happening on a seemingly infinite scale from small to grand, subtle to nuclear, still to beyond the speed of light. What’s it about? Where do we fit in? Our vision is so limited and, given the immensity of the whole thing, we mostly just ignore it and go on our way.

Going on our way, however, is exactly our problem – or better put, the problem of “our.” The premise of Two Trees in the Garden is that, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we became conscious, we woke up to “I”, “my” and “our.”

The “going on our way,” the “going” and the “way” of “our,” all happened on a road of fear. We believed ourselves to be alone and separate. We became aware of death. The response of “I,” “my” and “our” was greed and a grasp for power and control. Anger, deceit and violence became our tools.

But “our way” is not the way of creation, of true reality. It is only halfway. It is not whole. It is “self”-deceived. We don’t know it, but true reality is that we are under the Tree of Life, not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is only our limited misperception of the real thing. And that real thing, the real tree, is love, goodness, beauty, relationship, peace, the surprise of creation, rest and enough. Why would we not want these things? How do we get there?

It’s been called by many names, this turn from “self”-deceit to connected reality: enlightenment; awakening; conversion; second birth; born again. And in our despair, we look for any one of these (they are all the same) as some sort of magical elixir that, if we can only reach it, grasp it, experience it, will make us happy and solve our worldly fears and woes, maybe even save us from death. And it always seems elusively just beyond “our” reach.

But it’s not elusive at all. Yes, it is beyond “my,” “our” grasp. The problem is that we are grasping at nothing to be grasped. And we are missing everything. Because enlightenment, awakening, conversion, second birth, being born again are the simple choice of turning from deception and coming home to reality. And “reality,” is “not grasping.”

Creation, friends, is the impetus, the impulse, the word of love breathed infinitely and eternally into the void. And we are part of it and with it, not separate, as our fear – the fear that is “I,” “my,” “our” – would have us believe. And our fear is only that, a belief upon which we act, resulting in our unhappiness, the unhappiness of “our.”

Alas, what must “I” do to be saved? It’s so simple. Confess. Confess and submit. Confess that you, the real you, are connected to and one with the great I Am, the love and exuberance beyond all knowing that is part and parcel of all you see, unfolding with joy and confidence into all you cannot perceive.

It’s a piece of cake, a walk in the park, a look into the eyes of the beloved. When deceived “you” lets go of grasping and submits to real everything, you are alive, awake, born for real under the Tree of Life.

ep-news-business-builder-ad-1610

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Fight the Good Fight

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I grew up in the Midwest region of the United States. Feelings were pretty much just a bad thing. It’s not that we did not have feelings. We just did not admit to having them. Let’s take that a step further. We denied having them – especially anger. So we got angry and did not know we were angry. We did not know how to recognize, accept and deal with our feelings. That means they could get really out of control. And they could do a lot of internal and external damage.

Now, at almost 66 years of age, after losing the benefit of too many conflicts to unrecognized and poorly managed anger, I think I am beginning to learn. Note that I said, “losing the benefit.” The joy of the good fight is the transformation that can come in fighting it.

There are fights worth fighting. And there are ways to fight them. There will be feelings involved. The key is to recognize these feelings without allowing them to take charge. Pema Chodron uses the Tibetan term shenpa. She says that it is often translated to mean attachment, and that certainly is part of the reality. We get attached to our feelings and it becomes impossible to distinguish ourselves from them.

But Chodron says a more accurate definition for shenpa is the idea of getting hooked. A feeling surges up and hooks us. Or we hook onto it. Either way, it is painful, it is powerful, and it is hard to get free of it.

When we get hooked by our anger, we leave and lose the fight. We leave, because our energy becomes consumed by our anger and we have turned our attention from the fight to the overwhelming urge to satisfy our anger. We also become attached to an outcome rather than a process. We want only to defeat our enemy, not to stay with a creative process to an undetermined but perhaps mutually satisfactory conclusion – the real benefit of the fight. Everyone loses, because our anger is the only thing our enemy can see in us. Any merit in our case has left the building.

As humans, we will experience shenpa. We will get hooked. The trick is to recognize when it happens, to hold ourselves with compassion and to not let the hook take control of our actions.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna urges the reluctant Arjuna forward into battle with his relatives. Arjuna balks and laments. This is his family. And yet the fight needs to happen. Wrong needs to be confronted. Issues in relationship need to be resolved.

Loving our enemy does not equate to being nice to our enemy at all costs or abandoning the engagement. True love for our enemy treats the other with compassionate understanding while never shying from truth, to the extent that it has been shown to us.

That stance requires openness. We must pursue the cause valiantly without the shenpa of becoming hooked to a specific outcome. We must engage with full energy, even as we remain humble and open to new revelation and the change that comes from truly engaged relationship.

Life under the Tree of Life is not passive. Neither is it aggressive. Rather, it seeks transformation, not destruction. And it is open to the surprise of self-transformation, change that is larger than we can imagine, the transformation that comes from full, open and compassionate engagement.

God With Us

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Earlier this week, a man I had never met handed me one of those “Don’t wait until it’s too late on the highway to hell” tracts. “This is for you,” he said, and quickly exited the campus where I am working this year in Guatemala. He had been staying at our guesthouse.

Not a word of relational greeting, not a gesture of farewell, but, for him, an act of faithful mission accomplished, the first in a busy day ahead, I presume, in a foreign land. Duty bound and driven. I offered simple thanks and walked to my office, watching my emotions flicker between mild surprise, adrenalized offense, the dim glow of dormant anxiety, some reflective affirmation for a life of commitment and compassion for what seems to me a misguided purpose.

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus have been touted for centuries as the defining events, the sin qua non of Christianity. There is no denying their powerful drama. And a million words have been used to amplify, to give religious meaning, to add utility and certainly worldly power to them, whatever anyone may or may not think regarding a greater divine purpose.

Where Christianity as it has overwhelmingly been known leaves the tracks for me is in blood sacrifice and redemption. The history of our human enterprise of religion is rife with efforts to appease and manipulate the gods. In this view of the crucifixion, Christianity finally trumps all with God swooping in and sweeping aside the rest. Finished at last with every failed attempt of the imperfect priest, God sticks it to his own perfect incarnation. At last, blood that is good enough to cover your sins and mine, if we just believe in time. And watch out for that devil, stealthily tricking you into delay until it’s too late.

There is, I believe, a healthy alternative.

Come, oh come, Emmanuel. God with us. God dying with us. The God in us willing to live, and if necessary die, alongside our suffering neighbor.

The distinctive call of the true Christian, the follower of Jesus, is the recognition, as with the Buddha, of suffering as the nature of our existence. And when Christianity really gets it right, where Jesus really got it right, is in the commitment to engage, to join in the suffering of others as the doorway to transcendence for all concerned. In that light, the crucifixion and resurrection stand as powerful metaphors.

I am reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. If you have read it, you will understand that I am waking at night with stark visions of unspeakable horrors inflicted on slaves to assure economic privilege and access to wanton depravity. And I live this year in a country where hundreds of thousands of indigenous passed through and died in a similar hell for the same reasons as little as 30 years ago. Last week ICE raided a dairy farm in Upstate New York, Syria used chemical weapons against its own and stories of atrocities surfaced from every corner of the globe.

There is no greater hell than the one created by human forces of fear, greed and power, served fresh daily to millions of the innocent on our planet Earth. We need no other. A tract of the Gospel, of all things. It’s difficult to think of a more twisted profanity than scaring the suffering with hell in the name of Jesus.

