As an English major in college, I was required to take a course in public speaking. Thinking that was silly, I asked the professor if I could, instead, do an independent study in oral interpretation. I was surprised and pleased when the answer was yes.

This was a Mennonite College, back in the days when liberal arts were still valued as a foundation to all learning. All students were required to take at least two courses in Bible and religion. I had recently taken the Old Testament Survey class. Being the early 1970s, I found myself captivated, maybe even just blown away, by the social justice writing of the Hebrew prophets. The eighth century BCE prophet Amos, especially, connected for me the dots of radically speaking truth to power. For my independent study, I decided that I would do public readings of the entire book of Amos. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will say that it was one of the most magnificent experiences of my undergraduate career.

Amos did not mince words. While couched in the language of the Word of the Lord, he delivered no holds barred criticism of the injustice he saw around him. And he named it as incompatible, not with the Kingdom of Israel, but rather with the Reign of God, a land, a way of life that was bound not by mountains and rivers and political boundaries, but by the walls of a beating heart, a heart as big and open as the entire cosmos.

The climax of this short eight chapter book of poetic invective comes in Chapter 5, where Amos just flays the flesh of a religious cult, smugly secure in its worship and rituals, offering a very false sense of security to a starkly two-tiered society where the rich lived in excess at the expense and suffering of the poor (Amos 5: 21-24, Revised Standard Version):

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.

Nuff said.

But what is a prophet, really? What is prophecy? What might it mean to be prophetic today?

At one point or another, all of us have thought of the prophet as someone who predicts the future.  Even the gospel writers point back to the Hebrew prophets to confirm that Jesus was bound to come, pre-ordained by a God who put words into the mouth of someone – words that, even if they did not govern the outcome of a future event, certainly predicted its nature.  The poetic lines of the servant songs in duetero-Isaiah are among the most beautiful and hopeful words ever uttered.

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus himself claimed the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” He told his audience that these words were coming alive that day, in their very presence.

Did Isaiah know who Jesus was and that he was coming? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I have no doubt, however, that he was stirred by something deep and mighty in order to offer a beautiful vision of hope. And it was only natural for a writer like Luke to look back and connect his experience of Jesus with this lovely vision. Was that confirmation of some kind of magic? Well yes, I guess, but not the cheap magic of prediction, like the ability to guess someone’s weight or give them the first name of the person they will eventually marry.

No, this magic was the kind of magic we all experience – the magic of a heart stirred to express something stunning, connecting with the magic of another heart, equally stirred by the hearing of that expression.  It’s a magic that happens in words and music and prayers and touches every day, in every life.  It’s the extraordinary beauty of the ordinary when our hearts are tuned to the Spirit of all creation.

So let’s get back to Amos.  Sometimes beauty and power are just heart-breaking, heart-rending.  The cry of Amos is the cry of a heart torn not so much by the wrath of an angry God as by the overwhelming sadness and sorrow of a Spirit-connected human seeing clearly what was going on around him.  It was outrage at a society that couldn’t wait for the end of the Sabbath and the return to weekday business as usual – business where the measure of product shrank while the price increased, where the poor were “bought” by the injustice of the market, where junk could be packaged and pawned off as real food.

So what is a prophet, then?  Really, a prophet is just someone so aligned with God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source that they see the events of their time through a lens unclouded by ego and greed, a lens framed firm and polished clear by the Spirit of all creation.

But a prophet does more than see clearly.  The prophet also speaks.  And here is where we often get derailed about prophets and prophecy.  In the prophetic books of the Bible, the passages that reveal that clear vision of the times, seen through the lens of the Spirit, the lens of capital T Truth, these passages almost always start with something like “Hear the word of the Lord” of “Thus saith the Lord.”

The whole book of Amos, for instance, is built on a series of utterances that start with “Thus says the Lord.” In fact, Amos uses this as a powerful poetic and oratorical tool.  The heart of the first chapters is a series of short rhythmic utterances about the cities and nations surrounding Israel.  Every one starts with “Thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of “so and so” and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, for they” (fill in the blank about the injustice they do).

Amos uses this to tell the truth.  He also uses it as a rhetorical device to capture and lock in his audience.  He starts with statements about nearby enemies.  This sounds pretty good to the Israelites listening.

He circles in and circles in until he gets next door to Judah.  “For three transgressions of Judah and for four, I will not revoke the punishment.” Tension begins to build, building, building, until the full impact of what is coming starts to tremble in.  He looks his audience in the eye and declares, “Thus says the Lord. For three transgressions of Israel and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,” and the wild ride of the book takes flight.  The word of the Lord unleashed, the injustice of Israel laid bare, the coming destruction brought to full light.

So did Amos actually have a conversation with God, where God said go tell my people thus and so?  And likewise the other biblical prophets?  And why does this even matter to us today?

I don’t know about you, but I grew up thinking that somehow God spoke to people differently in ancient times, that these people – guys, for the most part, given the cultural context, but not entirely – that these people wandered off to the mountain or the desert, they had their conversations with God, they took good notes and they came back and spoke the word of the Lord.  There may be some truth here.  But it is not that the Spirit spoke to people then and just doesn’t anymore.

