Author Archives: Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

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About Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Jerry Kennell of Two Trees in the Garden is an author on post-modern spirituality in Taos, New Mexico. He blogs on spirituality at www.twotreesinthegarden.com. For more information, contact him at jerry@twotreesinthegarden.com. Shalom!

Baptism as Transformation: the Celts, the Romans, the Upanishads

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We have entered, in the ecclesiastical calendar, the beginning of Epiphany, the season of the manifestation and revealing of the ministry of Jesus. In all four traditional gospels this beginning is marked by the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

The practice of baptism likely grows out of the Jewish tradition of mikvah, a ritual immersion in water for repentance from sin, which opens the way for hope and realignment with God. This passing through the water for cleansing and change resonates with the work of John the Baptist, baptizing for the forgiveness of sins.

The baptism of Jesus, then, can be seen as his own identification with the human condition of separation and a symbolic act of washing it off, emerging, and revealing his true oneness with God. In the three synoptic gospels, Jesus sees heaven opening, the Spirit descending as a dove, and a voice saying, “This is my beloved Son.” In the gospel of John, the Baptist also sees this manifestation and affirms that Jesus is the Son of God who will baptize people with the Holy Spirit. Depending on the account, this beginning of ministry unfolds further in Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, where he rejects all power, glory, and addiction to physical desire, in favor of faithful service. Only then does he call his disciples and initiate his ministry of preaching and healing.

For Christians in the early church, baptism became a ritual that marked the death of a broken humanity and the emergence of a new person as a follower of Christ. The practice now, two millennia later, means much the same, a symbolic gateway between an old self and a new being, a new way of life.

There are many ways that baptism is practiced. Immersion, partial immersion, pouring, sprinkling, infant, adult believer’s, is it a rite, is it a sacrament, is it simply symbolic – I guess it’s no surprise that the Christian church, over twenty centuries, has bickered and bantered, sometimes even to death, over the correct and authentic way to baptize.

Growing up in what was known as the Old Mennonite Church – as opposed to the General Conference Mennonite Church, where I suspect people smiled and laughed more – baptism was done by pouring. Rooted in the adult believer’s baptism tradition, for us baptism happened only when we reached the “age of accountability,” meaning we were old enough to understand and be convicted of our sin, seek to repent, be baptized, and thereby enter the body of Christ. Most commonly that “only when” turned out to be twelve years of age.

Accordingly, at some point in seventh grade Sunday School, my classmates and I were each presented with a card asking whether we were ready to repent, be baptized, and become a member of the church. You can imagine that it was hard to say no, especially for me, growing up thinking I was the little engine that should.

Confession for me generally involved wrenching acknowledgment to my parents of some truly petty misdeed. And so I felt compelled to confess to my mother my decision about baptism – a misdeed only in that I did not completely trust that it was real. She, of course, became uncomfortably emotional about it, exacerbating my underlying guilt with the uncertainty.

Pouring – representing the pouring out of the Spirit on believers – involved an elder in the congregation pouring water out of a pitcher into the cupped hands of the pastor, who then released the water onto the head of the supplicant, kneeling beside all the other twelve-year-olds in front of the congregation. I was so nervous and uncomfortable that the sound of the water running off my head, big droplets hitting the carpet, startled me into laughter. You can imagine what that did to a hyperactive conscience.

Suffice it to say that, in the heavily suppressed and private way of a blooming adolescent, I suffered mightily thinking that I was a fraud and not truly saved. I did not feel different. Being a pretty good kid, I did not act especially differently. I did not feel forgiven, I could not tell if Jesus had really come into my heart, I felt like I was supposed to be telling the world around me daily that I had been saved and that they should be, too. I did not want to do that. And I felt pretty guilty about all of it.

There is so much I remember with great affection about my church, a true community of faith. I wish that the invitation had been a little more real and less mechanized. But truly I know now that what I brought to the table simply came back to me in that experience. While I wish it had been different, I trust that it has been useful in my faith journey.

Somewhere around 1990, this and other quandaries nudged me into an exploration across global religious traditions. In my lifelong quest to know, to connect with, and to serve God, I could not let go of the notion that our Creator and Sustainer surely spoke in all places at all times.

For more than thirty years, I have read Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and other scriptures, as well as Sufi poetry, and writings of the Christian mystics. All have led me to a richer and more satisfying understanding of my faith. I have not abandoned biblical scriptures or my core commitment to following the way of Jesus. But I have come to view everything about the life of faith as a journey of transformation. Baptism, for me, clarifies in that light.

A passage from the Katha Upanishad, written by a Hindu sage over 5,000 years ago, captures for me the essence of transformation:

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.

Discovering the disconnect of the small self, individual and isolated ego, from true Self, the person created and already inhabited by God, has led me away from trembling uncertainty about salvation and toward a joyful and fulfilling engagement of transformation.

What does this mean, day-to-day? It means that I practice being somehow more than my body, able to watch the way my separated, hungry, and fearful ego behaves and interacts with the world. It means I can watch and release my ego bound urges to defense and anger. I can see, with compassion, the driver who cuts me off as someone overtaken by their own anger or attachment to power, or just someone who made a mistake, the kind I make on a regular basis. It means, I hope, that I can do things for the satisfaction of doing what I am called to do, neither shying away from nor seeking recognition, letting go of insistence on specific outcomes. It means I can see when my passion gets in the way of relationship, learning to recognize the circumstances where I might run off the rails. It means I can sometimes set aside my selfish filters and soak in the whole true beauty of the person in front of me. It means, perhaps most importantly, that I can forgive myself and others with compassion, knowing that I am loved by something so much bigger. And I can share that love in service with others.

Interestingly, and refreshingly for me, this journey of transformation also corresponds harmoniously with Celtic Christian spirituality. From early times, the Celtic Christians believed in original goodness as opposed to the still dominant Augustinian belief in original sin. Pelagius, a Celtic contemporary of Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, argued that humans, made in the image of God, were free to choose whether or not to sin. There was no denial that we were prone to fall off the path. But there was trust that the image, the goodness of God, was our true center and we could return to it. Augustine argued that the sin of Adam and Eve tainted all humanity for all time and that humans were helpless in their sin. The pope at the time initially sided with Pelagius. But Augustine appealed to the government of Rome, which banned Pelagius, and the pope eventually fell in line. Pelagius was branded a heretic. Such are the ways of Christendom.

But the debate continued in the northern British Isles and this Celtic Christian tradition still thrives there and beyond. John Philip Newell, a theologian, prolific author, and sometime leader in both the Church of Scotland and the Anglican Church, is a leading contemporary proponent of creation spirituality.

