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.

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.

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

Good Friday

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.

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.

ISIS, Paris and the Fight for Dominance

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

ISIS this week brought its bloody bully show to the world media stage in the City of Light. We are saddened and disgusted by the loss of innocent lives in Paris, guilty only of being different. We grieve with the bereft and hurt with the wounded. We are twisted with angst that people disparage their own lives for the sole purpose of doing violence to others. How can this happen in the modern world? Will it happen to me? How can we stop it? What can it possibly be about?

Ultimately, all fights are about dominance. We perceive someone or something to be a threat to our wellbeing. Something about them makes us afraid that our particular way of life, our daily existence, is at risk. We respond with force.

A toddler wants control of a toy. Another toddler takes possession. A sense of violation takes over. Words or blows are exchanged, followed by tears and rage employed to elicit the intervention of a higher power to enforce justice.

Really, that is all there is:

A fundamentalist wants their god to dominate all others.
A mining company wants a peasant’s land.
A racist wants safety from and control over people of different skin pigmentation.
A man wants to dominate a woman.
A consumer wants the latest gadget for a life of no bother.

Violence ensues, whether in person or by proxy.

Good teachers and parents show children the value of sharing and cooperation. But the world around us teaches other lessons. At the end of the day, people are wounded and die. Some are beheaded or torn to bits in a suicide bombers’ blast. Most, truly, are the innocent casualties of another’s war. Iraq Body Count estimates somewhere between 146,000 and 166,000 violent civilian deaths since the 2003 United States invasion. When combatants are added in, the toll rises to 224,000. When secondarily related deaths are counted (a person in need of medical services or other life necessities they cannot access because of the war), the toll rises to over one-half million (see Huffington Post). And that is just one of today’s many wars.

Whether we are a toddler, a religion, an economic system or a nation, we see dominance as the antidote for our fears. And we set all good teaching and rationality aside, spending any resource to preserve our wounded ego and supposed safety through the use of force.

It does not work. Hitler rose to power by channeling collective fear into violent domination. The whack-a-mole response of World War II put an end to that only to yield the greater horror of nuclear annihilation and the super-power struggles of the Cold War. And no military or terrorist action by anyone in any place since then has achieved a lasting peace as a net result of the violence applied. Humanity ultimately seems cowed only by the insanity of mutually assured destruction.

Is that what we want? Whether Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or Atheist; whether American, Iraqi, Malaysian or Saudi; whether capitalist, socialist, communist or military dictator; whether retiree, school teacher, cashier or toddler on the playground, we make our choices. We make them in each breath.

Will we make the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil choice, the one that says there is not enough and that every other being is a competitor and a threat to our existence? Will we strike out in violence, large or small, overt or subtle, to secure what is never more than a temporary chimera of control? This happens each day at every level, from the battle to dominate our little vehicular turf on the highway to the unfathomable resources thrown into the assertion of military force.

Or will we learn the Tree of Life lesson of all our good teachers – everyone from the Buddha to Jesus to Mohammed to Mr. Rogers? Life works when we listen to others and share. Life works when we give up dominance, altogether, in favor of mutually assured satisfaction.

Life works, in fact, when we are willing to suffer the blow delivered by another and return only compassion and kindness. There is never a victory through violence. There is never ultimate security in threat. We win only when we give up the fight altogether and show another way. And so we teach our children. But we refuse to believe it and live it in every breath and aspect of our adult lives.

Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Walk the second mile. There is nothing passive about these things. All are active assertions of a better way. The Tree of Life grows surely at the end of that road.

Two Trees in the Garden

Thoughts on a New Spirituality

Category Archives: No War

Where is God?

ISIS, Paris and the Fight for Dominance

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