The ancients had a different view of the world than we do. They had no Webb telescope showing them pictures of light that had traveled 186,000 miles per second for a billion years. Their earth was flat. The sun came up over the edge in the east and settled down over the western rim every evening. Swarms of locusts came. Armies invaded. They had to make sense of it all. Somehow, for the Israelites, an anthropomorphized God that sent messages in these events helped them put it all together.

So did God speak to them?  Absolutely.  And the message – the important thing – was the same then as it is now.  Amos could see, and he said so, that a society built on injustice was bound for failure.

When the prophet looks through that clear lens of creation, she sees the ego-based greed and violence that create injustice in human relationships. She understands that, unchecked, this injustice will crumble the foundation of healthy society. And then she tells it straight – not from a position of hatred or judgment, but from a very broken and lamenting heart.

That cry, friends, that cry is the Word of the Lord in all times. We hear it in the words of our own prophets.

Bernie Sanders and Fyodor Dostoyevsky name the nihilistic greed – the ego-centered death grasp for my stuff, my rights, my so-called freedom – a greed that is shredding the fabric of our society. You feel that tear every day now, as it rips ominously and surely closer to our town, our caminos, our neighborhood.

Amanda Gorman narrows the focus of that in-sanity, that dis-ease, that cancer, to the sights and barrel of the gun that is surely aimed at our Smith’s Grocery, our Walmart, our Lyle Lovett concert.

Greta Thunberg tells us that the house is on fire. Yes, friends, it is. The house is on fire in Big Pine, in Cañoncito, in San Pablo, Mineral Hill, Ojitos Fritos. In Puertocito, Chacón and Abuelo. In Holy Ghost. (Historic New Mexico communities affected by wildfires in 2022)

Albert Einstein cried in lament for somehow facilitating the birth of the mother of all destruction. Since 1945 we have lived with this ever more twitchy hair trigger of extinction. This is not protection. This is the hard rain that’s gonna fall. Mayor Eric Adam’s department of public security in New York City recently sent out an emergency message telling every New Yorker what to do in the event of a nuclear strike. The two largest arsenals on the planet are shooting at each other in this very moment, with Ukrainians as our surrogates in what may be the run up to death untold.

And finally, Martin Luther King spoke the message of all true prophets, saying “. . . the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

That statement is the simple test for how you sort out the real prophets from the charlatans. The phonies are so easy to spot. They will conflate your country, and its guns, with the Will of God on Earth. The enemy of the day is the hand-maiden of satan, seducing the world on the sands that hold your oil. They will tell you that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on America for the simple reality of non-binary sexuality. Climate change is a hoax meant to eat away at the foundations of our sacred, free, gun-toting and Christian society. They laugh all the way to the bank before they head off to bed to ravage and abandon some trusting innocent.

God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source does not punish.  There is no need.  Greed, lust, violence and abuse of power create their own selfish and now, my friends, global undoing (us included).  And prophets are not some kind of magicians that forecast the future or call down the fiery wrath of God on evil people.  Prophets are just people with open connection to the source and power of creation and life, the root of all true relationship. They are people who from that place of connection, can see and name what is tearing us apart.  They are the broken-hearted voice of love calling its children home.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. (Bob Dylan)

Thus says the Lord.

For reference:

How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?” – Bernie Sanders

“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.” This is the worldly
doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again isn’t just insanity – it’s inhumanity. – Amanda Gorman

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire.
Because it is.” – Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought. But World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. – Albert Einstein

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. Speech given at the National
Cathedral, March 31, 1968.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. – Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

In his book Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power, my friend, mentor and NYU professor Lawrence Mead presents a convincing argument that distinctive Western culture, in a progression through its Northern European, British and now American iterations, is the true basis for the wealth, power and dominance of the United States in the world.  More specifically he asserts that individualism, which he traces to roots in Protestant Christianity, versus collectivism is the chief driver of this wealth and dominance.  Secondarily, he suggests that internalized moralism, rooted in the freedom that came with the Protestant Reformation and expressed in our democratic governance, provides the necessary check on both capitalism and potential social abuse.

There is, I believe, significant truth in these assertions, including the undisputed wealth and power that resulted.  While the expansionist Catholicism of Southern Europe opened the doors for European dominance, the thought and initiatives of Northern Europe created the economic productivity and its ultimate expression in a consumer economy.

Spain, for instance, was only an early actor.  As a Southern European and very Catholic country, it invaded the Americas with a papal mandate to claim territory and convert all inhabitants, collectively, to Catholicism.  Anyone who did not convert was to be treated as property, less than human, to be used in any manner the conquerors saw fit.  The mandate resulted in gross subjugation and abuse of the conquered populations and reckless extraction of resources.

But Spain experienced little lasting benefit.  The patriarchal/hierarchical culture focused primarily on the accumulation of wealth for the church and its designated political representatives.  Holding, rather than investing, was the order of the day. 

