A Good Read Under the Tree of Life

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we abuse scripture. We bind it up in leather, with gilt pages and we worship it. We thump it on the pulpit, we display it on the brass stand or podium, and when we do open it to read it, we shop for – and find – the bullets, knives and bombs we need to protect our separate selves and our separate religions. The tree always gives us the fruit for which we ask.

Scripture is the place where the stirrings of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source (C/S/M/S) meet the mind of humanity for distillation into concepts and words. Bodies of scripture, combined with years of interpretation, become the normative structure and formative tradition for religions and even whole societies. That is, perhaps, a useful social function. But it also, when scripture is adopted as uniquely and exclusively authoritative, becomes the blinders of division that keep us from open interaction and rich cross-fertilization between traditions. At its worst, it becomes the justification for oppression, violence against individuals, sexes and classes, used most abusively to support terrorism and war.

Types of scripture lend themselves to particular forms of abuse. Historical narrative – the bulk of the Bible being the prime example – can, for instance, lead us to believe that the struggles and understandings of one culture are more than that. We allow them to become the defining history of C/S/M/S to the exclusion of all others. We miss the richness of interaction and learning when we idolize the characters and stories rather than seeing them as a useful record of human experience, much like our own. When we close the canon, we in essence deny and shut down our own direct and vital connection to C/S/M/S.

Revealed scripture – the Koran, the Book of Mormon and more recently, A Course in Miracles – lends itself most easily to manipulation. Followers may be tempted to grant it an air of particular exclusivity. Again, the learning of the content is ignored in the sacralization of the whole. We may find ourselves using it to define in-groups and out-groups, or to idolize the founder who received this intense spiritual download.

Myth – like we find in the Bhagavad Gita, the biblical creation narrative or the many stories of the Buddha – is sometimes written off as not being real. We think, “How can something that is not real be as authoritative as something that is real?” Or equally as risky, we make it authoritative, clinging to and slinging around a literal interpretation of a good teaching story.

I personally find most easily accessible the experiential writings – the Psalms, the Upanishads, the struggles of the prophets. Somehow it is easier to place myself side-by-side with another human who relates their experience of wrestling with or finding unity on their spiritual path. But the same risks apply. I might be tempted to grant sacred status to the experience of another while denying the reality of my own interaction and relationship with C/S/M/S. Or I might ignore the truth that is there because I grant higher status to another source.

We get all messed up with judgment under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good Evil. We make this sacred and that secular. We assign qualities and attributes to make things more or less than what they are. And we do the same to ourselves.

In general, we have adopted a low view of ourselves in relation to all that we choose to label sacred. We insist that we are stuck in our separation from C/S/M/S and that “believing in” this set of writings or the tenets of that religion will save us from our assumed natural state of doom.

I believe scripture. I don’t believe in it. What am I saying when I say that? Under the Tree of Life, everything – absolutely everything – is available to us for learning and for growth. The written experience of all cultures and interactors with C/S/M/S is useful. We have tools to use, not objects to worship.

We don’t need to grant authority to one book or another. C/S/M/S is our author, and we are the breath of that creation. We have the same dynamic relationship as the prophets and writers of any past. And we share the same temptations to isolation and to ego.

We have the opportunity to rest and to revel in the word, in all the words that we encounter in each day of our life. They are the expression of our human discovery of connection and unity with C/S/M/S.

When we sacralize and canonize scripture, we profane our own lives. The fruit is ours, to pick, to eat and to live. It was never intended to be worshipped or to be thrown as a weapon at someone else.

Here we are, under the Tree of Life. Let’s settle down with a good book.

Heading for the Information Wars

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I get “push” messages on my iPhone – CNN and The New York Times duking it out in the information wars to see who can be the first with the latest to ring that little bell in my pocket. Sometimes it’s just AT&T about my data usage or the Estes Park App with the latest dinner deal. The information wars.

But this week it is chemical weapons in Syria and the build-up to whether the President of the United States will declare war on yet another country in the Middle East. Holy holy Jesus. Allah, Allah, the compassionate, the merciful. How did we get here? And where will we go next?

Somehow we have to kick it up another notch. We are all, every adult on the face of the planet, responsible for every action of every government. And death for so many innocents, by our collective hands, is the consequence of our lack of imagination and our inaction.

Under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, greed and power are always poised to dash in for the kill in any moment of weakness – the greed and power of individuals, the greed and power of political factions, the greed and power of religions, the greed and power of nations. It is all the same, collectively or individually. It is our human choice.

We are President Assad. We are the religious factions looking to force their will and control into any chink in the wall of power. We are the soldier we train and equip and send in to the next bloody and endless conquest. And we are President Obama, doing what? None of us, when it comes to the festering pain of our world, seem capable in the final instance of thinking or acting effectively outside the sandbox of violence. The biggest gun may kill the most people, but it never ever wins the heart. Our heart, folks. Everyone’s heart.

And no amount of individual meditation or spiritual practice, uncoupled with creative action, will ever ever tip the scales. Jesus tipped the scales. Gandhi tipped the scales. Martin Luther King, Jr. tipped the scales. You and I can, too, with deep, deep spirituality hand-in-hand and at-one with crystal clear intentional action.

But what kind of action? If it is not action taken under the Tree of Life, it is doomed only for the cycle of violence and death. If it is not action that lifts up every voice, calms every fear, touches every heart – bar none – it is the action of judgment that puts us back on the merry-go-round of death and despair. If it is not action taken with the strength of full vulnerability and the absolute absence of fear, it will be ineffective.