I find it interesting that Celtic Christian spirituality traces its parentage to St. John, and the more reflective gospel attributed to him, while Roman spirituality has maintained the hierarchical line of Peter as the first pope, with Matthew its gospel standard. The Celts hold as a central image John leaning on Jesus’s breast at the last supper. They say that John, the presumptive but never actually named disciple whom Jesus loved, listened to the heartbeat of God – such a beautiful image for a life of faith.

So what does all this have to do with baptism? In the dominant Augustinian lineage, the one of age old Christendom, the one in which most of us were raised, baptism signifies salvation from a desperate and unshakeable state of eternal damnation. The only solution to this terrible state is through faith in the atoning act of the crucifixion, meaning – let’s be honest – the required bloodletting and tortuous murder of God’s supposedly only child. Baptism in this lineage is a drowning, a putting to death of the evil self, resurrected as a new and perfected being only because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

In the Celtic Christian tradition baptism is more like a welcome home to the true and eternal family of creation, a celebration of the image of God at the heart of every living thing. A believer emerges from the water cleaned up and shining, having recognized and washed away the effects of a fearful and falsely disconnected ego.

While it may seem odd, I understand the heresy of this for both church and state. These “powers that be” simply cannot deal with a cohort of its minions experiencing that much freedom and joy, especially without their permission and mediation.

“The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in light.” Such amazing wisdom. Freedom and true joy are found in the choice to be free of the ceaseless judgments and grasping of ego, resting instead in the capital S Self. From the Celtic perspective, we could say that the small s ego self is not a different being. It’s just not awake to its true connection to God. I believe, with the Celts, that the difference between small s self and supreme Self is a choice we can make. The journey of Jesus through baptism, the various temptations in the wilderness, followed by his ministry is a beautiful example of this transformative journey. And it is a journey each of us can choose.

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine yourself as a young child in the Garden of Eden. You are sitting by life’s fountain. If you look up with the innocent eyes of an ego that does not know its connection to creation, you might see what you believe is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You might become afraid, knowing suddenly that you will die. You might fear that there is not enough to eat, and you will starve. You might believe that no one else cares.

In our fear, friend, we fled the Garden, grasping what we thought was power to protect ourselves. We exercised it in violence, greed, and the oppression of others – a failed attempt to save our isolated selves from what we believed to be our certain end.

Close your eyes again and imagine your Creator calling to you. “Dear child, I have created and placed you in the garden of beauty and goodness. Look, you are beside the fountain and under the Tree of Life. Everything you need to enjoy life and love is here. Don’t be afraid. You are not alone. We and everything and everyone around you are one. Here, let’s pick up this little frightened ego of yours. I love it as my own. There is no need to kill or destroy it, or anything else. Let’s just carry it back where it belongs, here with your family and your people. We’ll be right here under this tree with everything you need, beside the fountain that flows with the water of life. Look, here’s a blanket. Let’s have a picnic.”

And baptism? Well, as we say here in New Mexico, water is life. So many ways to know and love it:

  • Healing water
  • Peace like a river
  • Fountain of life
  • The shore
  • The acequia
  • Parting of the waters
  • Crossing over
  • The Living water

I don’t believe at all that the water of baptism is for the drowning death of anyone made in the image of our Creator. No, no, never.

O let all who thirst, let them come to the water. Let them come.

© Jerry S Kennell

Welcome to 2025

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Welcome to 2025. What do you think it will be like?

  • Will it be the most interesting year ever?
  • Will it be the happiest year ever?
  • Will we achieve world peace and an economy that serves all the people?
  • Will the globe get warmer or cooler?
  • Will we heal division?
  • Will we start a civil war?

Here’s what I think. I think our national imagination is moving powerfully and rapidly toward destruction of the current order, whatever that is perceived to be, and replacement, for a significant block of time, with violence, rubble, and chaos. Increasingly I read about people on opposite sides of a sociopolitical spectrum arming themselves, convinced that they must engage in violence either to achieve change or to fend off aggression from the other side.

I see the photos of death, despair, and ruin from Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan and I am shaken by the  possibility, moving toward probability, that we will begin to see the same pictures of destroyed cities and ruined landscape, with the displacement of population, crippling of health, education, and physical infrastructure, and accompanying starvation and disease in our own communities. I see shifting coalitions of armed militia and vigilantes abandoning law and decency to force their beliefs and burn out their hatred on the bodies of the despised and vulnerable. I see leaders encouraging and endorsing this violence, allying themselves with other powerful and narcissistic patriarchs across the globe.

Regularly I hear people talking, in decreasingly hypothetical terms, about leaving the country, taking their money, and running.

Perhaps this is pessimistic foolishness. Perhaps it is my suckered response to media hype, both liberal and conservative. Perhaps it is a manifestation of the fearful little aspect of our humanity that is drawn to look at disaster.

No matter. The important thing today is the choice about how I will live my life, regardless of the cultural backdrop. Will I stand and resist? If so, will my resistance include violence? Will I duck and run, even to the point of leaving my country? Will I stick my head in the sand and do nothing to prepare for a world that I don’t want to think about or see?

I am pleased and comforted, though not surprised, that beacons of light appear to guide us, the brighter for their stark contrast to the darkness that threatens. Jimmy Carter’s death on December 29 brings reflections on decency in leadership, courage to stand against the grain of misused power, and the holiness of works, large and small, for compassion, peace, and justice. Photos of him standing in blue jeans and cardigan at Camp David with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin or kneeling on a roof with a hammer for Habit for Humanity, remind us of and invite us to choices for light and life, the choice to join and stand with others in faithful and compassionate community.

The film Bonhoeffer, which I viewed on New Year’s Day, tells a story of deep faith incarnated in teaching and action, the gathering of saints who became the Confessing Church, standing aside from and in contrast to the forces of darkness that swept up the German populace in the 1930s.

While I have not been in his shoes, I take exception to Bonhoeffer’s choice to join the effort to assassinate Hitler. I am, after all, a tribal Mennonite, grounded in a commitment to nonviolence. But I am also humbled and ashamed that many, perhaps most of my people in Germany at that time, chose to duck and run, to put their heads in the sand, or even to welcome Hitler’s regime. Bonhoeffer’s example of courage to stand for something so much brighter and better, at a time when that stance meant almost certain death, is powerfully instructive as I consider the offering of my life today.

There is no day when the right choice is other than love – love expressed in standing with the oppressed, feeding the hungry, and healing the broken. But there are days when the light of that choice shines out more clearly because of encroaching darkness. Join me, stand with me, let’s share the strength that, together, can make us that bright beacon today and for all the days ahead. Let’s shine that light as resistance to the power of evil and as loving invitation to transformation, a better path, for all who fall under its spell.