The true economic winners were the Dutch and British, countries with more individualistic/entrepreneurial cultures.  The Dutch prospered through trade and transportation, the British even more so by adding value through the manufacture and sale of consumer goods using the raw materials acquired from the conquerors.  It is obvious where the United States has gone with this, driving individualist consumer culture beyond the wildest imagination of the early capitalists.

Material wealth and economic and military dominance have, indeed, been the products of this culture.  These are indisputable realities.   

The unanswered, or perhaps just unfaced question, which looms especially large today, is whether the individual moralism of White Protestant culture ever held or now holds sufficient sway to keep us in check from global destruction caused by the social and environmental underbelly of this material behemoth.

On the moral front, the capitalist success of individualist Western culture depended, and still depends, heavily upon cheap labor and unfettered access to extractable natural resources.  Slavery, for several centuries, was the blatant expression of this market mandate.  It continues today, less visibly, in child and quasi-slave labor in impoverished areas of the globe where raw materials are mined and consumer goods are manufactured. 

In the US, internalized moralism eventually held sway in the abolition of slavery.  But the drive for cheap labor and an unchecked amoral scapegoating process quickly reasserted itself in both the sharecropper/Jim Crow south and the industrial north.  Competition for wealth and social position fanned the flames of hatred among poor Whites and European immigrants, once again scapegoating the Black population.  Hatred of color remains the distracting diversion for less-educated economically challenged Whites in the United States.  The fires burn hot today, fanned by elements of power that are happy to see these flames curtain off the unfettered dash to accumulation at the top.

Extraction of resources from under the feet and homes of indigenous populations remains a global reality, feeding the hidden furnaces of material comfort for predominantly White America and the capitalist wave worldwide.  The onslaught pushing these native populations to less productive lands is only exacerbated by climate change, another byproduct of insufficiently checked individualist development of the West, the United States leading the charge.

A death knell is ringing for White American culture and its global pigmentocracy, built on the backs of people of color and the unfettered extraction of resources.  On its current trajectory, the end seems certain in one of several ways:  the nuclear genie used to pacify the globe will escape its bottle and blow the world to oblivion; narcissistic individualism uncoupled fully from collective responsibility will continue its descent into social chaos; the climate crisis and all its ramifications will take humanity the way of the dinosaur; artificial intelligence will subsume a human culture which is moving steadily along a spectrum from being served to being controlled by the algorithms of super computers.  As we approach the brink of any of these disasters, the global poor (BIPOC) will be further and further marginalized.  Violence of desperation will balloon.  Borders will be closed.  The genocide of proxy wars will increase and, when push comes to shove, more blatant forms of extermination may well be deployed.

Donald Trump’s angry America is all about this.  The president of the United States of America, the country held out as the bastion of individual freedom and opportunity, has carried individualism to its narcissistic zenith.  He has turbocharged the concentration of wealth at the expense of the environment and the common person.  A consummate master of illusion, he has convinced his base – a populace less and less useful to him and other accumulation elites beyond the economic benefits of consumerism and the votes needed in our inconvenient democracy – that their troubles are caused by – shazam – people of color and, of course, godless un-American socialists.  Why should we expect something new?  It’s the time-tested and proven American way.  License the White poor to shoot the Black despised and the pink socialists, while all but the few are stripped of the means to prosper. 

The middle class, as it erodes, is thrust down into this violent emotional maelstrom of self-destruction.  No need to worry about the White upper middle class just yet.  They remain numbed and blinded to complacence by their material comfort.  In the words of the Wicked Witch of the West, “All in good time, my pretty, all in good time.” 

We now face a spiritual crisis of existential proportions.  The Protestantism that added at least some check of individual social responsibility to the American capitalist and expansionist mandate, has given way to a much more individualistic but increasingly less moral Evangelicalism.  Only the thinnest valence of hotly disputed morality issues are now employed to distract from the mad and overwhelmingly blind dash toward the concentration of wealth and resultant global extinction.

It is questionable, in America, whether individualist moralism was ever sufficient to bridle the ultra-productive but amoral energy of capitalism.  Current concentrations of wealth and power would say otherwise.  Neither the right nor the centrist left have mustered the moral courage to treat workers fairly, harness productivity for the larger social good or tackle environmental realities in a meaningful and effective manner.

It’s a simple thing, really.  For the American experiment to grow out of this narcissistic and deadly adolescence and into full and successful maturity, humility must displace arrogance in the dominant culture.  But White America has been, collectively, arrogant for so long that we (I am White and male.)  cannot see it.  The world, the universe, is holding the mirrors to our face.  Greta Thunberg speaks to the United Nations.  George Floyd whispers “I can’t breathe.” Wildfires scorch and super storms flood.  Private violence is advocated as a valid adjunct to police brutality.

What we need, truly, is a new religion, or more accurately a new spirituality, more deeply and individually internalized than anything currently available.  The general social obligations presented by traditional Protestantism have morphed into a primarily externalized pursuit of social justice.  Its energy is consumed butting heads with an Evangelicalism promoting narcissistic accumulation behind a mask of holier than thou morality.  In the meantime, the amoral capitalist juggernaut skirts them both with its increasing control of the political and economic apparati.  All slide blindly together toward the brink of extinction. 