The crucifixion of Jesus, the lynching of Black folk in America, the trafficking of women and children for depravity and profit, the bombing and burning of anyone to crush a perceived enemy with fear. There is quite enough blood with far too little redemption.

God with us comes in the hands and feet of those who walk with the suffering in the face of fear, who accept the cross, the noose, the rape and castration, the bullet and blade of every human prince of darkness. God with us is the resurrection of community in the face of oppression, the dance of kindness under the Tree of Life.

Submit Yourself

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

East, West, which way to look for that perfect spirituality? Such a quandary for the comfortable with time and resources to spare. No doubt my deep intentions are tilting the universe in a better direction, while in turn, that very same expanse is conspiring for my greatest good. But somehow the rubble still gets deeper in Syria. The thugs paid by the palm oil companies are still burning the houses of peasants in Colombia. And the string of cars belching carbon, clawing their desperate way to the mountains in Estes Park, Colorado, extend the crack in the Antarctic ice sheet.

There are flies all over all of us. What to do? We can rage against the darkness. It’s so easy to blame the stupidity of others for the burden we share. We can wallow in despair, sighing our way to the next tomorrow and the next. We can stick our heads in the sand. If I am comfortable in this moment, why look beyond my bubble? We can work ourselves to weariness with good deeds, shrug, and say we did our best.

But these alternatives share major flaws. They are selfish and disconnected. All focus on how I feel about myself in relation to the problem or to the rest of creation. My anger at others exonerates me from personal complicity and, therefore, action. And yet, especially as one of the world’s privileged, I take no step and breathe no breath without exhaustive and violent extraction from the Earth and all its creatures, including the bulk of humanity.

Despair, of course, is just completely irresponsible. I can blame my inactivity on the impossible size of the task and the exhaustion I experience just thinking about it. Focusing on my own comfort at least gives me pleasure and distraction. But these two options also abdicate responsible participation.

And let’s be real. My good deeds are never enough. I can never run fast enough or jump high enough to save the planet on my own. And the conclusion that at least I tried is just another form of despair, with the gold star of performance pasted on it to relieve my guilt with a little smug pride.

The root error of all these responses is that they focus on me, as though my feelings are what matter, or as though the outcomes of creation are somehow, in a very special and important way, on my shoulders. And when I am focused on me, I am too distracted to be truly useful.

I opened with a less than subtle dig at the spirituality of intention. Perhaps that is unfair. Focusing our intentions for good can, it seems, shift energy with positive outcomes in ways that we can observe, if not yet comprehend. As Masaru Emoto documents in his Messages from Water and the Universe, even a positive word pasted on a glass of water can yield a response of astounding beauty in ice crystals formed from that water. Perhaps on a given evening we could effect positive change if millions focused their intentions completely on the healing of our president. And yet our New Years prayers for universal peace – offered annually all over the world – have yet to tip the balance decisively. Who can say, of course, that they have not at least held us back from the brink of destruction.

What we miss in all of this is that we are not, indeed, ourselves. Nor are we just our intentions. We are intention embodied. We (not just humans, but every particle and the energy that binds it into being) are the hands and feet of Creation. Our intelligence, while seemingly vast from where we stand, is just a speck of something grand beyond imagination. Whether we look big and far to the stars and galaxies or small to the mysterious behavior of the Higgs Boson, we learn that everything is always more and different than we think. Our book of physics is never more than a scratchpad of notes in the library of what we vainly imagine to be the universe.

We are intention embodied, We act within the capabilities and limitations of our embodiment. Granted, that is a statement of blind faith. But what is more blind than the borders of what we think is real? I choose – I invite you to choose – faith that the wonder of all we don’t know is expressing itself continually into the void. And we are part of that expression.

I propose active submission to that greater intention. We can engage the gorgeous paradox of acting, in complete rest, into that intention. There is direction available to us for action. We connect with it when we, as Gerald May has put it so well, eschew willfulness and embrace willingness.

When we submit (read “allow connection of”) ourselves, all our intentions and all our actions, with confidence to Creation/Spirit/Mind/Source (read words I use for God), we move forward, acting with compassion from a position of expectation, the joy and surprise of creation. We are not exhausted. We do not despair, nor do we fear or avoid walking forward.

We cannot know. We do not need to know. Our satisfaction comes in submitting ourselves and all our gifts to the intelligent Whole, being and acting rather than owning and resisting.

Exhaustion and despair are the net of our selfish frenzy under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Rest and compassionate action join as one for health and wholeness under the Tree of Life. Come with me, dear one, to the place of wonder and deep satisfaction.

Good Friday

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s Holy Week, Semana Santa. I started it this year in Guatemala. Everyone is back to their hometown, it seems, to visit family and friends. Alfombras, block long carpets of brightly colored sawdust and flowers, transform the cobblestone of colonial streets. Huge elaborate floats depicting the passion of Christ are carried on the shoulders of fifty or more of the faithful, inching their way past the cathedral and central park. The brass and drum corps marks time, in cadence befitting the gravity of the Lamb of God, taking upon himself the sins of the world.

It’s an outsize burden, I think. Mayan women hawk fabulously beautiful weavings, made of handspun yarn and natural dyes, painstakingly extracted from spices, flowers, berries and insects.

No price can adequately compensate the weeks of labor by these women, sitting on knees, the weight of their bodies creating the tension needed for the woof and warp of their backstrap looms. The work is so gorgeous. They ask so little. The market prevails in its daily disappointment.

Our travels took us to their villages, where tombstones decorated with primitive art depict burned houses and hanged, hacked and bleeding bodies of the hundreds, thousands, perhaps 250,000 of their beloved family and friends, slaughtered by soldiers and paramilitary in the 1980’s, pieces dumped into mass graves.

The generals justified these deaths with biblical quotes under a valence of anti-communism, preparing the way, as it has for 500 years, for the insatiable lords of wealth and power, the robes cast off by the killers piled for safekeeping at the gates of the School of the Americas.

I fly home. Three simple words that separate me indelibly from the suffering on the ground. I ride the slick shiny blade of the machete of progress, hacking its way through the friendly skies, bounding lightly across borders that say “No, you may not partake. Your cup is a sop of vinegar served up on whatever stick you can find.”

59 missiles flip their way mindlessly to an airstrip in Syria and MOAB, the “mother of all bombs”, is dropped in Afganistan, this week’s blackbird pie served up for the ego of a spoiled child, daily millions demanded to fund the latest Mar-a-Lago deal, the White House an empty shell of a sucked out egg, the hollow hope of the poor and downtrodden.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.

No amount of blood poured out has ever offered a drop of redemption. It’s just another killing – another lie of the king, sanctioned by the priest, to justify clearing the path ahead. Jesus died because of our sins, never to take them away.

Good Friday.

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development, Estes Park, Colorado. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW above to be notified of future posts.

Doctor My Eyes

Posted on February 18, 2017 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Donald Trump is not our problem in America. He is not the disease, although he is certainly a very troublesome symptom. Electoral politics and the dash to polarization are not the problem, nor the antiquated function of the electoral college, not to deny that a few systemic tweaks might provide some small relief from our indigestion and pain.