© Jerry S Kennell

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Salvation Is Not What You Were Told

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Jesus saves. Boomers grew up hearing it and seeing it on signs by Baptist churches and on the marquees of city missions. The subtext was this: You were born a “sinner.” You “committed” things that were called “sins” because your nature was “fallen.” Jesus was nailed to a cross, suffering and bleeding as a sacrifice so that God would forgive your “sins.” God needed that blood, in fact the blood of his only son, or He (God, who remains He in the more oppressive parts of the cult) was not going to save your soul and would send you to hell, burning in eternal fire.

Other Protestant denominations presented maybe a softer version, but the intent was still the same. Jesus died for your sins. God be praised, because if this plan for salvation hadn’t come along, there would have been no hope for anyone for the past two millennia. At least before that there was provisional animal sacrifice that counted as kind of a beta test of the system until it was perfected.

Sacrifice appears in cultures all around the world, going back ten thousand years, and who knows how many more, before there were drawings on cave walls and, eventually, written language. The gods and spirits had to be pleased and appeased to assure good crops, success in hunting and warfare, and fertility. And generally there had to be a priest or other officiant who was called out by the gods and the community as an acceptable intercessor between sinful or simply vulnerable humans and the deity. And to this day, there are those who find solace in some form of the practice.  

For centuries, Christian scholars and theologians have argued and refined the meaning of Jesus’s sacrifice, but the central concept has held on tight in the consciousness of the Christian tradition. The idea that his death was sacrifice for atonement has remained central.

That’s a funny thing, and probably the biggest reason that Western Christianity is sliding with increasing speed into the landfill of forgotten culture. This is truly a shame, because this whole blood sacrifice thing is not what Jesus spoke about or intended for his followers. His real message has been largely ignored. This also is a shame, as this message has huge relevance for our times.

Jesus addressed an oppressed citizenry during an era of powerful foreign military occupation and, as now, an increasingly irrelevant religious cult. And his message was this:

  • He announced his campaign with Isaiah’s language about release for the captive, recovery of sight for the blind, and declaration of the year of Jubilee, a season of economic rest and readjustment to make sure no one suffered at the bottom of a disparate social order. No wonder Rome had few qualms about killing him.
  • He spent his ministry healing people, often saying people’s sins were forgiven. This is grossly misinterpreted to mean that “sins” were the cause of illness and disability. He was quite specific that this was not the case. His intention was to buck a religious cult that used this system of never good enough to keep the populace obligated. No wonder the cult leadership had few qualms about killing him.
  • What he was really saying is, your “sins” have always been forgiven. You have not been accused; you have been called. The important thing is to learn from errors and grow up.
  • Healing, kindness, sharing with those in need, and absolute nonviolence were the entirety of his message. Love each other. And when you do that, you, just like me (Jesus speaking here), are a child of the Spirit, a true child of your Creator.
  • To make this concrete, he continually invited followers to join him as a citizen of the kingdom – let’s say country – of heaven. This was not imaginary or symbolic. It was a complete change of life – one that should seemingly have been acceptable in any religious or political context because it was so non-offensive. The powers, however, would have none of it because it put people in control of themselves, outside the system of sanctions and rewards, outside the winner takes all economy used by political and religious institutions alike to keep people subjugated.
  • This turning, this move of primary citizenship out of a state of oppression and into a state of freedom, characterized by compassionate community, was the whole call to and meaning of salvation. Zaccheus was saved, for instance, when he made the turn from a life founded on the economic oppression of others through manipulation of tax gathering, to one of sharing. He was relieved, saved, from the burden of his oppressive way of life, finding true satisfaction in joining a community of fairness and love.

Our times, like many, share much with the times of Jesus. The religious cult – in the current western situation, all variants of Christianity – has become irrelevant, grasping at straws to keep its numbers strong and its economic resources flowing. And we can see government collapsing around us as it jockeys for position in the world and has lost touch with all but an elite that is shrinking in numbers as it increases in wealth.

The genuine religious invitation, the invitation to conversion, is the invitation to step out of the institutional rat race of wealth and power and step into true humanity. Government and institutional religion might choose to follow. More likely, they will close ranks and resort to violence to regain what they perceive as lost control.

The thing about the choice of true conversion is the deep sense of satisfaction and peace found by those who choose to turn. Somehow our Creator hardwired us for connection, kindness, and mutual support, not for an attachment to power and gain which can never be fully satiated. What a joy, to consider and make the turn away from grasping and oppression and toward nonviolent and compassionate connection. You and I are invited to make that turn and live that life.

The biblical narrative tells of two trees in the Garden of Eden. But I believe there was only one, the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations. We turned it into the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we let fear take control, turning us away from sharing community and toward grasping individuality. The call has always been to remove the false mask of isolation and fear, and to come back to trust in a community of kindness and connection.

© Jerry S Kennell

Jesus Needs a New Religion

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America is not a Christian nation. America was never a Christian nation. The label itself is an oxymoron.

Christianity died, institutionally, when it became Christendom with its fourth century marriage to Rome at the altar of Constantine and Eusebius. And it has remained Christendom to this day, especially in the nation that more than any other conflates its image with an imagined Jesus.

Politicians of all stripes close their speeches with God bless you and God bless these United States of America. Our money, ironically, says “In God We Trust.” The laying of the cornerstone of the National Cathedral, conflation at its finest created by an act of Congress, was overseen by President Theodore Roosevelt, and placement of its final finial by President George H. W. Bush.

In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, who became the best known governor of the Massachusetts Colony, likened his vision of a moral society to Jesus’s description in Matthew of a city on a hill, a sentinel of the kingdom of heaven for the entire world to see. In recent decades, this reference has been cited in the campaigns and speeches of John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Elizabeth Warren, to name just a few. The implication is that the United States is Jesus’s own bright city on a hill, a community of kindness, peace, and inclusion, or at least democracy. This is an act of co-optation, not appointment.

Christians left and right claim this territory for the United States, and even more specifically for their own political community. Conservative Christians unite with one party, mainline and progressives with the other. All miss the mark. Followers of Jesus are completely distinct from the Christians of Christendom, the Christian appellation having lost its integrity.