The major religions of the East (Hinduism and its Buddhist offspring) have mastered the understanding of ego and connection to the whole, as have many indigenous religions that understand and celebrate a balance between needs and respect for resources.  All, to greater or lesser extent, advocate for abandonment of ego, the driving force of individualist capitalism, in favor of the connected realization of the higher Self.  They fall short in the recognition and celebration of individual energy and productivity.  They get the seamless connection to whatever it is we call God.  They miss the active participation of that spiritual force in the creative energy and expression of the individual.

A spiritually mature humanity might draw from both the European and Eastern understandings to find what I would call a connected individualism.  The West neither could nor should become mindlessly collective, abdicating all freedom and authority to the state.  But we could certainly benefit from a more Eastern view of ego and individualism.  Our productivity needs a more powerful and deeply internalized moral compass.  We need an ego that is connected with humility to the whole – human, all of creation, all of the cosmos. 

American individualism, arrogantly uncoupled from a mature spiritual connection to the rest of the earth and its human community, must be reined in before it kills all.  White America, specifically, needs to stand down.  It need not disappear nor abandon its gift for productivity.  But arrogance must be abandoned in favor of listening and a willingness to become partnered with, indeed led by others into a process of restoration and a new path of holistic progress.   

Lawrence Mead is right about cultures.  They shape global community.  White American culture, to this day leading the world, is now at the apogee of a trajectory of individualism disconnected and run amuck.  Global community is paying with its life.  Abandonment of creative individual energy is not the answer.  What is needed is a humble and celebratory understanding of the unfathomably vast and unselfish source of that energy, with its will and urge to express itself for true creative advancement through the hands and efforts of the connected individual.

There were two special trees in the Garden of Eden.  We have lived as isolated individuals – scared, hoarding, and violent – for far too long under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Come home, come home, America, to a place of mature, humble, and truly bountiful connection under the Tree of Life.

© Jerry S. Kennell

Jerry Kennell, Taos, NM, blogs on contemporary American spirituality at www.twotreesinthegarden.com.

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Creator of all, with realms beyond imagination, blessed be your numberless names.  Your community come, your way be done, right here, just like you intend.

Open us today to your gift of enough.  You have forgiven us.  May we forgive ourselves and each other.

Keep us from lashing out in our isolation and fear.  Deliver us from the lie of separation.

For we and everything seen and unseen are yours.  Your beauty, your joy drive creation.  Love wins.

Amen

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

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by online video 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.

Children are said to be “at risk” when certain conditions are present – or absent – in their lives.  A kind and working father is missing.  An abusive or addicted one lurks and festers, a boiling and unpredictable giant behind the front door of our denied safe harbor, the refuge of home after our day negotiating the uncertain and often demeaning paths of the classroom and playground.  Disease, or the need to work two or three jobs have broken the arms of mom’s affection and care.

These things make life harder.  They carve away at confidence and shape a world view.  Often the result, by choice, certainly, but under overwhelming pressure, is a generational cycle of poverty, addiction and despair.  Often, but not always.  There are spirits that in their time choose to climb out of the despair, spirits that find a life that transcends oppression, despite the powerful odds.

I have a neighbor and friend, Gordon, whose body has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease.  In Gordon’s case, the breakdown of the nervous connection between brain and muscles is progressing generally from the outside in, with loss of connection to limbs followed by atrophy and loss of large muscle areas.  Gordon is now in a residential hospice facility, diminished bodily to little more than the ability to talk, chew and breathe.

Gordon demonstrates, he embodies, the choice of spirit to transcend suffering.  He does this so completely that it is crystal clear that Gordon’s body has the disease, Gordon does not.  Gordon’s welcome is wide open, even, it seems, to the adventure of his bodily diminishment.  He names and embraces each loss, without denial of sadness or any of the range of expected emotions, but with full engagement, chapter by chapter.  And he extends his welcome to each visitor and caregiver that enters his sphere.  Many linger beyond their task for the joy and comfort of his tent of presence.  He seems genuinely, equally and seamlessly interested in them, at the same time open and willing to the honest and objective sharing of his own experience.

Gordon’s choice pulls the mask off at-risk.  We tend to think of risk as if it is related to suffering, with the ultimate risk being that we might die.  But we are not ever at-risk of death.  Death is a fact certain.  Our bodies will die, whether for wearing out, in a mass shooting, an accidental misstep or the sudden failure of a heart.  We are, in a certain physical sense, never really at-risk.  There is no maybe, no uncertainty at all.

So what is it that we are at-risk of?  We are, I believe, at risk of fear.  Our fear of death is so overwhelming that we choose delusion and denial.  Our favored weapons are wealth and comfort, the narcotics of a new car, dinner out and a trip to Europe.  These comforts come, always, with hidden attachment to the suffering of others – the animal killed, the poorly paid laborer, the displacement of peasants, the extraction and exhaustion of resources.  They fail, always, to avert the end.