Our problem is our eyes. It’s literally that we have chosen and clung to a very limited vision, an illusion that we believe to be complete and real. Whether we quake in fear and despair, watching blue states tumble to red and making frantic calls to legislators who seem deaf to voices without dollars. Whether we fulminate from the brilliant ivory tower of The New York Times. Whether we are certain that the immigrant other, seasoned with a dash of moral decline, is undermining our safety and the foundation of our American values. Whether we shake our snarling 4×4 fist as big government swallows the last guppy in our hard-earned and well-deserved Mar-a-Lago koi pond. Whatever our fear and angst, we are all, for the most part, just looking through the eyes of our chosen limitation.

And that’s just it, the eyes of fear and angst. The thing that binds us together, the foundational truth of America today is eyes that see only my shrinking piece of American pie.

Jackson Browne laments:

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand*

Doctor, my eyes. They see the hurt, petulant little boy spinning like a pulsar between his black hole need for adulation and his fits of distemper when we are unwilling or unable to pacify him. But he is our little boy, and we put him in charge. We must accept full responsibility.

Noble democracy, precious concept, is not our elixir. Today it is our exfoliant. It reveals the perilously thin skin of our fear, our polarization, our sorrow and longing, our greed, our corporate angst.

‘Cause I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
I’ve been waiting to awaken from these dreams*

From the Gospel of Thomas saying 22 or Gospel of Mary Magdalene 30:12, these confounding words are essentially the same:

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will gain the Kingdom.

“When you make . . .” my, your, our making. When we make our eyes something other than the eyes of our personal fear. When we rebirth our limited sight with the panorama of the kingdom of the spirit, we see a different world. It is not an American world, a Russian world, a Christian or Muslim world.

When we make these eyes, we might see the hurting little boy just as he is and take care of him. Certainly we would protect him from the inappropriate terror, his and ours, of placing him in the most powerful political position in the world.

We might also see the broken dreams of the working class and the hopes of the refugee and immigrant, with or without papers. Perhaps we would see through the paper money walls of our financial skyscrapers and over the bulwarks of our gated communities. Maybe we would see that these gates, these flimsy walls, are built by and rest on the shoulders of the formerly invisible and now despised. And we would have compassion for the hunger and fear of every being across this entire spectrum of humanity.

We might see that promoting hollow entertainment all the way to the doorstep of our nearly abandoned White House does not make for good governance. We might comprehend that the illusionists of “reality TV” can never transform petulance into POTUS. We might notice that fanning the flames of polarization to sell media ultimately burns away the bonds of healthy community.

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it’s too late for me*

Good news. The doctor is in. She’s got our eyes. They are truly ours. We can make them new. We can use them to see a world without borders. We can peer with them into the heart of each and see the need of all. But let’s not stop there.

Let’s look up and down, left and right, in and out. Take in the beauty beyond imagining, the world as it is without the borders of our old eyes. Absorb the wonders of the created and the unfolding. Rest in the assurance of a shared enough.

May our true eyes light the path of compassionate action with no attachments. Perhaps in this way, we will pick up and wield the tool of democracy with better respect and to greater effect.

*Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne. • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group

What Is Truth?

Posted on November 27, 2016 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

In 2010, Jehanne De Quillan published The Gospel of the Beloved Companion: The Complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene. De Quillan is a member of an independent religious order rooted in the Languedoc region of southern France. The order claims a spiritual lineage to Mary Magdalene, who is said to have come to the region in the first century, bringing with her an original Greek text of her own version of the story of the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.

In the early twelfth century, Jehanne De Quillan’s community translated the text into Occitan, the common language of the Languedoc in those times. They claim to have protected both the Greek and Occitanic versions of the text in the centuries since. The hidden nature of that protection stems from the early thirteenth century Albigensian Crusade and ensuing Inquisition, a twenty-five-year reign of terror unleashed by the Roman Church in this region, aimed at rooting out and destroying an elevated apostolic status of Mary Magdalene and other perceived heresies.

De Quillan claims, for the first time, to present a modern English translation of the original Greek Gospel of Mary Magdalene. She does this with the permission, but not universal support of her community, which fears reprisal and persecution even today. Reading the text, that fear seems justified in the shadow of a centuries old religious patriarchy.

The clear and consistent message of Jesus’s teaching in this gospel is simple, yet deep and very beautiful. It is this: The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, a seed of the Living Spirit waiting to be discovered, nurtured and cultivated. And it is to be lived into the world outside you.

The fruits of this cultivation are described in a lovely vision of a tree at the close of the gospel, with eight levels separated by seven guardians, each to be overcome and left behind before the fruit of the level can be consumed, allowing ascension to the next. These levels and gates are:

level one, the fruit of love and compassion, hidden by the guardian of judgment and wrath
level two, the fruit of wisdom and understanding, hidden by the guardian of ignorance and intolerance
level three, the fruit of honor and humility, hidden by duplicity and arrogance
level four, the fruit of strength and courage, hidden and defended by weakness of the flesh and the illusion of our fears

At the completion of this fourth level, the guardians are replaced by lessons or truths to be learned and fully embodied through the consumption of the fruit of the associated level:

level five, consumption of the fruit of clarity and truth, yielding the clarity and truth of our soul with the understanding that we are truly children of the Living Spirit
level six, consumption of the fruit of power and healing, yielding the power to heal our own soul
level seven, consumption of the fruit of light and goodness, yielding freedom from darkness and a resulting fullness of the light and goodness which is the Living Spirit
Having completed these seven levels, the eighth level is granted, which is described as a fierce joy in knowing and being embraced fully by the grace and beauty of the Spirit.

All else is folly. In this narrative, Jesus is even more explicit than in the canonical gospels about this folly and the oppression practiced by dominant religion through laws, rules and dogma. At one point, for instance, when challenged about the importance of circumcision, he responds that if God wanted males circumcised, he would cause them to be born that way. And in his closing admonition to the disciples at the last supper he says, “Tell others of what you have seen, but do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you; and do not give a law like the lawgiver, lest you be constrained by it.” Mary Magdalene 35:22

The Gospel of the Beloved Companion reads at heart like a truer version of the Gospel of John. Why do I say truer? Somehow it hangs together better. Whereas John is told by a narrator, this gospel is told in first person by someone who was not only an eye witness, but an intimate participant in the life and teachings of Jesus.

There are simple things. De Quillan points out, for instance, that when the various events and their locations – which are sometimes different than in John – are plotted on a map, they make more sense in terms of the walking distances of the day. We don’t have John’s mysterious “disciple whom Jesus loved.” It is unambiguously clear that this is a story told by a woman, Mary, also called the Migdalah, or tower, who is the beloved companion of Jesus.

There is nothing sensational about any of it, and the message at every turn points to the teaching about being born of the Spirit, living as a child of the Spirit, experiencing the Kingdom of God. But it has a much more whole and human feel throughout:

Without making any particular point of it, it is simply clear that what we know as the wedding in Cana, where Jesus turns water into wine, was actually the wedding of Jesus and Mary.
It is clear in this gospel that Mary Magdalene is the Mary of the Mary, Martha and Lazarus household, and they were essentially home base for Jesus during his ministry.
There is a different and gender balanced inner core of disciples who consistently understand the message of Jesus. This core includes: the original disciples Thomas and Matthew (referred to as Levi in this book); Mary, Martha and Lazarus; two women called Salome, one of whom is the mother of Peter and Andrew and the other who is the woman we know as the woman at the well; and Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who seem to be close friends.
The gospel does not try to disguise tension between this group and particularly Peter and Andrew, who challenge Mary at several points, indignant at the idea that Jesus might have told Mary, a woman, things that he did not tell them, or that she, a woman, might better understand the core message and teachings of Jesus than they did.

