Worthy Is the Lamb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worthy.

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

Hard Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly much that is good has been accomplished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embrace it under the Tree of Life.

Where is God?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are One

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

I speak of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, one of a million inadequate names for that which we commonly call God. In the very use of the name, of any name, I imply separation. But we are not separate. Separation has been our perennial blinder. We are One.

Under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we hide in our shame because, in our awakening to awareness of our surroundings, we believe we are separate. We have a sense of self. All good and true, that sense of self. But at the same time, We are One.

We think, rightly, of creation as the work of C/S/M/S. Creation is, in fact, the very outbreath of the energy of C/S/M/S. Because we can observe it, we are tempted to think we are not part of it. But even as we are gifted, in our limited capability, to look deeper and deeper into the infinite marvel of creation, we are the very thing itself. We are One.

All of our anxiety and distorted behavior; all of our anger and angst, our greed and despair; all of these are rooted in our shortsighted view of separation. Yes, we are unique in our embodied presence. Yes, we look out of these eyes and we see others and every thing. But every other and every thing emanates from the same breath, the indescribable marvel of mass, the speed of light squared and its energetic product. There is no difference or separation. We are One.

All evil emanates from the lie, the limited and incorrect view, that we are separate. We create. We make things. We buy things and sell them. When our making is isolated in self – when it is self-ish – it is corrupted and the wealth we generate and hoard only confirms our illusion of separation. I have more. That is good. Someone else has less. Too bad. Violence erupts and the only solution we can see is greater violence to crush our enemy.

When our making, our creating, takes place in the spirit of connection, we are conscious that we only touch, we co-create, we one-create with the Spirit of every thing and everything. And our product is a gift of beauty and utility for the world, the universe, the everything of which we are part. We are One.

When we wake in the morning, we can practice seeing things as whole. For me, the simple exercise of breathing in “Thy Will,” breathing out, “be done,” takes me to a place of connection. I am not separate from the creative will of C/S/M/S. Nor am I obliterated or forgotten in it. I am just in it, part of it, participating with openness and willingness. I am being my true Self, breathing, creating, acting in relationship to each one and each thing.

When we realize our true home under the Tree of Life, we are at rest in motion. We are at ease in creating. We have no fight with our surroundings, no fear of the other.

And we are empowered to speak with clarity, to touch with compassion, to invite with kindness.

We are One.

Scripture today from my soul brother JD Martin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q5ia2jUeqc

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

The Choice of Devotion

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Sri Ramakrishna, the 19^th century Indian saint, embodied above all things the practice of devotion. He eschewed study and strict adherence to Hindu ritual in favor of childlike adoration of Kali, the feminine aspect of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source. Sometimes petulant, sometimes playful, often appearing mad and completely out of control with devotion, he yearned to become one. He whimpered, pestered and cried to experience absolute unity with the Godhead through ceaseless pursuit of Kali’s attention and affection.

And by all reports he was rewarded, after a time but then regularly, with the state of Samadhi, the expansive experience of complete absorption, joy and oneness with C/S/M/S. In the midst of teaching his disciples, he would break into songs of adoration and then effortlessly enter and return from extended states of unitive bliss. He brought back tales of love and beauty beyond measure. Even dying of throat cancer, he seemed oblivious to his physical condition because of his laser focused devotion to the divine, the profound reality of his journeys.

Rumi, Teresa of Avila, Paramahansa Yogananda, Hildegard von Bingen; the great mystics of all traditions have been explorers of the outer edges and inner depths of human spirituality. Their times and cultures somehow made space for them, accommodated their extravagance, supported or at least tolerated their journeys. For all time, we welcome and stand in awe of the news they bring back.

Most of us live in the world of more mundane dimensions. We are the householders, the engineers and teachers, the burger flippers and shopkeepers of day-to-day existence. We raise kids and deal with plumbing problems and domestic struggles. We worry about our finances and the decisions of our governments.

But here’s the thing. Is there really any less wonder in the day-to-day? Is the amazing expression of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source any less as I turn right onto Montgomery Boulevard and walk or drive to the grocery store? I don’t think so. I don’t believe for a minute that C/S/M/S is any less present or less available for connection in the ordinary moments of daily existence.

In a single block, I see, I am part of the homeless person holding a sign for support at the intersection, the turquoise sky of the Southwest, the courtesy and service of the store clerk as I check out my oranges and baking powder. I am granted in every instant, at every turn, the opportunity for choice and participation. Will I engage consciously, with all my thought, all my intention, all my heart? Will I play my part, giving and receiving with wonder and gratitude? Will I practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and self-control – the beautiful and deeply satisfying fruits of the Tree of Life?

Or will I stay asleep at the wheel, angry at the young person who cut impulsively in front of me in the parking lot? Will I numb myself, choosing to be lost in the tedium, bother and annoyance of a world that just doesn’t get what I want, what I need, what I deserve?

Whatever my talent, whatever piece of the extravagance of God I am gifted to touch and unfold for the world around me, I have the choice of devotion or neglect. I can touch a relationship for healing, or I can stay lost in my hurt ego. I can polish my little part with the devotion of joy, or I can miss the moment, the now, entirely.

Truly, we each choose our devotion and practice it persistently throughout our life. Under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, our primary devotion is to preservation of self. We think we protect an isolated and threatened ego with fear, anger, defense, power, greed and violence.

Under the Tree of Life, we choose a different practice. We practice connection of Self; not an abandoned ego, but a connected Ego. We offer, we recognize and realize with willingness, our connection to Creator/Spirit/Mind/Self, the entire created universe. And we start and end by focusing that connection on the immediate. We are clear, we are conscious. Where there is anger we see hurt. Where there is the inability to function productively on a daily basis, for whatever reason, we feel cold and hunger. Wherever, whatever, we experience the deep beauty, the struggle of the birthing universe. And we become the midwife of creation.

Let’s choose that devotion, our home in all that is. Let’s find ourselves beneath the Tree of Life, with its leaves for the healing of everything.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

For Christmas this Year, Let’s Let Jesus Off the Bloody Hook

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

For Christmas this year, let’s give Jesus a gift. Let’s let him off the bloody hook. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s letters, “Follow me” turned into “I did it all with blood sacrifice.” Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 – 1109, sealed the deal with his writing on the satisfaction theory of atonement.

And ever since, we’ve been killing him (Jesus) softly but surely by piling on the sins of the world, Sunday after Sunday. Data tells us he’s almost half dead now, under the load. Barna Group relentlessly counts the beans of evangelical angst, documenting the slippage of the “churched” through the door to become the “unchurched”, searching for just the right moves to get’em “churched” again. Their latest book, Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them, documents that the “unchurched” segment of the US population has grown not just steadily, but at an ever increasing rate from 30% in the 1990’s to 43% in 2014. For Barna and company (A better book title might have been Clueless.), it seems a daunting task to stem that tide, given what they see as the relentless bashing of Christianity by godless unchurched culture. A small first step might be to get rid of those repelling and out of touch churched and unchurched labels.

Let’s let Jesus off the bloody hook. Lots of folks have tried to redeem atonement by turning it into “at-one-ment.” Too little too late, I fear, but the sentiment is useful. I believe with all my heart that Jesus was “at-one” with Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source. And I believe “the way” to which he persistently called the people of his small corner of the world in his time is, indeed, the path forward – the very same foundational path forward whispered by the breath of life in all places and all times.

But we – you and I and Aunt Suzie – won’t find that path by continually “casting our burden upon the Lord.” (If you are sufficiently unchurched, that phrase of evangelical atonement might be unfamiliar, and I promise not to use it again.) We will find it, metaphorically, in our own journey from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life. We will find it by changing the way we view ourselves and the world around us.

“Salvation,” another hopelessly abused and by now nearly dead word, is really just our choice to grow up and move along that path. A bloody choice? Well, let’s be honest. Turning from the fear and separation of the metaphorical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is very threatening to power, at least to the misused power of twisted politics and those that wield religion to mediate your redemption and mine. Taking personal responsibility for growing up to compassion, confidence and responsible relationship – becoming the Adult of God (Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source – not an old man in some heaven) that we become under the Tree of Life – taking that personal responsibility and acting on it generally, at some point, puts us crosswise with the powers of fear. Witness Jesus as the Romans nailed him to a tree, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer and six millions Jews up in smoke in bloody Christian Germany.

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.
(Amos 5: 21-24. God I love my old Revised Standard Version.)

Want to be saved? Stop going to war. Want to be saved? Take care of the planet. Want to be saved? Don’t even think about killing the food stamp program.

Want to be saved from “sin and death?” Stop nailing Jesus to the tree and crying salvation. Grow up and choose it. Forgiveness is not a gift that was given in the bloody slaughter of the Lamb of God. Forgiveness is a state of being. No one can give it to you. You must truly embrace it for yourself. And then move on.

Move on, move on down the road. And consider a gift to Jesus this Christmas. Take him off the bloody tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the tree of fear and hate and twisted power. Clean him up, like the Good Samaritan would. Clean him up and walk with him, even through the valley of the shadow of death. Walk with him, all the way to the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

New Worship

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Alas, for many who are no longer comfortable within the confines of a single religion, or who can no longer accept core doctrines of their root tradition, worship has become both a problem and a loss. There is a desire to touch, to engage. And there is an aversion and disappointment in what is found in that touch. Beautiful hymns in four part harmony lift the spirit in ecstasy, only to crash suddenly to earth in a glorification of blood sacrifice.

Our existing traditions and the accoutrements of worship that support them have been built over centuries, with great care. Meticulously orchestrated and standardized rituals mediate the sacred, serving as metaphorical doors that open for a moment beyond the limits of physical pain, daily toil and bodily death. They deliver a prescribed, and for many still effective formula of immanent experience and transcendent connection with Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

But for those with one or both feet outside the doctrinal door, satisfaction is limited or seemingly unavailable. In varying degrees, there is a sense of alienation, of fraud. We can choose to stay, crossing fingers or going silent when songs and liturgies lead us into language outside our defined circle of spiritual integrity. For many, that is a useful transitional compromise, preserving aspects of community and offering some level of the expression of ecstasy. But this route offers only a partial, incomplete and less than fully satisfying solution.

A richer alternative may be to extend the circle beyond judgment of the mediated. Recall in our discussion of the sacred and profane that these are not two categories of phenomena. Rather, sacred and profane are the lenses we choose between when we view and engage all that is. Do we choose a sacred life of connection and reverence, or do we engage phenomena as though they are outside ourselves, materialistic products for consumption in a zero sum game of winning or losing, wealth or poverty? This view, this choice, has profound implications for our concept and experience of worship.

Living only within the confines of mediated worship, or fighting its limitations are both positions of judgment, positions that leave us with the dissatisfied sorting of sacred and profane. Either way, we decide that something – whether our traditional worship or our disdain of it – is sacred while the other position is profane. We limit ourselves to external sorting and judgment rather than to holistic seamless engagement of the immanent and transcendent nature of all that is.

When we live life with the eyes of the sacred, we remove the barrier of judgment. We expand with ease outside the limited mediated experience of organized religion without a need to judge or reject it. It’s just that religion and worship are no longer compartmentalized experiences packaged and delivered by institutions. They are not activities like a sport or a class that we choose to take. They are not the prescribed clothing, food, prayers or practices of a given day of the week. Religion and worship become, instead, the very fullness of life itself.

Worship in this sense becomes attention and connection. We become aware of the people on the bus, the driver in the next car, the car and the road themselves. We hear each sound, see each sight, feel each touch, glorious and mundane. We engage with appreciation and reverence, without judgment, experiencing no boundary between institutionalized religious experience, if we choose it, and the fullness of life itself.