  • Followers of Jesus know no borders. There are none in the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus demonstrated in his meeting of the woman at the well and his parable of the good Samaritan. Every neighbor is to be loved exactly as the self.
  • Followers of Jesus do not go to war. Jesus rejected violence of every kind in favor of inserting oneself, as he did, between victim and perpetrator, taking the blow even if it meant death. No candidate and few Christians, with the exception sometimes of the small sects of Anabaptists and Quakers, advocate this stance. Violence, in defense of “truth, justice, and the American way,” is central to the American myth, the rallying cry that unifies, breaking down the boundaries of all politics in times of threat. This is not the way of Jesus.
  • Followers of Jesus do not judge others. They know only love. How many times have you heard, “Love the sinner but hate the sin?” Those are not the words of Jesus. They are a thin excuse for exclusion of the inconvenient or despised other.
  • Followers of Jesus do not make, carry, or export arms. Christian America claims moral high ground while arming the world to the teeth, defending supposed self-interest while quietly and invisibly padding corporate profit. Eight out of nine parties complicit in the death of an estimated 5.4 to 6 million Congolese in the wars since 1996 used weapons supplied by the United States. And we continue more openly in our current proxy wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
  • Followers of Jesus serve each other, not the bottom line. This is the biggest and best hidden contradiction of the American myth. Christians, conservative and progressive, throughout American history, have confused productivity with morality. And they have accepted as natural order an economy that demands the service of the poor for the benefit of the rich. Witness the vast community of undocumented immigrants, tacitly ignored when not openly despised, that cut up our beef and serve our fries, or the global sweatshops creating our comfort and convenience. The economy of Jesus serves people. In an American perspective, people serve the economy.

Jesus brushed aside the Pharisees that tried to trip him up about payment of taxes. The coin, indeed, is minted by and belongs to the emperor. But the follower is called to be in the world and not of the world, living with integrity and vulnerability the citizenship of the kingdom of heaven, a realm of the heart that transcends the boundaries of any nation or empire. Give the empire its due, which does not include one’s service to violence or sacrifice of soul. Give your body and soul to love.

Empire and institutional religion, supposed enemies, quickly closed ranks against Jesus and his community of nonviolent love and inclusion. Nothing has changed today. The conflation of Christianity with America has compromised the following of Christ. Jesus needs a new religion.

© Jerry S Kennell

Ending Polarization Through Kindness

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What country do you live in? These days in the United States it might seem hard to tell. Or maybe it is easy because everyone knows what country everyone else lives in. They’re a fascist or they’re a radical leftist. Either way, my existence is mortally imperiled by their existence. And the only path forward is to make sure my side has more electoral votes or the guns to blow away the cheaters if the count does not go my way.

We are angrier and angrier, jumping up and down, yelling, making threats, certain that the end is near if our side does not win. We spin and twirl like whirling dervishes to the tune of unseen social media influencers with who knows what motivations. If their goals are chaos and self-destruction, hats off to them. They are truly amazing and bound to win.

Everyone wants to save America. Here’s a suggestion. Let’s try kindness. You say, “I will if the other side does, too.” I say, “No. Let’s try kindness.” It takes two sides to start and have a fight. It takes one side to end it, not by blowing the other side to oblivion, but by – heavens to Murgatroyd – just not fighting. But, Holy Captain America, we can’t do that! That makes us losers!

Peace in the Middle East will never come from continued acts of terrorism followed by scorched earth retaliation. Progress will never happen in Congress with turf fights at all costs. And when was the last time you or I successfully engaged another driver in a round of road rage? And even if we did not physically engage, how useful was that shot of adrenaline and cortisol? Did we enjoy that moment? Was the burn healthy and healing? Are we happy and satisfied with the percentage of our lifetime spent feeling that way?

No? Then for our own sake, why not take a deep breath and let it go? Our antagonist is only our antagonist if we let them be. They cannot make us feel or act one way or another. Only you and I can do that. What amazing power we have! And the coolest part is, this silly little truth has equal validity from the playground to the battleground, and all points in between.

There were two special trees in the Garden of Eden – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. One has roots of fear and fruits of greed, defense, and violence. The other has roots of trust and fruits of kindness, compassion, and community. But look again. They are the same tree! It’s just my chosen point of view. What amazing power I’ve been granted!

Woman, Wisdom and The Word: Reflections on the Divine Feminine

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For reference, with text included after the blog:

  • Proverbs 8:22-31; The words of Sophia, the Wisdom of God
  • John 1:1-5; 9-14; In the beginning was the Word
  • Gospel of the Beloved Companion 1:1; 2:1-3; The words of Mary Magdelene, the Beloved Companion
  • From the Book of Wisdom, Chapter 7; More from Sophia
  • Suzanne; Song by Leonard Cohen

Scripture is such a mess. Or maybe it’s that we are such a mess when we come to it. We can’t decide what is literal and what is metaphorical. We can’t decide what it means to be the inspired Word. Does that mean that God just grabbed somebody and put exactly the right words in their mouth, in their pen? And did it all stay perfect despite coming through a human mind, conditioned by the culture and times? Did God really appoint a council of male patriarchs to decide what was true and accurate about Jesus, three hundred years after his life? Did inspiration die with the closing of the canon? And is the Holy Bible the only true scripture?

Humankind has spent millennia debating these things. Wars have been fought, are being fought every day still, over whose truth is true, whose land and people it is tied to, and what ought to be done about that. Scripture has been used to weaponize power, maybe as often as it has been used to sooth and heal a broken soul.

In the Christian tradition, patriarchy, for example, has asserted and abused power consistently, perhaps as early as the listing of who was a disciple (only males in the authorized writing), and certainly since the church, the intended bride of Christ, eloped with the empire of Rome in the fourth century CE.

As a man of unmerited privilege, I am among the least qualified to speak of the feminine aspect of God’s relationship to creation. But I can at least recall, in my own upbringing, that well into the 1950’s and early 60’s, women in my rural Mennonite church wore little white net caps called coverings because the Apostle Paul, over twenty-centuries ago said that a woman should cover her head during worship. And the same church, as recently as twenty years ago, split over questions of whether women could serve even as ushers, let alone ministers. I saw one of the pastors at that time slam his Bible to the floor and declare that we might as well just stomp on it, stomp on the Word of the Lord, if we are going to allow such things. I am pleased to say that the remnant that remained at Roanoke Mennonite Church, the families nearest and dearest to my own, in more recent years have a pastoral team of three, two of whom are women.

The first scripture referenced above is from the book of Proverbs. For whatever reason, as part of the set of scriptures labeled wisdom, Proverbs received little to no attention in my upbringing. Maybe some small consternation and debate over “spare the rod and spoil the child.” But it was certainly never said to me that wisdom, the purported author and narrator of the book, was Sophia, the lovely feminine breath of God, waiting to touch and nurture me.

In the summer of 1972, nineteen years-of-age going on twenty, I spent eight weeks studying in England. In that same year, I felt compelled to read the Holy Bible from cover to cover. You know, it’s really not that long. It’s just that we spend so much time, like I’m doing here, trying to make so much of every little word.