All of these very human interactions give the book an air of authenticity, as opposed to a story that was augmented or glorified in an artificial manner to prove the divine and extraordinary nature of Jesus. Jesus is clearly someone sent by the Living Spirit with a message and invitation to his human companions that they, like him, are children of that Spirit. He invites them to own it and live it.

I say authenticity. To be clear, when I read this, it rings true to me.

OK, so you may ask the sardonic question of Pilate, which appears in this gospel just as it does in John, “What is truth?” That is an excellent question when it comes to any scripture and, for most of us, especially the traditional biblical scriptures, which, as we grew up, were presented as ultimate truth.

Let’s ask it again today. What is truth?

Is truth a canon of gospels, letters and visions written and rewritten to suit the tastes of a male hierarchy of patriarchs, three centuries after any fact and in league with the government of Rome?
Is truth the Gospel of John, which when read side by side with the Gospel of Mary Magdalene does not hang together with nearly the same consistency and authenticity? I come away from the reading with a sense that John, while certainly a unique and lovely book, was a redaction of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene intended to make it palatable and acceptable to a patriarchal church.
Is truth what appears in the traditional gospels to be a systematic denigration of a woman, the only person who consistently in all the narratives stayed by the side of Jesus through his trial, crucifixion and resurrection – the first one to whom Jesus appears and speaks? The institutional church, from the days of canonization forward, has painted Mary as a demoniac and whore. Her only redeeming quality in that picture is that she is repentant. I find it more likely that the portrayal of her as someone possessed by seven demons was a male redaction and upending of the vision Jesus gave her of the seven gates to be conquered in the journey to complete experience of the tree of the Living Spirit. And the casting as a whore seems the ultimate stake of death, hammered through the heart by a male power structure that could not bear the possibility of a woman being the closest disciple and companion to their savior and champion.

What is truth? By now we know that truth is not historical inerrancy of every word of the canonized scripture. The inconsistencies are too glaring, the contradictions too complete.

Truth, capital T truth, seems something quite other than facts which can never be firmly established. Even if, for instance, the Greek text guarded by this spiritual community in Languedoc turned out to be a first century original, there is no guarantee that it is factually true. Anyone can write a story.

Truth, it seems, is something entirely other than proof positive. So what is it? Jackson Browne touches it for me, somehow, in a line from a song titled The Dancer: “I don’t know what happens when people die. Can’t understand it as hard as I try. It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear, I can’t sing it. I can’t help listening.”

Truth, I believe, is the song sung in a quiet heart. It is as much a sound as it is an object. Jesus, in every portrayal, whether canonized or otherwise, is consistent in this. He says that the children of God, the children of the Living Spirit, are the ones who truly hear his words, who understand them and live them from their hearts.

Truth is the abandonment of wrath and judgment in favor of love and compassion; the eschewing of ignorance and intolerance in favor of wisdom and understanding; the forsaking of duplicity and arrogance to take on honor and humility. Truth is the journey of the soul toward embrace and union with the light and joy of the Living Spirit.

May we quiet our hearts. May we hear the song. May we follow that sound to the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations.

At Risk

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Children are said to be “at risk” when certain conditions are present – or absent – in their lives. A kind and working father is missing. An abusive or addicted one lurks and festers, a boiling and unpredictable giant behind the front door of our denied safe harbor, the refuge of home after our day negotiating the uncertain and often demeaning paths of the classroom and playground. Disease, or the need to work two or three jobs have broken the arms of mom’s affection and care.

These things make life harder. They carve away at confidence and shape a world view. Often the result, by choice, certainly, but under overwhelming pressure, is a generational cycle of poverty, addiction and despair. Often, but not always. There are spirits that in their time choose to climb out of the despair, spirits that find a life that transcends oppression, despite the powerful odds.

I have a neighbor and friend, Gordon, whose body has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease. In Gordon’s case, the breakdown of the nervous connection between brain and muscles is progressing generally from the outside in, with loss of connection to limbs followed by atrophy and loss of large muscle areas. Gordon is now in a residential hospice facility, diminished bodily to little more than the ability to talk, chew and breathe.

Gordon demonstrates, he embodies, the choice of spirit to transcend suffering. He does this so completely that it is crystal clear that Gordon’s body has the disease, Gordon does not. Gordon’s welcome is wide open, even, it seems, to the adventure of his bodily diminishment. He names and embraces each loss, without denial of sadness or any of the range of expected emotions, but with full engagement, chapter by chapter. And he extends his welcome to each visitor and caregiver that enters his sphere. Many linger beyond their task for the joy and comfort of his tent of presence. He seems genuinely, equally and seamlessly interested in them, at the same time open and willing to the honest and objective sharing of his own experience.

Gordon’s choice pulls the mask off at-risk. We tend to think of risk as if it is related to suffering, with the ultimate risk being that we might die. But we are not ever at-risk of death. Death is a fact certain. Our bodies will die, whether for wearing out, in a mass shooting, an accidental misstep or the sudden failure of a heart. We are, in a certain physical sense, never really at-risk. There is no maybe, no uncertainty at all.

So what is it that we are at-risk of? We are, I believe, at risk of fear. Our fear of death is so overwhelming that we choose delusion and denial. Our favored weapons are wealth and comfort, the narcotics of a new car, dinner out and a trip to Europe. These comforts come, always, with hidden attachment to the suffering of others – the animal killed, the poorly paid laborer, the displacement of peasants, the extraction and exhaustion of resources. They fail, always, to avert the end.

Dylan Thomas, whether in brash arrogance or exploding despair, howls his mandate that we “not go softly into that dark night.” In my reading, he captures the shock and awe of the certain ultimate removal of the mask of our delusion, with the result being our hollow and futile “rage against the blinding of the light.”

Our desperation to preserve physical life and comfort, in the extremes that we have chosen, seems most likely to correct itself ultimately in extinction, or at least in some future adjustment of mass death followed by nature’s reassertion of its own millennially patient creative and re-creative processes. Life will urge forward in its evolutionary persistence, with or without the human race.

There is an alternative for us. We can choose to embrace the gift of our spirit – the Self that is beyond fear, the Self that is the observer of all, attached to nothing – no thing. We can embrace wonder. We can choose a life of true risk, the risk of engagement, of compassionate embrace of the full range of joy and suffering. We need not categorize. The arms of God are as certain in the air beyond the face of the cliff as they are in the physical rock of our desperate clinging.

Let go. Feel the splendor of the fall. Or is it a rise? No matter. Embrace it all, with attachment to nothing, and share it with others. Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, the all-in-all that is with us, is us, is beyond fear, beyond what we call death. Science has taught us nothing if not that there is always a further horizon, no true up or down, no large or small.

We grasp in delusion for what we call safety, the opposite of what we falsely conceive as risk, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But chapters of inevitable diminishment peel away the decaying flesh to reveal the true nature of the naked and unencumbered spirit. We can delude ourselves all the way to our ultimate collision with despair. Or we can choose today the reality of the spirit of all that is, living with joy, confidence and compassion under the Tree of Life.

EP News Business Builder Ad

Is God?

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

A talk, April 17, 2016 at Journeys, a weekly gathering of spiritual seekers in Estes Park, Colorado.

Here at Journeys we explore matters of faith. For the most part, we do this from what we would call a progressive Christian perspective. We take the primarily Christian faith concepts we have grown up with and we ask out loud our honest questions about what seems real, what does not, and what we, as maturing adults, actually believe. And we take away some thoughts and life applications about these things. It is good to be in a trusting company of humans where this can happen.

