Worthy Is the Lamb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worthy.

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

Hard Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fight the Good Fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God With Us

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

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

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

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

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

There is, I believe, a healthy alternative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Friday.

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

Doctor My Eyes

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

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

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

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

Jackson Browne laments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly much that is good has been accomplished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embrace it under the Tree of Life.

Where is God?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spirit of Willingness on the Wave of Creation

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

Last year I lived in a completely secular cooperatively owned housing complex. Each person was there for their own reason, with the common denominator being affordability. Each brought, consciously or otherwise, their own set of enacted values which, as a whole, shaped the character and life of the community. I learned in spades the difference that each individual choice and action made in the quality of life and relationships. Careful attention to full awareness of the other and to actions that strengthened relationships and built community yielded palpable and tangible changes in the nature and spirit of daily life. Attitudes of selfishness and defense contributed equally powerful results in another direction.

There is a sweet spot of rest and action for our spirit. It rides the crest of the wave of creation – the push of energy into the void, the place where sound and light – the Word of Creation and the Spirit that carries and speaks it – manifest as something new, another beauty, in the world as we know it, the world as it becomes.

I can perceive myself as alone on that crest, as an isolated individual, a singular atom or particle that must fight for protection, the avoidance of destruction in what seems like a violent rush forward into the unknown. My action response is willfulness. Willfulness pushes out to force into being what I hope will be a safe and protective space. Willfulness grabs for resources that I think will sustain me against the rush. In willfulness, I believe I am using my own power to protect and preserve myself and my little space against a scary and unpredictable world.

But the truth is, I have no singular power. I possess nothing that is uniquely mine. And my only achievement when I believe and act otherwise is to create an insubstantial lie, an illusion of security that will crash, burn and drift to nothingness, certainly at the time of my physical demise if not before.

There is a paradox of singularity and oneness on that glorious wave crest. I am, indeed, a spot and spark of awareness, a phosphorescence – something perhaps analogous to the bioluminescent organisms in the bay at Vieques, off Puerto Rico. My actions and intentions matter. They matter because I am, whether or not I like it or believe it, connected to the whole.

When I act alone with willfulness, I create a small scar, something that does not fit and flow in the creative surge. I hinder the curve and curl in my brief moment. And I may destroy the hope and creative activity of those around me, all those with whom I am in direct or indirect relationship.

But when I recognize and rest in my connection to broader spirit and act from a posture of willingness, I flow forward with confidence. And I am aware of the others flowing forward around me. I see their spark, I understand our connection in the wave. I realize that beauty and community depend on and respond to both my restful connection and my acts of intention. I contribute to the luminous glow, the shape and texture of the curl as creation advances.

We are not, as we falsely tell ourselves, alone under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are one under the Tree of Life. Willfulness blinds us to this truth, throwing up barriers of fear that cause pain and brokenness in our immediate and extended relationships.

Willingness opens to the whole, with an understanding that our creative power is one, a point of lovely and loving energetic awareness on the leading edge of the complete breath of God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source as it pushes forward in its surge to beauty and being on the edge of the void. Rest in the flow. Open your light with willingness, yielding up its luminescence to join with others, as far as your relaxed awareness will take you on this ride to all that will be.

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

Forgiveness II: Our Emotions Are Our Teachers and Not Our Rulers

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

“Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Jesus to Peter, Matthew 18: 22, NRSV on the question of how often to forgive) Stuff just doesn’t go away that easily. It’s not so much that someone has wronged us seventy-seven times. It’s more that we keep working on the wrongs that really nail us over and over and over. The encouragement, I believe, is not to be a fool and allow the same person to harm us seventy-seven times – the delightful wallow of co-dependence – but rather to keep working it out, keep working it out.

Whatever the cause of a deep pain, our overwhelming response is anger, the desire for revenge and even hatred of another. These are natural emotional efforts to protect ourselves. It hurts. I’ve been wounded. I have lost things that cannot be recovered. There are scars. The wounds may be physical, psychic or both.

Here’s the thing. We need our emotions to be our teachers and not our rulers. We need our emotions to be our teachers and not our rulers. The first seventy-five times we work at forgiving someone in our head we are probably just learning that lesson. The problem is that we feel bad about the emotions – the fact that we are still angry about having to give our perpetrator a Get Out of Jail (or Get Out of Hell, as the case may be) Free Card.