I digress. In July of that summer, during a course on Shakespeare in Stratford upon Avon, I arrived at the book of Proverbs. She took me in, although I was still blind to the femininity of her voice. I was blown away by her words, and hopelessly drawn by a desire to be filled with wisdom. That filling became my earnest and constant prayer. Even today I enjoy looking back at my tattered Revised Standard Version and seeing the many highlights and note I wrote during that encounter.

And so we have these lovely voices of delight and wisdom today. The wonder and thrill of Sophia co-creating everything, every little thing, with the Creator. The beautiful image of the Word made flesh in John. And Mary Magdelene reveling in her connection to the great I Am. “I am with him in the beginning, and I am with him in the end, and I know that his testimony is true.”

So who are these characters, these expressions of the Creator presented to us? These scriptures tell us that there is this woman named wisdom, or Sophia in Greek. She was, is, in the beginning and now with God, part of God, loving and creating. Her title is Wisdom. She delights, with God, in people. Her name is also Spirit. She is the breath of God, the breath that carries and makes it possible for the Word of God to be heard, the breath that gives life to human flesh and all that lives.

If we believe her story, Sophia has co-existed forever with the Word. And we might also see that, in fact, she has a brother named Jesus. There’s a surprise, but maybe not if you are a real trinitarian. Jesus, too, was, is, in the beginning with God, part of God, loving and creating. He delights, with God, in the little ones and heals all that is broken. His title is Word. Together they are light and life, gifting with joy to all of creation.

In both John and the Beloved Companion, The Word, through the breath of spirit, became flesh, and all who received him learned that they are children of God. They are not like children of God, not kind-of children of God. With Wisdom and the Word, they – you, we – are fully children of God. As children, they/we see and delight in all of creation and in the human race. We can do that every day, delight in each other, and in the entire human race.

But many would not/will not own being children. They would not/will not trust in being part of the light and the life. They could not/cannot accept and rest in just being part, and not the whole. They wanted it all for themselves, and so they created their own tools of darkness. They created fear, the fear of death and of hunger and of pain. And they directed that fear into domination, and anger, and greed, into hatred and violence. And they turned that hatred against the flesh of the Word, and they killed that flesh because it was everything they were not, and they could not stand it. And they continue to kill it to this very day.

But they could not/cannot kill the Word. It lives on in every cup of cold water, every act of forgiveness, every blessing of a child, every bite of food for the hungry, every touch of compassion, every urge toward community. The Word lives on in all who became, who become children because they understand and delight that the Word is Love. And in each one, the Word again becomes flesh, walking with light and kindness beside and through the darkness that continues to hate, to claim false power, to name everything, living and material, as its own, only its own.

It was different with Sophia, and yet the same. She, too, became flesh, the flesh of woman, the flesh of birth, the urge to beauty, to the ecstasy that births new life, to the joy of creating and the tenderness of nurturing. As the breath of God, she carried the Word in her arms, fed it of her body, taught it and raised it to learn and to know her Wise ways. Sometimes the whole is just too much for us to see. So She mirrored, she holds the mirror to the Word, bringing it into focus for every creature so that they can see and know the truth of Love, the truth of their nature as authentic children. We begin to see, with awe and wonder, Leonard Cohen’s heroes in the seaweed, the children in the morning.

But many turned on Sophia, too. They blamed her, from earliest days, for trying to share God’s gift of the Tree of Life, planted in the center of the Garden of Eden. They wanted all the fruit for themselves, wanted not to be part of creation, but to be the very creator and controller. They took the fruit of the Tree of Life and renamed the tree as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, claiming for themselves the power to judge, to dominate, to consume, and to exploit. Their accomplishment has been the defoliation, decimation and desecration of the Garden itself, and the legacy of resentment, fear, and abuse of women.

Because Sophia/Woman represented the combination of giving and vulnerability, they hated her as much as they hated the Word, maybe even more. Over the eons she was often ravished and despised. Evil men feared the power of her attraction, her giving, her kindness. They insisted that she was only pure and acceptable as a virgin. They filled her with demons before admitting her to the company of Jesus. They tried to stone her in the presence of the Word. They could not stand the power or her life-giving presence.

But she was the one to whose home the Word went for refuge during his ministry. She was the one who was there at his trial and did not deny him and run away. She was the one that stayed with him at the foot of the cross. And she was the one that came, that had the power to recognize him, the first one whose name he spoke in loving tenderness when he emerged from the tomb, uncovering the lie of the false powers of darkness and death.

And so we praise you, Sophia/Wise Woman/Magdalene/Spirit Breath that for all time has carried the Word. We praise you, co-creator that participates in, delights in and marvels at creation. We praise you, Spirit, that enlivens us, gifting wisdom and sound counsel, filling us with the very presence of God. We praise the wholeness of a Creator, that despite the efforts of evil over the ages, presents over and over as the most complete of beings, embodying the amazing entirety of full humanity, created in the image, created in the image. We praise you, both Breath and Word that come to us in all times and places, filling us with wisdom, animating us with love.

Hail Mary, all the Marys, all the Eves, all the Lydias and Suzannes and Sophias, full of grace. Blessed art thou among women. And blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

Proverbs 8:22-31, New Revised Standard Version

The words of Sophia, the Wisdom of God

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

When there were no depths I was brought forth,

when there were no springs abounding with water.

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth—

when he had not yet made earth and fields,

or the world’s first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit,

so that the waters might not transgress his command,

when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker;

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race.

John 1:1-5; 9-14, New Revised Standard Version

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. 

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to

become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Gospel of the Beloved Companion 1:1; 2:1-3

The words of Mary, the Beloved Companion

This is the testimony of the son of humanity once known as Yeshua. All that I say here is true; of his words, his deeds, his life and his death. You will know my words are true because others have testified of the same, and their words are the same, and where two testify together the law says that it is true. I am with him in the beginning, and I am with him in the end, and I know that his testimony is true.

There came a man out of the land of Yehuda, sent from the Spirit, whose name was Yeshua, son of Yosef in the tribe of Yudah. In him was life and that life was the light of humanity, the light that shines against the darkness, and never has the darkness overcome it.

Yeshua lived and walked among us. We saw his glory, such glory as of a true son of humanity, full of grace and truth. He was in the world, and through him the world would be born anew, but the world did not recognize him.

He came to his own, and those who were his own did not receive him. But as many as did receive him, to them he gave the power to become the children of the Living Spirit, for those who believed in his teachings were born into life not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of the Spirit.

From the Book of Wisdom, Chapter 7, Jerusalem Bible

All that is hidden, all that is plain, I have come to know, instructed by Wisdom.… Within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, … dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying…. She pervades and permeates all things. She is the untarnished mirror of God’s active power.… She makes all things new. In each generation she passes into holy souls.

From Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind

And you think maybe you’ll trust her

For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

Time to Reboot Religion in America: Thoughts for Thanksgiving 2023

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A talk given November 19, 2023 at Taos UCC

In 1630, John Winthrop, a lawyer, vested Lord of the Manor of Groton, civic leader, and fervent Puritan wrote a sermon called A Modell of Christian Charity. It’s unclear if he wrote it before embarking on a ship to New England in August of that year, or onboard the ship. No matter. The sermon wasn’t published for many years, and we don’t really know who heard it. Again, no matter.

The important thing is that the sermon encapsuled the vision of the most influential governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company and captured the powerful religious impetus that guided the founding of the United States. Its principles are central to our national mythos. Its doctrines are hardwired into national character and practice right down to the present.

To understand the sermon, and Winthrop, we need first to understand the context in which it was created. Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in Wittenberg, Germany just over a century before the first waves of English migration to the Americas, and three quarters of a century after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. The Renaissance, with its revival of classical antiquity and love of learning, was in full bloom. The Protestant Reformation was the religious fruit of this energetic cauldron, and its English iteration was reaching its peak in the first half of the 17th century.

Key branches of the reformation included: Lutheranism, the first small step away from Catholicism; Calvinism, the tradition of the Dutch Reformed, Puritan and Presbyterian churches; and Henry VIII’s Anglican Church, a sort of warmed-over version of Catholicism that, conveniently and expediently, moved the power of the church from Rome to England and allowed Henry to annul his various marriages.

Lesser branches included the Anabaptists, who advocated adult baptism of believers, maintained separation of church and state, and, following their understanding of the example of Jesus, refused to go to war. The Quakers in England also adopted pacificism and focused on the discovery of “that of God” or the “light of God”, present, they believed, in each person.

Plenty to pick from and plenty to pick a fight about. Lutherans and Catholics, in the best spirit of Jesus, drowned Anabaptists, except when they beheaded them, or burned them at the stake. Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII, reigned as Queen of England and Ireland from 1553-1558, returning to Catholicism. In her short tenure, she earned the nickname Bloody Mary, having burned over 280 Anglicans at the stake. Charles I, King of England from 1625-1649 and married to a Catholic, attempted a return to an absolute monarchy. He favored the more traditional Anglicans over the further reformed elements, like the Puritans. Unfortunately for him, Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarian New Model Army, composed primarily of Puritans, overthrew Charles in 1649. Alas he was beheaded for high treason. By then, however, many of the Puritans, having had enough of what they considered to be the other godless rabble, had largely migrated to New England where they intended to find liberty – meaning liberty for themselves – and establish a more righteous civilization, governed by property owning men of Godly principles.

This stuff sounds almost funny. It wasn’t and it isn’t. These were Christians not even killing members of other faiths. They were Christians killing Christians. And it didn’t stop on the other side of the Atlantic.

Perhaps the antiquarian language of Winthrop’s sermon obscures this for us today. But the Puritans did not want religious freedom, they wanted religious exclusivity. So they came to a land which had never known anything of private property or legal ownership until the Kings of England claimed it as theirs and doled it out in colony parcels to the migrants. Forget the natives (truly they did), forget turkey, forget corn pudding. Here was some real cause for Thanksgiving!

How real was the exclusivity? When Quakers showed up in the Massachusetts Colony, they were expelled. If they came back, they were hung. Not that the Puritans could agree internally on what or who was pure. There was plenty of infighting among leadership and the Salem witch trials outdid all in the desperate striving for salvation.

The Puritans, of course, weren’t alone in this religious intolerance in the land of the free. As a matter of expedience, the King of England granted Maryland as a place to isolate and assuage the Catholics. Maryland was tolerant. Sort of. Unless you refused to confess belief in the triune God. That remained a capital offense.

And the Anglicans of Virginia had it best of all. They forswore the ecclesiastical governance and courts of the motherland as well as the stuffy do-gooders of New England and made up their own rules, just like their good father Henry VIII. Talk about religious freedom. How convenient for the import and enslaving of Black Africans.

An auspicious beginning, indeed, for Winthrop’s City on a Hill and, ultimately this one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Where has all this gone in the nearly 400 years since Winthrop’s sermon? The answer, I believe, can be found most succinctly in the 5 tenets of Calvinism, central to the faith and practice of the Puritans and, I would assert, the backbone to this day of Protestant Christianity and national ideology in America.

All you need is the acronym TULIP; T-U-L-I-P. Cute, I guess, when you think of the Dutch Reformed Church as a bastion of Calvinism. Let’s spell it out:

T Total Depravity – We are hopelessly fallen, start to finish and it is only the grace of God that saves us from this deplorable and despicable condition.

U Unconditional Election – God has known from Alpha to Omega, from eternity to eternity, the names of all who would be saved.

L Limited Atonement – Only these preordained elect are atoned for by the sacrificial blood of Jesus, the finally perfect human and therefor finally acceptable sacrifice to appease a righteously offended God.

I  Irresistible Grace – If you are on that list, you will find it impossible to resist the grace of God that will pursue you relentlessly. But there’s a catch.

P  Perseverance of the Saints – Some may think they are saints. But if they fall away, they never really were.

Put this Puritan theology together with two other key aspects of Winthrop’s vision and we have, I believe, a deadly cocktail that intoxicates us straight to the mess we find ourselves in today.

The first issue is conflation of church and state. Let’s go back to Winthrop:

“For the work we have in hand, it is by a mutual consent through a special overruling providence, and a more than ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ, to seek out a place of Cohabitation and Consortship under a due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical.”

Pardon me, but when did Jesus mention the need for either ecclesiastical or civil government? Yes, he talked about the Reign of God, the Kingdom of Heaven – which he consistently said had “come near” whenever people reflected the kindness, compassion, forgiveness, healing, and peace of his teachings. That’s all. He advocated being in the world but not of the world, inasmuch as both government and organized religion represent power structures of this world. Give them their due, the due they demand. Put up with them. But live the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God. Serve all. Love all.

That has not been the history of Christianity in America. Much as we parade separation of church and state in the United States, the conflation is deeply embedded. Every speech, it seems, of every presidential candidate ends with God Bless You and God Bless These United States of America. The slogan of the American Legion is For God and Country. The National Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington was created by an act of Congress in 1893. According to Wikipedia, “Construction began on September 29, 1907, when the foundation stone was laid in the presence of President Theodore Roosevelt . . . and ended 83 years later when the “final finial” was placed in the presence of President George H. W. Bush.” Fitting, truly, that both were Godly men of war.