But there is always an unseen elephant in the room – or maybe there isn’t. Our faith is rooted in a presupposition that there is an ultimate cause – something we have chosen to call God. As Christians in America, we grew up calling God “Father.” Jesus was the son of God – somehow in a different way than we are. Yet we learned that we were created in the image of God. These concepts, whether we are comfortable with them or not, are rooted deeply in our collective psyche and its expression in our culture.

On the flip side, we grew up in an era where some philosophers and theologians dared to say out loud that God is dead. In fact, as early as 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann as quoted in Wikipedia

Many of us remember, exactly fifty years ago this week, the stark red letters on the pitch black background of the April 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine: “Is God Dead?” As an eighth grader, I remember being shaken significantly by this, too young to explore, process or absorb it with sufficient personal confidence or grounding.

While the conversation was much more nuanced, this seemed, at least to me at the time, the ultimate despairing triumph of science over religion. It was the penultimate question and thought of the twentieth century, when the explosion of the material seemed at last to have built and nailed shut the lid on the coffin of superstition.

In fact, I have often felt that the only legitimate reality left standing at the end of the twentieth century was a question mark. The gravity of it all is summed up well in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous quote of the Bhagavad Gita as he watched the explosion of the first atomic bomb: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Not being able, as a 13-year-old, to deal adequately with all of this, I am sure that I chose to repress the question. But we all know what happens with repression. The tadpole shoved under the surface of the vast pond of consciousness still becomes the frog, and grows and grows until it ultimately breaks back through the surface with a size and force that will not be denied.

And it is the re-emergence of this monster frog in later life that has given me – given us – the courage and freedom to make these statements, to raise these questions, opening the door to a rich garden of spiritual exploration. For better or worse, without these statements and events, we would not likely be here doing what we do and having this particular discussion.

So here we are, living the questions. And today the question is, “What is God?”, or even more bluntly, “Is God?” You’ll be shocked, I am certain, to learn that I have some thoughts about that.

And here is my basic position. God is the thoughts we project onto big mystery. I’ll say that again. God is the thoughts we project onto big mystery.

Working within the limits of our consciousness, there is really not much else we can say. In every tradition, God, while made metaphor and personified, is ultimately beyond thought and language. For each of us, then, that makes God a choice – a matter of belief or disbelief. Proof positive and complete definition are simply not possible.

It has always been this way. People in every culture have wrestled with meaning within the limits of knowledge. And the result of that wrestling has always been a concept of something bigger and other that contributed form and direction for personal and social life. We need not criticize. Rather, it is important to realize that for all time, we have been alternately creating God and then killing our creation when it no longer fits plausibly with our current context. And then we birth God anew.

Emily Dickinson says it well in the closing line of her poem, “This World is Not Conclusion”: “Narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul”.

So let’s have at it.

First of all, let me say that I choose to believe. What I mean by that is I choose to believe in something rather than nothing. Why? I’m not entirely sure. I think in large part I do so because I like the way my life works in that orientation. But choosing to believe begs the question, “What do I believe; what do I believe about God?”. In my writing on spirituality, I generally shy away from using the term God because of the longstanding Old Man Judging Father in the Sky image conjured by the word in our Western world. Instead, I tend to use a series of words, “Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.”

Let’s take that apart.

Creator

Creator implies action. Nearly all world religious traditions view God as creator. Some people, particularly those we have labeled deists, speculate that God set things in motion and then stepped back, letting natural law and evolution take their course. God observes, if paying much attention at all, from a very great distance. We are essentially on our own to figure out the path forward within the confines of our consciousness. As the classes I was not able to attend here last summer described, some of the founders of our nation were deists and not at all the kind of evangelicals that want to “take back our country for God.”

Others, called theists, also view God as having created or set things in motion. But they differ from deists in that they believe that God, on an ongoing basis, intervenes to straighten things out. This has been the general orientation of Western religion. God created, we messed up, God intervenes. It is relational, but primarily in the manner of a corrective or redemptive relationship. We petition God for intervention. Sometimes God’s intervention comes also on its own, as help or judgment. Theism, of course, is the dominant position of traditional Christianity. It is the concept we were taught as children and remains deeply rooted in our collective Western psyche.

The Bible says we are made in the image of God. While I believe that to be true, the theistic God of the Bible seems more to be made in the anthropomorphic image of us. We made a big male powerhouse and put him in charge of everyone, especially the women and children.

In truth, it is our discomfort with this deeply rooted theistic concept that brings us to this room every Sunday morning. We no longer accept the theistic requirements of an anthropomorphized male God and we struggle mightily with the concepts of the fall of humanity and the resulting requirement of blood atonement.

In that regard, most of us actually fall to some extent under another label. In terms of the traditional Judeo-Christian theistic God, we are a-theists, atheists, not theists. That is a term that made us shudder in our youth. It is the horrible and evil “yes” in answer to the question, “Is God dead?”. And in reality, the theistic God of our older traditions is, beyond occasional metaphorical value, dead.

Abandoning traditional theism, I was happy to encounter another label that, insofar as I actually understand it, works much better for me. The label is panentheism.

Panentheism is the belief that the something we call God encompasses, interpenetrates and is yet greater and other than the universe. The word sounds like the more common term, pantheism, but it is much more expansive. They should not be confused. The pantheist sees God in nature, in the physical universe, and that’s pretty much that. The panentheist says there is always more, with limitless attributes of every kind.

The forest sages of the Upanishads, part of the wisdom literature of ancient India, were panentheists. They labeled this Creator the Self – capital “S” Self – which they described as the immanent, transcendent and essential reality of everything. Creation emanates from and is the expression of this Self. Creation returns to the Self. Creation is Self as action. Self is. Self does. Self is our true personal and transpersonal reality. Science is our discovery, our observation of the Self in action.

From The Isha Upanishad, as translated by Eknath Easwaran:

The Self is one. Ever still, the Self is

Swifter than thought, swifter than the senses.

Though motionless, he outruns all pursuit.

Without the Self, never could life exist.

In the panentheistic view, we are actually part of God – this Self of the Upanishads – creating. Some people say that we co-create, but that implies separation. In panentheism, we uni-create. We one-create. We are not all of God, but we are certainly part of God. We think. We move. And in that very thought and motion, a new world appears that did not exist only moments before. We one-create in every breath, every thought, every step. And that is why the chosen nature of each breath, each thought, each step is so important.

God – this Self – is Creator. I believe that when I trust my at-one-ment with God, the great “Is”, the great “I am”, actually works and does and creates as one with me. I am an active part of the unfolding creative activity of God. I ride the joyous wave of emanation into the void. Wow!

God is Creator.

Spirit

Spirit implies conscious but not concrete connection. Spirit is how we experience God. We feel, we intuit, we sense synchronicity. Spirit is Jung’s vast unconscious, the ocean of archetypes bubbling beneath our waking surface. It breaks through in dreams and moves in our intuition and creativity. Spirit might be called the “how” of God’s action. We are touched and infused, we are activated by Spirit.

As a panentheist, I believe in God as Spirit. For me, that means I have a huge trust in God acting in and through me whenever I am not deluded by my little false separated ego-self. The Upanishads distinguish clearly between the lie of separation and isolation by contrasting, over and over, this small “s” ego self with capital “S” true self. From The Katha Upanishad:

In the secret cave of the heart, two are

Seated by life’s fountain. The separate ego

Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,

Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,

While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter

Neither liking this nor disliking that.