We hear the prophetic voice in a rock song, the hope and longing of a ballad. A flower, a fly, a fleeting smile. All things and all acts, ours and those around us, become part of the song of creation, the perpetual praise of becoming – the joy that we are, in the same moment and for all time, ourselves, the spark of being, at one, integral in the fabric of everything.

From this perspective we are free to engage even what we may feel that we have left behind. There is no aspect of loss or limitation, only expansive, extravagant and compassionate welcome of every expression and exploration, each tentative test and step forward into the unknown, the unfoldment of the yet to be created.

There is no loss. There is only more, something whole and complete, worship as the fullness of life and all that is, glorious expectation and engagement of all to come.

I am in Latin America right now. In Spanish one might affirm, “Así es!” This is how it is! Así es! Así es, under the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Suchness and Form

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, the infinite mystery of the universe, is described in many ways: word, breath, spirit, formless, suchness, energy, nameless with a thousand names. We turn to look and do not see. We listen, but the sound escapes us. But somewhere in our being, everywhere in and beyond our being we know, we revel, we delight.

This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine – he passes judgment on the ten thousand things but he doesn’t think himself severe; his bounty extends to ten thousand generations but he doesn’t think himself benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity but he doesn’t think himself long-lived; he covers heaven, bears up the earth, carves and fashions countless forms, but he doesn’t think himself skilled. It is with him alone I wander. Taosim. Chuang Tzu 6*

The sages have sifted and filtered the light for us and with us, spoken pieces of the word, cast metaphor on the formless, seen spirit in the manifest:

Just as light is diffused from a fire which is confined to one spot, so is this whole universe the diffused energy of the supreme Brahman. And as light shows a difference, greater or less, according to its nearness or distance from the fire, so is there variation in the energy of the impersonal Brahman.

Vishnu is the highest and most immediate of all the energies of Brahman, the embodied Brahman, formed of the whole of Brahman. On him is the entire universe woven and interwoven: from him is the world, and the world is in him; and he is the whole universe. Vishnu, the Lord, consisting of what is perishable as well as what is imperishable, sustains everything, both Spirit and Matter, in the form of his ornaments and weapons. Hinduism. Vishnu Prana 1.22*

C/S/M/S is the essential energy and spirit. We are not separate. We and everything are embodied temporal expression of that spiritual reality. We fool ourselves into fear when we hide alone in seeming separate ego. But we hide only from the falsehood of fear. There is no true hiding from our essential being, the Self that breathed us and is us – the Self that is every rock and tree and is at the same time the no-thing, the mystery we can only sense, only trust, but not fully grasp.

When appearances and names are put away and all discrimination ceases, that which remains is the true and essential nature of things and, as nothing can be predicated as to the nature of essence, it is called the “Suchness” of Reality. This universal, undifferentiated, inscrutable Suchness is the only Reality, but it is variously characterized as Truth, Mind-essence, Transcendental Intelligence, Perfection of Wisdom, etc. This Dharma of the imagelessness of the Essence-nature of Ultimate Reality is the Dharma which has been proclaimed by all the Buddhas, and when all things are understood in full agreement with it, one is in possession of Perfect Knowledge. Buddhism. Lankavatara Sutra 83*

We move, we feel, we see, hear, judge and act. We must never forget who We are as we do these things. The talent is not to be buried, but to be used to its fullest in the creation of beauty, wonder, compassion, the newness and suchness of each breath.

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. Christianity. John 1:1-4 NRSV

We are the Word, spoke into being by I AM. Thinking ourselves alone we hide in fear under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Awake, we breathe, we create. Growing, becoming, we heal. We are, suchness and form, in the image, under the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Two Trees in the Garden

Thoughts on a New Spirituality

Category Archives: Being

Creation

Submit Yourself

What Is Truth?

The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

Where is God?

We Are One

The Choice of Devotion

For Christmas this Year, Let’s Let Jesus Off the Bloody Hook

New Worship

Suchness and Form

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