Dylan Thomas, whether in brash arrogance or exploding despair, howls his mandate that we “not go softly into that dark night.”  In my reading, he captures the shock and awe of the certain ultimate removal of the mask of our delusion, with the result being our hollow and futile “rage against the blinding of the light.”

Our desperation to preserve physical life and comfort, in the extremes that we have chosen, seems most likely to correct itself ultimately in extinction, or at least in some future adjustment of mass death followed by nature’s reassertion of its own millennially patient creative and re-creative processes.  Life will urge forward in its evolutionary persistence, with or without the human race.

There is an alternative for us.  We can choose to embrace the gift of our spirit – the Self that is beyond fear, the Self that is the observer of all, attached to nothing – no thing.  We can embrace wonder.  We can choose a life of true risk, the risk of engagement, of compassionate embrace of the full range of joy and suffering.  We need not categorize.  The arms of God are as certain in the air beyond the face of the cliff as they are in the physical rock of our desperate clinging.

Let go.  Feel the splendor of the fall.  Or is it a rise?  No matter.  Embrace it all, with attachment to nothing, and share it with others.  Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, the all-in-all that is with us, is us, is beyond fear, beyond what we call death.  Science has taught us nothing if not that there is always a further horizon, no true up or down, no large or small.

We grasp in delusion for what we call safety, the opposite of what we falsely conceive as risk, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  But chapters of inevitable diminishment peel away the decaying flesh to reveal the true nature of the naked and unencumbered spirit.  We can delude ourselves all the way to our ultimate collision with despair.  Or we can choose today the reality of the spirit of all that is, living with joy, confidence and compassion under the Tree of Life.

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

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

A talk, April 17, 2016 at Journeys, a weekly gathering of spiritual seekers in Estes Park, Colorado.

Here at Journeys we explore matters of faith.  For the most part, we do this from what we would call a progressive Christian perspective.  We take the primarily Christian faith concepts we have grown up with and we ask out loud our honest questions about what seems real, what does not, and what we, as maturing adults, actually believe.  And we take away some thoughts and life applications about these things.  It is good to be in a trusting company of humans where this can happen.

But there is always an unseen elephant in the room – or maybe there isn’t.  Our faith is rooted in a presupposition that there is an ultimate cause – something we have chosen to call God.   As Christians in America, we grew up calling God “Father.”  Jesus was the son of God – somehow in a different way than we are.  Yet we learned that we were created in the image of God.  These concepts, whether we are comfortable with them or not, are rooted deeply in our collective psyche and its expression in our culture.

On the flip side, we grew up in an era where some philosophers and theologians dared to say out loud that God is dead.  In fact, as early as 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann as quoted in Wikipedia

Many of us remember, exactly fifty years ago this week, the stark red letters on the pitch black background of the April 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine: “Is God Dead?”  As an eighth grader, I remember being shaken significantly by this, too young to explore, process or absorb it with sufficient personal confidence or grounding.

While the conversation was much more nuanced, this seemed, at least to me at the time, the ultimate despairing triumph of science over religion.  It was the penultimate question and thought of the twentieth century, when the explosion of the material seemed at last to have built and nailed shut the lid on the coffin of superstition.

In fact, I have often felt that the only legitimate reality left standing at the end of the twentieth century was a question mark.  The gravity of it all is summed up well in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous quote of the Bhagavad Gita as he watched the explosion of the first atomic bomb:  “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Not being able, as a 13-year-old, to deal adequately with all of this, I am sure that I chose to repress the question.  But we all know what happens with repression.  The tadpole shoved under the surface of the vast pond of consciousness still becomes the frog, and grows and grows until it ultimately breaks back through the surface with a size and force that will not be denied.

And it is the re-emergence of this monster frog in later life that has given me – given us – the courage and freedom to make these statements, to raise these questions, opening the door to a rich garden of spiritual exploration.  For better or worse, without these statements and events, we would not likely be here doing what we do and having this particular discussion.

So here we are, living the questions.  And today the question is, “What is God?”, or even more bluntly, “Is God?”  You’ll be shocked, I am certain, to learn that I have some thoughts about that.

And here is my basic position.  God is the thoughts we project onto big mystery.  I’ll say that again.  God is the thoughts we project onto big mystery.

Working within the limits of our consciousness, there is really not much else we can say.  In every tradition, God, while made metaphor and personified, is ultimately beyond thought and language.  For each of us, then, that makes God a choice – a matter of belief or disbelief.  Proof positive and complete definition are simply not possible.

It has always been this way.  People in every culture have wrestled with meaning within the limits of knowledge.  And the result of that wrestling has always been a concept of something bigger and other that contributed form and direction for personal and social life.  We need not criticize.  Rather, it is important to realize that for all time, we have been alternately creating God and then killing our creation when it no longer fits plausibly with our current context.  And then we birth God anew.

Emily Dickinson says it well in the closing line of her poem, “This World is Not Conclusion”:  “Narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul”.

So let’s have at it.

First of all, let me say that I choose to believe.  What I mean by that is I choose to believe in something rather than nothing.  Why?  I’m not entirely sure.  I think in large part I do so because I like the way my life works in that orientation.  But choosing to believe begs the question, “What do I believe; what do I believe about God?”.  In my writing on spirituality, I generally shy away from using the term God because of the longstanding Old Man Judging Father in the Sky image conjured by the word in our Western world.  Instead, I tend to use a series of words, “Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.”

Let’s take that apart.

Creator

Creator implies action.  Nearly all world religious traditions view God as creator.  Some people, particularly those we have labeled deists, speculate that God set things in motion and then stepped back, letting natural law and evolution take their course.  God observes, if paying much attention at all, from a very great distance.  We are essentially on our own to figure out the path forward within the confines of our consciousness.  As the classes I was not able to attend here last summer described, some of the founders of our nation were deists and not at all the kind of evangelicals that want to “take back our country for God.”

Others, called theists, also view God as having created or set things in motion.  But they differ from deists in that they believe that God, on an ongoing basis, intervenes to straighten things out.  This has been the general orientation of Western religion.  God created, we messed up, God intervenes.  It is relational, but primarily in the manner of a corrective or redemptive relationship.  We petition God for intervention.  Sometimes God’s intervention comes also on its own, as help or judgment.  Theism, of course, is the dominant position of traditional Christianity.  It is the concept we were taught as children and remains deeply rooted in our collective Western psyche.

The Bible says we are made in the image of God.  While I believe that to be true, the theistic God of the Bible seems more to be made in the anthropomorphic image of us.  We made a big male powerhouse and put him in charge of everyone, especially the women and children.

In truth, it is our discomfort with this deeply rooted theistic concept that brings us to this room every Sunday morning.  We no longer accept the theistic requirements of an anthropomorphized male God and we struggle mightily with the concepts of the fall of humanity and the resulting requirement of blood atonement.

In that regard, most of us actually fall to some extent under another label.  In terms of the traditional Judeo-Christian theistic God, we are a-theists, atheists, not theists.  That is a term that made us shudder in our youth.  It is the horrible and evil “yes” in answer to the question, “Is God dead?”.  And in reality, the theistic God of our older traditions is, beyond occasional metaphorical value, dead.

Abandoning traditional theism, I was happy to encounter another label that, insofar as I actually understand it, works much better for me.  The label is panentheism.

Panentheism is the belief that the something we call God encompasses, interpenetrates and is yet greater and other than the universe.  The word sounds like the more common term, pantheism, but it is much more expansive.  They should not be confused.  The pantheist sees God in nature, in the physical universe, and that’s pretty much that.  The panentheist says there is always more, with limitless attributes of every kind.

The forest sages of the Upanishads, part of the wisdom literature of ancient India, were panentheists.  They labeled this Creator the Self – capital “S” Self – which they described as the immanent, transcendent and essential reality of everything.  Creation emanates from and is the expression of this Self.  Creation returns to the Self.  Creation is Self as action.  Self is.  Self does.  Self is our true personal and transpersonal reality.  Science is our discovery, our observation of the Self in action.

From The Isha Upanishad, as translated by Eknath Easwaran:

The Self is one.  Ever still, the Self is

Swifter than thought, swifter than the senses.

Though motionless, he outruns all pursuit.

Without the Self, never could life exist.

In the panentheistic view, we are actually part of God – this Self of the Upanishads – creating.  Some people say that we co-create, but that implies separation.  In panentheism, we uni-create.  We one-create.  We are not all of God, but we are certainly part of God.  We think.  We move.  And in that very thought and motion, a new world appears that did not exist only moments before.  We one-create in every breath, every thought, every step.  And that is why the chosen nature of each breath, each thought, each step is so important.

God – this Self – is Creator. I believe that when I trust my at-one-ment with God, the great “Is”, the great “I am”, actually works and does and creates as one with me.  I am an active part of the unfolding creative activity of God.  I ride the joyous wave of emanation into the void.  Wow!

God is Creator.

Spirit

Spirit implies conscious but not concrete connection.  Spirit is how we experience God.  We feel, we intuit, we sense synchronicity.  Spirit is Jung’s vast unconscious, the ocean of archetypes bubbling beneath our waking surface.  It breaks through in dreams and moves in our intuition and creativity.  Spirit might be called the “how” of God’s action.  We are touched and infused, we are activated by Spirit.

As a panentheist, I believe in God as Spirit.  For me, that means I have a huge trust in God acting in and through me whenever I am not deluded by my little false separated ego-self.  The Upanishads distinguish clearly between the lie of separation and isolation by contrasting, over and over, this small “s” ego self with capital “S” true self.  From The Katha Upanishad:

In the secret cave of the heart, two are

Seated by life’s fountain.  The separate ego

Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,

Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,

While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter

Neither liking this nor disliking that.

The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self

Lives in light.  So declare the illumined sages . . .

Paul, in the Christian scriptures, quotes a Greek poet, describing this Self as the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”  (Acts 17:28 NRSV)

In my life I experience Spirit as intuition and revelation, as unexpected insight and the beauty of unfolding relationship.  I see the action of Spirit most clearly when I look over my shoulder and observe the path of life – the nudging, the encounters, the crashes and lessons learned, the blessing of redemptive healing and the sense of direction that all add up to the person I am.  And I rest in trust, in the presence, fullness, loving care and direction of that Spirit, for all that I will become.

God is Spirit.

Mind

Mind is the conscious aspect of God – of this capital “S” Self.  Mind is awareness, the ability to see and to perceive.  Mind is the way we experience.  It is language and its manipulation.  It is the Word from which everything springs.  Mind processes all.  Mind is the mill of creation.  Isolated mind is monkey-mind, full of anxiety, fear and distraction.  Connected Mind is the pure joy of essential experience, the flow of creative ideas and the choice to act with truth and compassion.

The Buddhists capture Mind in the now popular term “mindfulness.”  The wise Buddhist priest, teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh urges us to mindfulness in his many books, calling us to undisturbed awareness of the present moment.

Reflecting on the Eucharist in his book, Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh says:

The practice of the Eucharist is a practice of awareness.  When Jesus broke the bread and shared it with his disciples, he said, “Eat this.  This is my flesh.”  He knew that if his disciples would eat one piece of bread in mindfulness, they would have real life.  In their daily lives, they may have eaten their bread in forgetfulness, so the bread was not real bread at all; it was a ghost.  In our daily lives, we may see the people around us, but if we lack mindfulness, they are just phantoms, they are not real people, and we ourselves are also ghosts.  Practicing mindfulness enables us to become a real person.  When we are a real person, we see real people around us, and life is present in all its richness.

We live within the construct of our limited small “m” mind, bounded by the capabilities of our sense organs.  Our eye sees the world differently than the eye of an eagle, or of a honeybee.  Yet we believe that what we see and feel is what is, exactly and in totality.

The real temptation of the Garden of Eden was the temptation to believe that our individual mind is all, that the small “s” isolated self that we perceive and the world we experience around it is the sum total of existence.  That is a fearsome perspective.  When I stay stuck just in small mind, I fear for my life.  There is never enough to satisfy me and never enough protection.  Lust, greed, anger and violence are the natural responses.

When I live in mindfulness, I am aware of my connection to all around me.  All that is.  And I rest in trust even as I move into the unknown.

God is Mind.  God is the practice of mindfulness.

Source

Source is the alpha and the omega, the eternal continuity, the singularity and totality of God.  It is the very point and location, the wellspring of creation – the place where nothing becomes something, where something becomes other.  It is the place to which the waters return after they have exhausted the work of gravity and evaporated into the wind.  Source is the eternal circle, where any point is the beginning of something and the end of something else, where truly there are no beginning, no middle and no end.  Source is the richness of everything beyond imagination, the bottomless shopping bag of creation.

Think of Source as both the center and the perimeter of a spinning wheel.  At the absolute center, there is complete stillness.  Theoretically there must be this stillness because the top of the wheel above is moving in one direction, while the bottom of the wheel below is moving at the same speed in the opposite direction.  Source is that still center of the wheel.

And source is the perimeter, the place where the spinning wheel meets the road.  When a wheel is rolling down the road, there is actually no movement whatsoever at the place where the wheel touches the pavement.  Stillness in motion, something from nothing.

Source is the infinite smallness and vastness of all that is – the particle we will eventually observe that, acting with energy, makes up the Higgs Boson; and the endless expanse we may speculate beyond the perimeter of the known universe.

Again from The Upanishads, a sort of benediction of Source:

All this is full.  All that is full.

From fullness, fullness comes.

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness still remains.

God is Source.

So there you have it, my projection onto big mystery.  Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.  I’ve gone and done it – made God in the image I want – made myself in the image of God.  Just another human’s elephant.  But I like my elephant.  I feel safe in its presence.  It guides my path when I trust and follow it.  It leads me by still waters and restores my soul.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of it.  It is alive in the gift of relationship with Leonor.  I hear it in the ripple of water over stone in the Fall River.  I share it in the breath of conversation together here in this room.  I look over my shoulder, I stand in the present, I trust and become the road ahead.  Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

 All this is full.  All that is full.

From fullness, fullness comes.

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness still remains.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti

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

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

I turned 20 in 1972.  Somehow, in that year of moving out of my teens, I must have felt some necessary transition.  Whatever the cause, I got the urge to read all the way through the Bible, cover to cover:  the creation myths; the twists and turns of Old Testament characters; the tortuous law; the romances; Psalms and the wisdom literature; the histories; the prophets, great and small; the gospels, letters and finally that wild apocalypse at the end.  What a slug it seemed at the time!

There were ups and downs of interest.  I know I spent a lot of time in Proverbs, punctuated with prayers for wisdom.  I have always been blown away by the crystal calls to social justice of the minor prophets, especially Amos.  And Paul’s ego was very annoying (Was I struggling with my own?).  But I will never forget that one particular passage captured me and brought me home.

Somewhere in the middle of Jeremiah, there are several chapters sometimes referred to as The Little Book of Comfort.  In chapter 31: 33-34 it says:

³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts . . . No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord (read Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source),’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”  Something in those words gripped my soul.