The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self

Lives in light. So declare the illumined sages . . .

Paul, in the Christian scriptures, quotes a Greek poet, describing this Self as the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28 NRSV)

In my life I experience Spirit as intuition and revelation, as unexpected insight and the beauty of unfolding relationship. I see the action of Spirit most clearly when I look over my shoulder and observe the path of life – the nudging, the encounters, the crashes and lessons learned, the blessing of redemptive healing and the sense of direction that all add up to the person I am. And I rest in trust, in the presence, fullness, loving care and direction of that Spirit, for all that I will become.

God is Spirit.

Mind

Mind is the conscious aspect of God – of this capital “S” Self. Mind is awareness, the ability to see and to perceive. Mind is the way we experience. It is language and its manipulation. It is the Word from which everything springs. Mind processes all. Mind is the mill of creation. Isolated mind is monkey-mind, full of anxiety, fear and distraction. Connected Mind is the pure joy of essential experience, the flow of creative ideas and the choice to act with truth and compassion.

The Buddhists capture Mind in the now popular term “mindfulness.” The wise Buddhist priest, teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh urges us to mindfulness in his many books, calling us to undisturbed awareness of the present moment.

Reflecting on the Eucharist in his book, Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh says:

The practice of the Eucharist is a practice of awareness. When Jesus broke the bread and shared it with his disciples, he said, “Eat this. This is my flesh.” He knew that if his disciples would eat one piece of bread in mindfulness, they would have real life. In their daily lives, they may have eaten their bread in forgetfulness, so the bread was not real bread at all; it was a ghost. In our daily lives, we may see the people around us, but if we lack mindfulness, they are just phantoms, they are not real people, and we ourselves are also ghosts. Practicing mindfulness enables us to become a real person. When we are a real person, we see real people around us, and life is present in all its richness.

We live within the construct of our limited small “m” mind, bounded by the capabilities of our sense organs. Our eye sees the world differently than the eye of an eagle, or of a honeybee. Yet we believe that what we see and feel is what is, exactly and in totality.

The real temptation of the Garden of Eden was the temptation to believe that our individual mind is all, that the small “s” isolated self that we perceive and the world we experience around it is the sum total of existence. That is a fearsome perspective. When I stay stuck just in small mind, I fear for my life. There is never enough to satisfy me and never enough protection. Lust, greed, anger and violence are the natural responses.

When I live in mindfulness, I am aware of my connection to all around me. All that is. And I rest in trust even as I move into the unknown.

God is Mind. God is the practice of mindfulness.

Source

Source is the alpha and the omega, the eternal continuity, the singularity and totality of God. It is the very point and location, the wellspring of creation – the place where nothing becomes something, where something becomes other. It is the place to which the waters return after they have exhausted the work of gravity and evaporated into the wind. Source is the eternal circle, where any point is the beginning of something and the end of something else, where truly there are no beginning, no middle and no end. Source is the richness of everything beyond imagination, the bottomless shopping bag of creation.

Think of Source as both the center and the perimeter of a spinning wheel. At the absolute center, there is complete stillness. Theoretically there must be this stillness because the top of the wheel above is moving in one direction, while the bottom of the wheel below is moving at the same speed in the opposite direction. Source is that still center of the wheel.

And source is the perimeter, the place where the spinning wheel meets the road. When a wheel is rolling down the road, there is actually no movement whatsoever at the place where the wheel touches the pavement. Stillness in motion, something from nothing.

Source is the infinite smallness and vastness of all that is – the particle we will eventually observe that, acting with energy, makes up the Higgs Boson; and the endless expanse we may speculate beyond the perimeter of the known universe.

Again from The Upanishads, a sort of benediction of Source:

All this is full. All that is full.

From fullness, fullness comes.

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness still remains.

God is Source.

So there you have it, my projection onto big mystery. Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source. I’ve gone and done it – made God in the image I want – made myself in the image of God. Just another human’s elephant. But I like my elephant. I feel safe in its presence. It guides my path when I trust and follow it. It leads me by still waters and restores my soul.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of it. It is alive in the gift of relationship with Leonor. I hear it in the ripple of water over stone in the Fall River. I share it in the breath of conversation together here in this room. I look over my shoulder, I stand in the present, I trust and become the road ahead. Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

All this is full. All that is full.

From fullness, fullness comes.

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness still remains.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti

EP News Business Builder Ad

The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It was a whizz-bang week – the final presidential candidate debates before the New Hampshire primary capped off by the 50^th Super Bowl. God bless America, Lady Gaga, Coldplay, Beyoncé and certainly Peyton Manning. And fighter jets. And the pyrotechnics. And Wilson. And Hyundai. And CBS. And the pill that remedies various colon related issues that prevent us from success in our daily conquest.

The Western Christian narrative of God and humanity has been one of separation and not connection, a fierce, frantic and fearful individualism. A whole host of problems arise with this. First, there is the underlying sense of alienation and isolation, resulting in chronic anxiety and uncertainty. We are never quite sure, short of less than satisfying dogmatic formulas, whether we are safe or not. Am I forgiven – enough? Am I saved? Is it really possible that God hears me when I pray? How can I get that right and be sure? Is there even God?

The flip side of the uncertainty is vain over-confidence. I am all-powerful. I can do anything. The world is my playground. You just don’t get it. Get out of my way. Stupid you if you don’t have enough.

Oscillating between these two poles, we exhaust ourselves. The existential angst is never relieved, the material satiation is never enough, the domination is never complete. We are a sometimes weary people in need of greater and greater assurance, no matter how shallow or hollow the language, no matter how sensational the show.

There are those that would say this separation, this individualism, is exactly the triumph of the West – that our belief in the power of the individual and the application of that belief in the material realm have created all that is good in the world. We have imposed order on chaos, driven out superstition with real medicine, turned raw materials into comfort and pleasure and, through accumulation of wealth transformed into overwhelming force, assured the safety of humanity.

Certainly much that is good has been accomplished.

But back on the panic side of our void, our concept of prayer remains characterized alternately by begging or claiming – as if we are constantly but inadequately grasping at something that is not quite ours. We need demonstrable proof, sure results. The tornado lifted when it came to my house. Or it didn’t because I didn’t pray hard enough. Superstorms and terrorist threats are God’s judgment on “the gay lifestyle.” We dash about and shout our certain proclamations. And we allocate more money to put a material or military patch on the mess to keep it all from falling apart.

Presidential politics in 2016 reflects the fever pitch of our bifurcated anxiety. It’s as if the deep underlying infection of isolation and desperation is finally forming a boil, a small and intense festering that burns under the thinnest layer of decaying skin, ready to burst.

The infection is spiritual. It is not religious. It is not political. It is not tied to one economic system or another. One candidate epitomizes the bluster and desperation. And only one comes close to naming the underlying spiritual vacuum and disconnect that rules our discontent – the fire that drives our fever toward the threshold between morbidity and mortality. When Senator Sanders pulls back the curtain masking unfettered greed, he touches, without fully naming, our great hunger and despair.

I am not suggesting at all a vote of any sort. No party, candidate or election can salve the infection of our soul. Nor am I recommending that we shut off the Super Bowl. But I am inviting us to see, to understand, to absorb and to embrace the nature of the illness. And I am suggesting we can cure it with a change of orientation.

It is our isolation that fuels our insatiable hunger. And it is our underlying narrative of separation that walls us off from the deep satisfaction and power of existence. Believing conquest and satiation to be the elixirs of at least happiness, if not eternal life, we drive pedal to the metal toward the brink of extinction.