Emotions jump up and tell us that we have been hurt, that we have been violated, that we are suffering and in need of repair because of the actions of another. Pay attention. These are messengers. We need compassion. We need care. We need healing.

Our Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil response is to let these emotions become our rulers. OK, anger, take charge. This feels good. Let’s get violent, whether in thought, word or deed. Whether in aggression that is active or cloaked in passivity. Let’s break some china. Let’s destroy some things, deliver the pain that will bring this sum back to zero. Let’s take it a step further to teach a lesson and win the game. Be done with this sucker.

All of this is compounded by the deep wounds of childhood, wounds that happened before we had any clue of how to deal with them. Wounds when we were innocent and did not even know that the world should not be, or might not be like the world we were experiencing. Seventy times seventy times seventy, the iteration and years of learning and coming to terms with these wounds.

Under the Tree of Life, our emotions are our teachers and not our rulers. They tell us that our little manifestation of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source has been wounded. We need protection and shelter. If we are wise, we will give true heed to the inclinations for fight or flight, and we will make, for us, the best choice about the immediate and longer term path out of danger.

Ultimately, perhaps around cycle seventy-six of our desire for revenge, we may begin to understand the edict that we love our neighbor as our self. We begin to love our self. We hear our own pain and respond with compassion. We see our wounds and apply the dressings, or find the person who can help us apply them. We sit with our self. Our capital S eternal Self beyond all harm sits, and holds, and cries, and rocks and soothes our small s manifested and wounded self. We gift our self the Breath of Life that cools, the Healing Water that cleanses, the Leaves of the Tree that create the balm of protection and restoration.

And when seventy-seven rolls around, we might just be ready to turn to our neighbor, our father, our mother, our colleague, the perpetrator of our hurt. We turn and we offer, from our Self to their self, the seat of welcome and restoration. Come sit beside me, here, beneath the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations.

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

It’s Not Always Clear

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s not always clear, the path forward. Our vision is limited. There are far too many factors to weigh. Feelings are a roller coaster ride from day-to-day, and then there is the vast unknown. If I go left, will I be right? If I go right, am I wrong and left behind? Could‘a, would‘a, should‘a are crying from the back seat and the whole trip begins to seem like a sham.

“Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!” (Fred Hillebrand, 1932) We walk by faith, not by sight (Paul, 2 Corinthians 5: 7). Fear and misgivings are the roadblock, the isolated ego cowering in the corner.

In the three worlds,
there is nothing I must do,
nothing unattained to be attained,
yet I engage in action.

What if I did not engage
relentlessly in action?
[Humans] retrace my path
at every turn, Arjuna.

As the ignorant act with attachment
to actions, Arjuna,
so wise [folk] should act with detachment
to preserve the world.

(Krishna to the wilting Arjuna in The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, The Third Teaching: Discipline of Action; 22-24, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, Bantam Classic Edition, 1986)

Creation is the path forward. Something from nothing. Or something new, something that has never been, as the next step from all that is. Beautiful, joyful. There is no wrong path in faith, there is only the next step of creation on the road ahead.

Faith, by nature, is blind. It is not ignorant. Faith is based on the experience of goodness and beauty that result when we act while resting in the Spirit of all that is. Even God, I think, has no idea what is going to happen next. Let’s take a step and see!

What matters is not where we are walking to, but where we are walking from. If we are walking from a place of fear and defense, our steps will falter and creation suffers. If our steps are from a place of joy, kindness and compassion, the beauty of the universe unfolds with us, just far enough ahead to meet our foot as it greets the path of creation.

When we are attached to what we think is/will be the outcome of our action, we falter. We have no idea of any outcomes. Or if we do have that idea, we fool ourselves. We can never know all the implications before we act, or the outcome of a different course.

Home, James, and don’t spare the horses! Home to the Tree of Life. Create with joy. Create with kindness. Create with compassion. Put the paintbrush to the canvas, in faith, and see.

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

We Are One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are One.

Scripture today from my soul brother JD Martin:

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

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

The Choice of Devotion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O Holy Night

Posted on December 25, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5: 21-24. God I love my old Revised Standard Version.)

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

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

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

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

New Worship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

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.

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

The World We Dream

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

In his book, Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo describes the shamanic/spiritual practices of the Laika, an indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon:

The Laika believe that everything is imaginal. Whatever we perceive is a projection of our inner world, and the world perfectly mirrors the condition of our soul.