Hebrew scripture was written, of course, for the Hebrew people from a particular cultural and historical perspective.  It has the trappings of time and place and the personal limitations of any individual author.  But like all good scripture, the universal Truth of it breaks out of those limitations and speaks where and when it will.

We live in a time that demands that breaking out.  Few in the postmodern world can accept or live entirely or exclusively within the narrow strictures of any particular religious tradition.  We are simply too aware of the variety of paths, the spiritual journey of all the great traditions.  We are cognizant of the human and institutional flaws that have inevitably tainted each – the flaws that reflect, simply, the struggle of our own hearts, the urge of ego toward power and domination through intimidation, force and fear.  We may choose to live in one house, but we will be engaging, dialoging and welcoming across the global community.

And on any given day, in any given body of scripture, when we mine with an open heart, the gems show themselves.  Somehow when I encountered this diamond, I knew I had found my home – or, of course, it had found me.  Somehow the vision and realization that words don’t matter; that names for Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source are inconsequential; that our hearts at their core are true beyond teaching and language; somehow that message took me completely apart and put me back together, all in an instant.

Humpty Dumpty, of course, has fallen off the wall many times – at least daily – since that encounter.  But hold back the king’s horses and all the king’s men.  Let me fall.  Let us all fall until the last speck of clay is shattered and polished off that diamond of our hearts, and all that is left are the words love, justice, peace and compassion, shining with gentle brilliant welcome, reaching beyond voice to all we encounter.

There is fruit on the Tree of Life.  Its bark is studded with diamonds, a gem in every leaf.

© Two Trees in the Garden.  Share what is useful.  Please quote the source.

I have built this blog on the metaphor of the two special trees planted in the Garden of Eden:  The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and The Tree of Life.  I have said that neither was forbidden, rather that both were intended for us. We ate from the first and became aware of our potential for good and evil – the choice between connection and separation.  We can make the choice of moving on to the second.

Since childhood I have loved C.S. Lewis’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia.  Over the past few months I have had the pleasure of reading some of them to my granddaughter.  A nine-year-old sometimes teenager, she has, to my delight, fallen for them almost as surely as I did when they were given to me fifty years ago.  My parents – Mom’s idea, pretty sure – had this habit of giving us a book at our birthday and another at Christmas.  Judging by the gift date inscribed in The Magician’s Nephew, book six in this seven book series, I likely received these in a period from the age of ten to thirteen.

The Magician’s Nephew, the creation story of Narnia, is really a prequel to the series.  As such, it contains its version of how evil came into the world, including a role for a magical mystical garden.

What I find interesting about Lewis’s garden is that there is only one tree.  The tree and its fruit hold great power.  The garden is surrounded by a high, though easily scaled earthen berm, with beautiful closed gates.  On the gates there is an inscription that reads:

Come in by the gold gates or not at all,
Take of my fruit for others or forbear.
For those who steal or those who climb my wall
Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair.

The gates of the garden open with a touch for the person whose thought is for kindness, for compassion, for healing, for relationship, and the fruit of the garden yields exactly their heart’s desire, with accompanying deep satisfaction.

For the person whose thought is only selfish pleasure, gain and power, the gates may not open, but entry is not prevented, nor is taking of the fruit.  And again it yields exactly what it was created to yield – the heart’s desire – selfish pleasure, gain and power, with the accompanying, ultimately gnawing, isolation and despair of disconnection.

The Trees are in reality one.  They are the tree of prana, the source of all that enlivens us.  They are the great I AM, AUM, Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, eternal and always accessible.  And the garden never goes away.  It is not a one-trip salad bar.  We go back over and over.  Often times we go over the wall to snatch for ourselves, fearful that there is not enough, fearful that our pleasure is wrong, wanting more than our share, chasing the desire that leads to pain and isolation.

We do not change the tree.  We do not make it other than it is.  We simply choose our entry, our approach, which shapes our encounter and our experience.  Thief, possessor, abuser?  Guest, steward, partner?  We choose, individually, corporately, in each moment and each breath.

The garden, the tree, is not the world of our action.  It is the source of our being.  We cannot make or break the source.  But we can make or break its creative or destructive expression in our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our society and our world.

We are offered, and feed daily upon, the fruit of the Tree of Life.  And every time we eat it, we experience, we express its life force as the fulfillment of our heart’s desire.

How much, how often, must we fill ourselves with the knowledge of good and evil – with our urge to personal and isolated “will,” for solely personal satisfaction, protection and satiation – before we learn to enter every day the golden gates of “willingness,” to trust in the satisfaction of enough, to relax in being part of rather than possessor of, to give and to receive rather than to force and to grab.

The call of the prophets and avatars has always been simple and the same.  Choose life.  The difference between the trees, friends, is really only the difference of how we enter the garden.  Do we come through the gate with a willing heart, or over the wall with a willful heart?  Either way, we leave filled.  We leave fueled to build the world of our heart’s desire.

© Two Trees in the Garden.  Use what is useful.  Please quote the source.