There is a different way, a different orientation, a different direction in which to look. The forest sages of ancient India captured it so clearly in the Upanishads. Through the practice of stilling the mind and quiet observation, these sages document a Self, immanent and transcendent, that is the loving essence of each one and every thing. It is as if the flashing stream of still pictures that create the illusion of motion has been stilled, and the space between revealed to be something entirely other, a space without fear, a limitless expanse of satisfaction and creative bliss, a place beyond need or desperate grasping.

No matter what or how much it consumes, the separate ego is never satisfied. And our belief that we are disconnected beings in a world we increasingly understand as only material, accelerates us exponentially toward exhaustion and annihilation on the wings of glittering despair.

Mastery of our lust comes from understanding and turning away from isolation and toward connection, away from insatiability and toward satisfaction. It comes from abandoning fear in favor of trust, and willful grasping in favor of willing service.

And, ultimately, it comes from embracing our true Self, the Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source that is the light, the eternal energy and limitless love we begin to glimpse between the moving frames of our desperation. We are not separate and fallen. We only blind ourselves with the fear born of our limited consciousness and chosen view. We are Spirit, experiencing the material. Touch without owning, look without lusting, enjoy without hording. There is enough. Our greatness already is and has no vital connection to anything at all in the halftime show or ads or victor yet to come in Super Bowl 51, no critical dependence on the outcome of election 2016.

Embrace it under the Tree of Life.

Where is God?

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Nothing cuts to the chase quicker than evil and suffering when it comes to the question of where or what is God. Or for that matter, “Is God?”

Inevitably, the Holocaust comes up in the discussion. Are you Frankl or Wiesel? And terrorist attacks, with responses that range from “We will not be afraid. Our love will conquer all,” to the Donald Trump trample. And the potpourri of painful ways that life comes to an end.

The answers seem glib. We point to various interpretations of the Book of Job. We give up the concept of omnipotence, because a loving God cannot possibly be an all-powerful God and let this stuff happen. We say that God is standing by – or with us – in the thick of it – or that God is judging and blessing in turn, based on our behavior.

Buddhism has the slickest answers in nonjudgment and the nature of life being suffering. But those seem too easy. They ring hollow in the face of our yearning for meaning.

Inevitably our answers, whether hardline zingers or thoughtful stories, fall short. They are too empty or too full. One answer undermines another. And still, the suffering continues.

God, ultimately, is the thoughts we project on Big Mystery. And Big Mystery is really big – or small, depending on our frame of reference and where we look. For all we know there are an infinite number of universes in every Higgs Boson.

We throw our concepts and stories at it to see what sticks. It all falls short. We fall short. Our consciousness is just not yet that well developed, if our consciousness is even anything at all.

We are left with speculation and choices. Do we choose faith? If so, faith in what? Go ahead and try to answer – you, me, Job, the kid next door. We slam our books on the table with condemnations to hell and a gunshot to send us there.

To what end? We don’t know. We just seek meaning and relevance. Some little path forward. Who can blame us for that?

As for me, I choose to believe that there is, indeed, a balm in Gilead. I just want to. Isn’t that enough?

I believe that when my wife and I dream the very same dream in a given night, that when we show up at the same time at a favorite haunt, from different points of origin and not a word spoken in advance, that there is more – that it is good, that there is healing, that the ultimate word written on our hearts is love.

And from there, all our choices unfold, and they all matter. Not because there is anything certain that can be pinned down under them, but because something completely ineffable has spoken in our mitochondria – deeper, even, in the empty spaces between whatever particles form us, if those things are particles at all. And that ineffable something has found its ways through our synapses and into our muscles, our visions and the words we speak to each other, the touch we share and the kindnesses exchanged.

Somehow it is better that way. And so I believe. I believe that we are the awakening of consciousness in its steady progression into the void, that we ride the very curl of the wave of creation. I believe we shape that wave in all our intentions and connections, just like we shape our images of God. And I choose together and not alone. Where is the separation? Can you find it? Can you see any reality in it at all?

Somehow that awakening contains the full spectrum, insofar as we know it, of pain and beauty, of suffering and healing, of bloom and demise. Our choice is to embrace or reject. We cannot change it.

Let’s join in the embrace. Please! Come with me, will you? Let’s sit together, under the Tree of Life.

ISIS, Paris and the Fight for Dominance

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

ISIS this week brought its bloody bully show to the world media stage in the City of Light. We are saddened and disgusted by the loss of innocent lives in Paris, guilty only of being different. We grieve with the bereft and hurt with the wounded. We are twisted with angst that people disparage their own lives for the sole purpose of doing violence to others. How can this happen in the modern world? Will it happen to me? How can we stop it? What can it possibly be about?

Ultimately, all fights are about dominance. We perceive someone or something to be a threat to our wellbeing. Something about them makes us afraid that our particular way of life, our daily existence, is at risk. We respond with force.

A toddler wants control of a toy. Another toddler takes possession. A sense of violation takes over. Words or blows are exchanged, followed by tears and rage employed to elicit the intervention of a higher power to enforce justice.

Really, that is all there is:

A fundamentalist wants their god to dominate all others.
A mining company wants a peasant’s land.
A racist wants safety from and control over people of different skin pigmentation.
A man wants to dominate a woman.
A consumer wants the latest gadget for a life of no bother.

Violence ensues, whether in person or by proxy.

Good teachers and parents show children the value of sharing and cooperation. But the world around us teaches other lessons. At the end of the day, people are wounded and die. Some are beheaded or torn to bits in a suicide bombers’ blast. Most, truly, are the innocent casualties of another’s war. Iraq Body Count estimates somewhere between 146,000 and 166,000 violent civilian deaths since the 2003 United States invasion. When combatants are added in, the toll rises to 224,000. When secondarily related deaths are counted (a person in need of medical services or other life necessities they cannot access because of the war), the toll rises to over one-half million (see Huffington Post). And that is just one of today’s many wars.

Whether we are a toddler, a religion, an economic system or a nation, we see dominance as the antidote for our fears. And we set all good teaching and rationality aside, spending any resource to preserve our wounded ego and supposed safety through the use of force.

It does not work. Hitler rose to power by channeling collective fear into violent domination. The whack-a-mole response of World War II put an end to that only to yield the greater horror of nuclear annihilation and the super-power struggles of the Cold War. And no military or terrorist action by anyone in any place since then has achieved a lasting peace as a net result of the violence applied. Humanity ultimately seems cowed only by the insanity of mutually assured destruction.

Is that what we want? Whether Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or Atheist; whether American, Iraqi, Malaysian or Saudi; whether capitalist, socialist, communist or military dictator; whether retiree, school teacher, cashier or toddler on the playground, we make our choices. We make them in each breath.

Will we make the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil choice, the one that says there is not enough and that every other being is a competitor and a threat to our existence? Will we strike out in violence, large or small, overt or subtle, to secure what is never more than a temporary chimera of control? This happens each day at every level, from the battle to dominate our little vehicular turf on the highway to the unfathomable resources thrown into the assertion of military force.

Or will we learn the Tree of Life lesson of all our good teachers – everyone from the Buddha to Jesus to Mohammed to Mr. Rogers? Life works when we listen to others and share. Life works when we give up dominance, altogether, in favor of mutually assured satisfaction.

Life works, in fact, when we are willing to suffer the blow delivered by another and return only compassion and kindness. There is never a victory through violence. There is never ultimate security in threat. We win only when we give up the fight altogether and show another way. And so we teach our children. But we refuse to believe it and live it in every breath and aspect of our adult lives.

Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Walk the second mile. There is nothing passive about these things. All are active assertions of a better way. The Tree of Life grows surely at the end of that road.

Syria, Guatemala, the Twin Towers and the Tree of Life

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Syrian and African refugees are flooding Europe. Foreign ministers of the EU huddle in angst to find a solution to the crisis. A little boy lapped by the waves on the beach captures our heart, a heart that we believe helpless to solve either the hostilities of the terrorist threat or the plight of the poor. Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of Central Americans flee gang and narco-violence only to be housed in detention centers for children in Texas. We, with Hungary, dream of a better wall.

In 1954 the US Central Intelligence Agency, in league with United Fruit Company, Congress, President Eisenhower and the US Department of State, overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. The New York Times, Time Magazine and the rest of the major media of the day swallowed the manufactured anti-communist rhetoric, reporting persistently and with favor what in reality was a thin charade of a military coup against a very democratic regime. The agricultural land and labor of the indigenous people of Guatemala were the true prize.

Alas, it didn’t work out so well and ultimately required millions of dollars of arms, annually, to support successive regimes of oppression in the slaughter or disappearance of an estimated 250,000 Guatemalans, mostly indigenous, in the years between then and the early 1990’s. Today, US and Canadian mining and agricultural interests quietly pursue the same business, in league with governments to engineer trade pacts that pave the way for the interests of wealth at the expense of the powerless. We are blind and complicit in our convenient comfort.

The Guatemalan people, once again last week, spoke up, peacefully and successfully, to unseat the latest propped up corrupt president – a seeming victory. But let’s read the history. Anyone elected who intends to act in the best interests of all the citizens of Guatemala faces North American defamation and, as likely, murder for their efforts. The best interests of all the citizens of Guatemala do not align with the insatiable hunger of the powers that be.

Greed fuels the engine of power abused. Violence and despair are its polluted exhaust. And there is no limit to the sophistication and depravity of lies and destruction that, unchecked, may be served up to keep that turbine whirling.

Fourteen years ago this week, these same powers co-opted the destruction of the World Trade Center towers as the demon of terrorism to mask yet another generation of violence in the Middle East. The bitter fruit of that story is no different than that of Guatemala. Hundreds of thousands, mostly civilian, lie dead (only thousands of our own, a cynically acceptable return on investment) in an ecological, social and political waste land that cranks out profits beyond the pale for military and oil contractors. And the embedded press, as always, missed the story entirely, serving up the dulling Kool-Aid® of terrorist threat to a complacent and willing public.

Time will tell whether the demise of those buildings and lives served only as serendipitously convenient cover or whether, just like in 1954, this was an orchestrated sleight of hand to camouflage greed beyond imagination. No matter at this point. Violence and greed breed poverty and oppression, paving the way for trafficking and profiteering of all kinds. Terrorists, drug lords, pimps and gang leaders are no more than a distracting by-product. The immigrant crisis in Europe and the United States is not the problem of those that are fleeing. Nor is it the result of the immediate violence that pushes these poor people, at last, to embrace the risk and humiliation of their plight. Rather, it is the fruit of the soil tilled by the heart of greed.

There is no political or military solution, friends. There is no magical system or policy. And our Band-Aid® social and relief programs address only symptoms, not the disease. There is only our willful refusal to connect the dots all the way back to the root and make the choice for which we are responsible.

When we are stuck in the fear of death under the metaphorical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we respond with greed, violence and the abuse of power. We do this as individuals. And the heart we choose as individuals becomes the collective heart of our institutions of commerce, religion and government. These work together seamlessly to mask our bottomless fear, hunger and despair.

When the individuals at the helm of obscene wealth and its political, covert and military minions come to terms with the empty depravity of their abusive choices; when we as citizens of privilege are willing to face our complicity in blind addiction to comfort, we may find and embrace the solution to both the misery of the oppressed and the wake of violence that flows in to fill the void of our desecration.

We are neither helpless nor irreparably fallen. We have a choice. There is enough. We are each and all responsible. When we turn to live under the Tree of Life, we choose to embrace rather than oppress the powerless. We refuse to create an enemy that masks and justifies the violence of our greed. And we harvest the fruit of goodness instead of the bitter and rotten fruit we feed to the refugees of our depravity.

Conversion and salvation are not the easy mouthing of the name of Jesus. They are, rather, the conscious and practiced choice of maturity, of becoming the true Self of compassion and kindness we are intended and able to be. Come Lord Jesus. Come Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna and Aunt Susie. Come you and me, with nothing but the desire to heal our hearts, in rest and sharing under the Tree of Life. It is there, for our choosing, at the center of the City of Our Source, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22: 2)

Announcing Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Friends and travelers, with this post I am announcing the launch, in Estes Park, Colorado, of Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Think spiritual fitness center. Think practice for growth and maturation of our Vital Essence, our connection and oneness with Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

For all the richness of our various religious traditions, we have for the most part built them on a foundation of separation from our Creator. Augustine the Roman outmaneuvered Pelagius the Celt in the Christian tradition to ensconce the fall over celebration of original goodness. Our myths and rituals are about appeasing and placating the gods we have created, begging their recognition and touch, hoping for redemption, salvation and eternal life.

In our deluded embrace of the fall, we lose ourselves in fear of physical annihilation, of death, of no longer being. And we turn, individually and in our societies, to greed, hoarding and violence in a panicked and futile attempt at physical preservation. Indeed, we lose sight of, we forget Ourselves. We search for paths home, never recognizing that in reality we never left the house. The path never left us. The path is Us. The path is Home and We are there. Our blindness and isolation are chosen and habitual illusions.

Redemption is the choice to wake up, to open our eyes, to see Ourselves. Salvation is breathing the Breath of Our Being with rest and no fear. Eternal life is the practice of willing connection, of embracing Our True Nature. Dropping the scales from our vision; unlocking the chains of our delusion; shedding the shell of our fear: these things take practice, practice, practice.

Two Trees Center is a place of practice, a place of celebration and nurture of connection, not separation. It is a place to greet, to embrace and to practice our True Nature, the Word written on our hearts, the Eternal Breath of Our Spirit, Our True Self, Our Calling.

At Two Trees Center you will draw freely on every aspect of our rich heritages. You will learn to own and take responsibility for our present and presence. And you will find your light to shine on the creative path forward.

The initial manifestation of the Center is in the practice of spiritual direction, of greeting and accompanying each other on the path. It is already happening in conversations at my dining room table, on mountain paths and by video connection.

The Center will grow. Likely next steps include group spiritual direction and classes to develop practices like centering prayer and meditation. It may bloom further into new ways of celebrating our connection – ways that honor and build on the best practices of our various traditions and new ways that well up in the Spirit of Now. And always, Two Trees Center will foster and nurture the expression of our True Connection in lives of compassionate service.

You need not abandon your tradition to participate any more than you need to abandon your home in order to go to the gym. Come as you are. Celebrate as you are. Become Who You Are. The first step is to recognize and embrace a yearning to be the True Emanation of Spirit, the Word of Love and Breath of Life from which You spring and to which You belong.

The second step is to send an email, voicemail, text or instant message that says “I am coming.” Come in person. Come by the cloud. Take courage today. Choose Life and Your True Self. Contact Two Trees Center to partner with you, to nurture you, to celebrate with you on the path to your True Home under the Tree of Life.

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

*Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne. • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: