Category Archives: Compassionate Service

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.

God With Us

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

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

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

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

There is, I believe, a healthy alternative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Submit Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Announcing Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (way, way up near the top of your screen : ) to be notified of future posts.