Winthrop’s cooptation of the Matthew image of a city upon a hill is now an almost ubiquitous necessity in political success. In recent decades it has been cited in the campaigns and speeches of John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Elizabeth Warren, to name just a few. The implication, my friends, is that the United States is Jesus Christ’s own bright city on what hill, Capitol Hill?, a beacon lighting the way for the people of Guatemala, the Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Venezuela? You name it. Praise God and sell the ammunition. Conflation, dear friends, has served the government far better than it has served the church.

The second big issue is the misguided use and abuse of sin and salvation which, together, serve as an effective valence to distract us from the patriarchal economic violence that acts as the engine of prosperity and comfort, as well as of economic and social abuse, for the United States and its global relationships.

Personal morality, coupled with perpetual striving forward and backsliding on a treadmill to salvation have been the hallmarks of Protestant religion in the Americas from the 17th century right down to the present. While Jesus never created this kind of angst for those who came in great need to him for healing or protection, this intense preoccupation was seeded by the Puritans and has been husbanded by all manner of Protestants in the following centuries. This strong preoccupation, I contend, has helped allow liberal economics to make an end run around a religion that should have been paying attention to this engine of unjust disparity.

Let’s go back to Winthrop’s opening words:

“God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”

Not that anyone is looking back to these very words for permission, but it is significant to note their presence, right up front, in the ideological root of our society.

This patriarchy of wealth and privilege rules Wall Street, the corporate board room, the boards of elite universities, and trickles right down the ladder to the life of the humblest “illegal” immigrant that cuts up the chicken and cooks the fries for these “high and eminent in power and dignity.” And the shrinking middle class seems deaf, dumb, and blind in its steady slide toward the bottom.

But what does this have to do with religion? First, from Winthrop’s words forward, the disparity has been justified as the God ordained natural order of things. Second, religion ranks right up there in this patriarchy of wealth, privilege, and power. The Catholic Church in the United States has over 71,000,000 members. I don’t need to tell you about patriarchal hierarchy for this one. I will share, however, that I was once part of a small gathering hosted for tea by then Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, at the Cardinal’s private residence, 452 Madison Avenue, in Manhattan. The pomp and opulence were profane beyond imagination.

Next in line, on the Protestant side, is the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 8,415,000 members, overseen by, you guessed it, 100% professing straight males. While the denomination came to terms in recent years with the possibility of male African American leadership, churches ordaining women are still summarily expelled.

So what’s the point here? Let’s start with what it isn’t. The point here is not that nothing good has come out of either the church or, for that matter, the material achievements of the United States. Who’s to judge the good work of the church, for instance, during the civil rights movement, or who’s to say that vaccines for smallpox, polio or COVID should not have been made?

But it is so clear that our excess, created by our dogged commitment to the economy, over and above humanity and the entirety of creation, is on the verge of destroying all of God’s good work on this earth.

Friends, we are not, we were never a Christian nation. The term is an oxymoron. And our religion has moved far from the bounds and message of the one we follow.

Jesus did not advocate taking anyone’s land and turning it into the private property of his followers. He preached the kingdom, or as Pam Shepherd said so eloquently, the kindom of all humanity, with their Creator, right here, right now, just like in heaven. Jesus did not preach a morality code and work ethic. He preached the beatitudes. Jesus did not preach the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, used since the 15th century right through the present to rape the world and its people in his name, extracting resources for selfish gain, disenfranchising, enslaving or just starving and killing any who get in the way. God help them if they flee to our border in hope of real salvation.

Jesus preached forgiveness, plain and simple, not justification by faith, not predestination, and not election of some fixed number of saints, primarily to be found in the economic, intellectual, and political elite of England and their progeny.

We need the body of Christ to be a real life. We need it to be a strong voice. We need it to be an exemplar of compassionate and authentic relationship, separate from the power structures of the world. We need a reboot of religion in America.

What is a Prophet?

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As an English major in college, I was required to take a course in public speaking. Thinking that was silly, I asked the professor if I could, instead, do an independent study in oral interpretation. I was surprised and pleased when the answer was yes.

This was a Mennonite College, back in the days when liberal arts were still valued as a foundation to all learning. All students were required to take at least two courses in Bible and religion. I had recently taken the Old Testament Survey class. Being the early 1970s, I found myself captivated, maybe even just blown away, by the social justice writing of the Hebrew prophets. The eighth century BCE prophet Amos, especially, connected for me the dots of radically speaking truth to power. For my independent study, I decided that I would do public readings of the entire book of Amos. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will say that it was one of the most magnificent experiences of my undergraduate career.

Amos did not mince words. While couched in the language of the Word of the Lord, he delivered no holds barred criticism of the injustice he saw around him. And he named it as incompatible, not with the Kingdom of Israel, but rather with the Reign of God, a land, a way of life that was bound not by mountains and rivers and political boundaries, but by the walls of a beating heart, a heart as big and open as the entire cosmos.

The climax of this short eight chapter book of poetic invective comes in Chapter 5, where Amos just flays the flesh of a religious cult, smugly secure in its worship and rituals, offering a very false sense of security to a starkly two-tiered society where the rich lived in excess at the expense and suffering of the poor (Amos 5: 21-24, Revised Standard Version):

I hate, I despise your feasts,

and I take no delight in your

solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your

burnt offerings and cereal

offerings,

I will not accept them,

and the peace offerings of your

fatted beasts

I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of

your songs;

to the melody of your harps I

will not listen.

But let justice roll down like

waters,

and righteousness like an

ever-flowing stream.

Nuff said.

But what is a prophet, really? What is prophecy? What might it mean to be prophetic today?

At one point or another, all of us have thought of the prophet as someone who predicts the future.  Even the gospel writers point back to the Hebrew prophets to confirm that Jesus was bound to come, pre-ordained by a God who put words into the mouth of someone – words that, even if they did not govern the outcome of a future event, certainly predicted its nature.  The poetic lines of the servant songs in duetero-Isaiah are among the most beautiful and hopeful words ever uttered.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus himself claimed the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” He told his audience that these words were coming alive that day, in their very presence.

Did Isaiah know who Jesus was and that he was coming? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I have no doubt, however, that he was stirred by something deep and mighty in order to offer a beautiful vision of hope. And it was only natural for a writer like Luke to look back and connect his experience of Jesus with this lovely vision. Was that confirmation of some kind of magic? Well yes, I guess, but not the cheap magic of prediction, like the ability to guess someone’s weight or give them the first name of the person they will eventually marry.

No, this magic was the kind of magic we all experience – the magic of a heart stirred to express something stunning, connecting with the magic of another heart, equally stirred by the hearing of that expression.  It’s a magic that happens in words and music and prayers and touches every day, in every life.  It’s the extraordinary beauty of the ordinary when our hearts are tuned to the Spirit of all creation.

So let’s get back to Amos.  Sometimes beauty and power are just heart-breaking, heart-rending.  The cry of Amos is the cry of a heart torn not so much by the wrath of an angry God as by the overwhelming sadness and sorrow of a Spirit-connected human seeing clearly what was going on around him.  It was outrage at a society that couldn’t wait for the end of the Sabbath and the return to weekday business as usual – business where the measure of product shrank while the price increased, where the poor were “bought” by the injustice of the market, where junk could be packaged and pawned off as real food.

So what is a prophet, then?  Really, a prophet is just someone so aligned with God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source that they see the events of their time through a lens unclouded by ego and greed, a lens framed firm and polished clear by the Spirit of all creation.

But a prophet does more than see clearly.  The prophet also speaks.  And here is where we often get derailed about prophets and prophecy.  In the prophetic books of the Bible, the passages that reveal that clear vision of the times, seen through the lens of the Spirit, the lens of capital T Truth, these passages almost always start with something like “Hear the word of the Lord” of “Thus saith the Lord.”

The whole book of Amos, for instance, is built on a series of utterances that start with “Thus says the Lord.” In fact, Amos uses this as a powerful poetic and oratorical tool.  The heart of the first chapters is a series of short rhythmic utterances about the cities and nations surrounding Israel.  Every one starts with “Thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of “so and so” and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, for they” (fill in the blank about the injustice they do).

Amos uses this to tell the truth.  He also uses it as a rhetorical device to capture and lock in his audience.  He starts with statements about nearby enemies.  This sounds pretty good to the Israelites listening.

He circles in and circles in until he gets next door to Judah.  “For three transgressions of Judah and for four, I will not revoke the punishment.” Tension begins to build, building, building, until the full impact of what is coming starts to tremble in.  He looks his audience in the eye and declares, “Thus says the Lord. For three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,” and the wild ride of the book takes flight.  The word of the Lord unleashed, the injustice of Israel laid bare, the coming destruction brought to full light.

So did Amos actually have a conversation with God, where God said go tell my people thus and so?  And likewise the other biblical prophets?  And why does this even matter to us today?

I don’t know about you, but I grew up thinking that somehow God spoke to people differently in ancient times, that these people – guys, for the most part, given the cultural context, but not entirely – that these people wandered off to the mountain or the desert, they had their conversations with God, they took good notes and they came back and spoke the word of the Lord.  There may be some truth here.  But it is not that the Spirit spoke to people then and just doesn’t anymore.

The ancients had a different view of the world than we do. They had no Webb telescope showing them pictures of light that had traveled 186,000 miles per second for a billion years. Their earth was flat. The sun came up over the edge in the east and settled down over the western rim every evening. Swarms of locusts came. Armies invaded. They had to make sense of it all. Somehow, for the Israelites, an anthropomorphized God that sent messages in these events helped them put it all together.

So did God speak to them?  Absolutely.  And the message – the important thing – was the same then as it is now.  Amos could see, and he said so, that a society built on injustice was bound for failure.

When the prophet looks through that clear lens of creation, she sees the ego-based greed and violence that create injustice in human relationships. She understands that, unchecked, this injustice will crumble the foundation of healthy society. And then she tells it straight – not from a position of hatred or judgment, but from a very broken and lamenting heart.

That cry, friends, that cry is the Word of the Lord in all times. We hear it in the words of our own prophets.

Bernie Sanders and Fyodor Dostoyevsky name the nihilistic greed – the ego-centered death grasp for my stuff, my rights, my so-called freedom – a greed that is shredding the fabric of our society. You feel that tear every day now, as it rips ominously and surely closer to our town, our caminos, our neighborhood.

Amanda Gorman narrows the focus of that in-sanity, that dis-ease, that cancer, to the sights and barrel of the gun that is surely aimed at our Smith’s Grocery, our Walmart, our Lyle Lovett concert.

Greta Thunberg tells us that the house is on fire. Yes, friends, it is. The house is on fire in Big Pine, in Cañoncito, in San Pablo, Mineral Hill, Ojitos Fritos. In Puertocito, Chacón and Abuelo. In Holy Ghost. (Historic New Mexico communities affected by wildfires in 2022)

Albert Einstein cried in lament for somehow facilitating the birth of the mother of all destruction. Since 1945 we have lived with this ever more twitchy hair trigger of extinction. This is not protection. This is the hard rain that’s gonna fall. Mayor Eric Adam’s department of public security in New York City recently sent out an emergency message telling every New Yorker what to do in the event of a nuclear strike. The two largest arsenals on the planet are shooting at each other in this very moment, with Ukrainians as our surrogates in what may be the run up to death untold.

And finally, Martin Luther King spoke the message of all true prophets, saying “. . . the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

That statement is the simple test for how you sort out the real prophets from the charlatans. The phonies are so easy to spot. They will conflate your country, and its guns, with the Will of God on Earth. The enemy of the day is the hand-maiden of satan, seducing the world on the sands that hold your oil. They will tell you that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on America for the simple reality of non-binary sexuality. Climate change is a hoax meant to eat away at the foundations of our sacred, free, gun-toting and Christian society. They laugh all the way to the bank before they head off to bed to ravage and abandon some trusting innocent.

God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source does not punish.  There is no need.  Greed, lust, violence and abuse of power create their own selfish and now, my friends, global undoing (us included).  And prophets are not some kind of magicians that forecast the future or call down the fiery wrath of God on evil people.  Prophets are just people with open connection to the source and power of creation and life, the root of all true relationship. They are people who from that place of connection, can see and name what is tearing us apart.  They are the broken-hearted voice of love calling its children home.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. (Bob Dylan)

Thus says the Lord.

For reference:

How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?” – Bernie Sanders


“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly
doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again isn’t just insanity – it’s inhumanity. – Amanda Gorman


Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire.
Because it is.” – Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland


I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought. But World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. – Albert Einstein


We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. Speech given at the National
Cathedral, March 31, 1968.


You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. – Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

A God-Sized Hunger

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I’ve been thinking about the spiritual train wreck of the 20th 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 20th 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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Stand Down, White America

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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 S. Kennell

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

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The Prayer As I Hear It

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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 S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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

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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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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.

Worthy Is the Lamb

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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 S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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

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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.

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

Creation

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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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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

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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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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.

God With Us

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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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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 above to be notified of future posts.

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Submit Yourself

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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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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 above to be notified of future posts.

Good Friday

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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

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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.

© Jerry S Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden.  Feel free to quote, as useful, with proper reference.

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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 in the upper left menu bar to be notified of future posts.

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

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