“The world perfectly mirrors the condition of our soul.” I believe that to be true, individually and collectively.

So what does that mean? Does that mean I can imagine great wealth and it will happen to me? Maybe. The prophets of positive thinking would say so, and Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates certainly imagined something. I have actually heard people say that the entire universe is constructed, at root, to conspire for our greater good.

But there is something about this glib thinking that is potentially shallow and backwards. This thinking tempts us to focus on changing the reflected image – the world we create or manifest – rather than the underlying reality, the condition of our soul. We act out, we manifest, what we have allowed ourselves to become. And the work for a better world is done not by sitting around and imagining a better world, but by working on the condition of our souls.

If I focus chiefly on the universe conspiring for my greater good, I will get a world that looks like my soul – a manipulative and selfish world with relationships and outcomes to match. When I move my focus to outcomes, I lose track of who I am and I become, perhaps unintentionally, but truly, the picture of my neglected soul.

This is true collectively as well as individually. The United States has begun air strikes in Iraq to counter forcefully the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Our focus is on outcomes. But the real world, the world that is, reflects the condition of a collective soul that wanted wealth and oil at any cost. The condition of our soul manifested a world that supported oppressors like Saddam Hussein – or the Shah, or Somoza or any number of puppet regimes – in the oppression and pillage of people to yield the comfort we thought was our greater good. And the perpetual wars that result, whether the violence in the Middle East or the violence in Central America beneath the current child refugee crisis, truly mirror and are an accurate manifestation of the condition of our soul. When our soul, anyone’s soul, is sick with greed, we manifest a world of oppression and violence.

I remember bumper stickers that said “Visualize World Peace,” as though sitting still and picturing a peaceful world in our mind would make it happen. But that is magical thinking, no better or more effective than the satirical bumper sticker retort, “Visualize Whirled Peas.”

“The world perfectly mirrors the condition of our soul.” Mirrors can be useful. Any one of us can look in the mirror and learn something about reality. I might learn I am aging and wrinkling. I might learn that I am contorted with anxiety, or that I am satisfied and radiant. Certainly I can paste on a different face if I want to imagine something different than what I see. I have manipulated the outcome of an image. I have not changed the underlying reality.

There were two metaphorical trees planted at the center of the Garden of Eden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and, beside it, the Tree of Life. We ate from the first and were given the gift of conscious awareness. We could see the mirror image of all that we had manifested. It was frightening and disconcerting.

Our reaction was to try to manipulate outcomes, to make the picture we saw safe and comforting. Seeing only ourselves, we resorted to fear and greed. We created religions in an attempt to get the gods to conspire for us, to cooperate with us, or at least not to work against us.

But there were – and are – those who grew up, who awoke to a different truth. These prophets, saints and mystics realized that the world was just a reflection of something deeper, of the condition of our true spiritual selves.

Their call in all times has been to turn from the mirror, to embrace and nurture the reality. The reality is the quality of our soul. If we cultivate peace and harmony in our spirit, the mirror reflects it. It’s not that we changed the picture. It is that we changed our being. We made the choice to grow up. We nurtured the condition of our soul. And the picture around us – the manifested world of relationships – reflects our nurture.

The two metaphorical trees in the garden, as I have noted before, are really only one. When we focus on the mirror, we see only the image of the tree. That image is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we bang into the mirror, over and over, trying to get what we want, what we think we need from that picture. And the picture only gets worse, because it reflects our frustration and unhappiness.

When we turn away from the mirror of our manifested world, and cultivate the quality of our soul, we find that we are living in true reality, under the Tree of Life. We manifest peace. We manifest kindness and compassion. We manifest abundance – the power of enough for all – because we have cultivated those things at the root of our being.

Turn inward. Cultivate your soul. Live in reality under the Tree of Life. You won’t need the mirror to know the outcome.

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

Two Trees in the Garden

Thoughts on a New Spirituality

Category Archives: Human Condition

Creation

Submit Yourself

The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

Where is God?

The Spirit of Willingness on the Wave of Creation

Forgiveness II: Our Emotions Are Our Teachers and Not Our Rulers

It’s Not Always Clear

We Are One

The Choice of Devotion

O Holy Night

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

New Worship

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

The World We Dream

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

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