Category Archives: Born again

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

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.

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.

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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What Is Truth?

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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.

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

O Holy Night

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Something extraordinary happened in the birth of Jesus.  No one bothers to write tales of wonder about the birth of most of us: confounding tales of deep simplicity and wild extravagance; no room at the inn and choirs of angels; the politicos already attuned to the threat to power.

We come looking for a savior and king.  Something in us yearns for the perfect leader, the one who will make it all right, with enough for everyone, the end of death and sorrow and pain.

But the prince of peace would not be king.  He said to serve each other the way we have been served.  The supposed savior said it is, in fact, your own faith that makes you whole.  The one who shines a light on the path to the Tree of Life said that you – you and me – you are the light of the world.

And the one slaughtered on a cross did not call us to receive salvation kneeling at the foot of that tree.  The way of Jesus calls us all the way to the terrible end hanging from the top, nailed to the gnarly limbs of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:  a death by submission to connection, by willingness to release the isolation of ego; death to fear; death to selfishness and the violence it engenders; the overwhelming death of embracing the pain, fear and sorrow of life without turning away, without running to hide, with no father or regiment of angels to take us down from that hanging before the last ounce is wrung out.

There is a barrier, a chimera, a lonesome valley and dark night of the soul that stands in the road between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life.  We must ultimately walk it by ourselves.  No one is born again without the lonely death on that tree.  No one finds the other end of that path by staying stuck on their knees at the foot of the cross of Jesus.

O Holy Night.  Be born again: born through every step of pain and suffering; born to the last wretched and lonely breath, stolen by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Be born to your true light, the light of your life.  Walk as a companion and not a king.

Blessed Christmas.

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

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

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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.

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

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

Second Birth: The Upanishads, Jesus and the Journey to Self

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Recall that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a metaphor for the first awakening of human awareness: the ability to perceive a discreet self; the ability and propensity to judge phenomena as good or bad, depending on how we think we are affected; the ability to contemplate life, death and the nature of the universe.  It is, in short, the realization of ego.  In its immature form, the ego only perceives separation and vulnerability, and the response is fear along with a desperate grasping for protection at any cost.

The metaphorical Tree of Life represents a maturation of awareness.  It is achievement of a stage of realization that recognizes the interconnectedness and spiritual nature of life and all that is.  We are no longer just isolated selves, dependent solely on our ability to protect our body and our fragile ego.  We achieve a realization that we are part of something larger, something that transcends time, space and physical manifestation.  We are, in fact, living sparks of the very mind of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, breathed full of the breath of life, the creative thrill of the universe.

The garden trees themselves are, in reality, only one.  They simply represent the manifestation of all that is, the complete creative activity of C/S/M/S.  They are the source and stuff of life, the universe and everything (appreciation and apologies to Douglas Adams).  The two trees are not distinguished by their unique and independent natures.  Rather, they are distinguished only by how we view them.  Their names – Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or Tree of Life – are just indicators of the level of our own spiritual maturity.  Have we grown to a level of trust and comfort with our place in the universe, a place of willingness to give and to receive without fear or grasping?  Do we trust that there is “that” of us that transcends birth and death, space and time?  Or do we see only as much as we can through the blinders of separation and scarcity, good and bad, physical life and death?

The journey from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life is, in reality, the journey from small “s” self to capital “S” Self.  Nowhere is that journey presented with more clarity than in the Upanishads, wisdom teachings attached to the Hindu Vedas that grew out of the merger of the Indo-European speaking Aryan culture and the resident culture of the Indus Valley.  This merger of cultures is believed to have happened about 4,000 years ago, placing the Vedas among, if not distinguishing them definitively as the earliest of what we would call scriptures.

The relevance for those of us in the West, particularly as we move away from a spirituality based on original sin and redemption through blood sacrifice, is tremendous.  Here are writings, among the earliest on spiritual reflection and experience, that discover and declare the difference between these two different levels of spiritual maturity.  There is no presentation or burden of guilt, just recognition that we are born into small “s” self and that our task in life is to grow, to mature to capital “S” Self, our connection with and existence in timeless being.

We are, in truest essence, born again when we make this move between the two trees, the journey from disconnected ego to connected essential being.  We achieve this step, our second birth, through renunciation of attachment to the senses – the mindless drive to chase what we think is pleasure and safety and to run from what we perceive as danger and pain.  Renunciation is not separation or disengagement from these life experiences.  Rather, it is to live them fully without attachment, without being driven and governed by them, recognizing their passing existence as opposed to our eternal being.

From the Isha Upanishad*:

6 Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
7Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?

8The Self is everywhere.  Bright is the Self,
Indivisible, untouched by sin, wise,
Immanent and transcendent.  He it is
Who beholds the cosmos together.

From the Katha Upanishad*:

Part I [3] 15The supreme Self is beyond name and form,
Beyond the senses, inexhaustible,
Without beginning, without end, beyond
Time, space, and causality, eternal,
Immutable.  Those who realize the Self
Are forever free from the jaws of death.

Part II [1] 2The immature run after sense pleasures
And fall into the widespread net of death.
But the wise, knowing the Self as deathless,
Seek not the changeless in the world of change.
3That through which one enjoys form, taste, smell, sound,
Touch, and sexual union is the Self.
Can there be anything not known to That
Who is the One in all?  Know One, know all.

Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (John 3: 3, NRSV).  This is indeed second birth, to renounce the fear and slavery of small “s” self, and to engage our true Self, at peace, at one with all there is.  Experience without fearing.  Enjoy without grasping.  Share without owning.  Choose, practice, to be born to Self under the Tree of Life.

*From The Upanishads, introduced and translated by Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, © 1987, 2007 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.

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

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

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