What are the ideas, the dreams of your heart, that you are afraid are just too small, too irrelevant, too naïve to possibly be effective? What is the rock of your love, slung tight in the cords and pocket pouch of your heart, which might just slay the Philistine of our collective fear – the fear that numbs us to inaction?

Is it maybe a Peace Force? Damn our halls of fear and power! (Make no mistake, those halls are us. We have no fingers to point.) Is it ten thousand people willing, at a moment’s notice, to find their way from many countries, to walk together across any border in the face of any fire?

I will tell you that such a force could sing a song, a song that breaks through the fear that underlies the manic greed of President Assad. It could sing again the true song of Allah, the one who calls us to mercy, compassion, hospitality, the giving of alms and never to be the judge, jury and hangman of anyone – never never ever that. And it could sing a song that tells us we no longer need to carry around the supersized arrogant balloon image of ourselves, fabricated of the wealth and complacency that lull us into the belief that we will never die.

Can you share this a thousand times, and can we do something together, now, across the globe that celebrates the Tree of Life in the vacuous and lying face of death? What will it be?

How will we stand up together and sing that song under the Tree of Life?

Scripture today from Jackson Browne, “Information Wars” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoCfII2p8BA –

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The Day of Non-Judgment

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Check yourself when you wake up in the morning. What’s that first feeling inside? Is it angst about the things you have to do? It might be worry about meeting with certain people or concern about the pile of unfinished tasks that lies ahead. Or maybe it is relief that this is a day off, or excitement about an especially anticipated event – a birthday or the beginning of a long awaited journey.

Whatever the feeling, it is almost certainly one of prejudice – pre-judgment. We are pretty sure that things will be this way or that way. And we have pretty much decided that this way is good or that way is bad.

I am not an advocate of positive thinking, of trying to manipulate actions and outcomes by painting them bright yellow and giving them a spin to the left or to the right. Positive thinking is only what it is – a veneer we try to paste on our muddy core of judgment.

Nor am I an advocate of denial of feelings. Feelings are simply the natural reactions to reality as it is perceived and experienced by small “m” me, the me I discovered when I awoke to my surroundings under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The very name of the tree implies exactly what it is – the tree of judgment.

Waking up under that tree, we believe that our life task is to sort our pile of baby blocks just as quickly and effectively as we can. This block is good . . . It goes in this pile. This block is bad . . . It goes in that pile over there and I hope I can figure out a way to trash it so it never comes back. And, oh my goodness, worst of all, I can’t decide about this one. What will it become? How do I know? What should I do with it? What will it do to me?

I think I will bury the feelings, maybe over here under positive thinking, so I don’t have to feel this way anymore. Shit! That didn’t work either! And now I am late for my meeting!

Chill, baby “m”. Let “Me” (big “S” Self) hold you and tell you that we are here together. And we are not, as you believe, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are under the Tree of Life.

We are not our feelings. We just experience them. And our true response comes from the source of everything we need – the fruit of the Tree of Life and the living water of the river by which it is planted – the gifts of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source – our essence, breath and true being.

The essence of that water is love. It nourishes the sustaining fruits of the tree, which are peace, true joy, patience and compassion. Whether baby “we” know it or not, that is what we truly seek. And when we open the eyes of our Spirit, on any given morning, we know that we have exactly what we need. And we can offer it to our small “s” selves. We can live it in all of our actions, in the touch of all whom we encounter.

Let’s hold that little fearful self for a moment to calm its terror about the day. Let’s sit with it in joy and help it to let go of the angst that the things we have judged to be good might not work out. We can tell it that all is well, that we can choose to be and to act, in each moment of each day, without judgment. We can choose to be and to act as our true Self, the one that is fed and cared for – by and one with C/S/M/S – under the Tree of Life.

The practice of stillness, at one with the action of willingness, creates the doorway to non-judgment. It is the practice of being the center of the spinning wheel – completely at rest and fully in motion.

Our focus and activity, in each moment and without judgment, is to drink the living water, which makes it possible for us to be the very fruit of the Tree of Life. We offer this nourishing fruit, we offer Ourselves, in each moment and in each action. We offer it first to the little one, the little self, crying in our arms. We offer it to redeem and to transform the false vision of all who find themselves anxious and unhappy under the tree of judgment, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

A peach, for you and for me, together, under the Tree of Life.

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Deep Wounds, Pure Hearts

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

About ten years ago I heard a bright young praise band at a church singing a love song imploring Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source (C/S/M/S) to “Break me, Lord.” I am sixty-one. I, and likely you, have been broken. At the time, I was pretty much shattered – not by the music, but by the events of my life. I actually felt anger as I listened to the song, and after the service I felt compelled, firmly, to address the unsuspecting singer. I looked the poor girl straight in the eye and said, “Don’t you ever ask God to break you. You will, indeed, be broken, whether you ask for it or not. And when that happens, you just pray your heart out that you live through it.”

Who knows, she had probably already been broken. She certainly did not deserve my hurt projection. I hope that she has forgiven me and, perhaps, that she even found, sometime or other, something useful in the experience.

We speak of a broken heart. But somehow I don’t think it is our hearts, really, that get broken. Our hearts are only found. And generally that takes some heavy duty cracking of shells and some serious excavation.

We get what we seek from our tree in the garden. Stuck in our perception of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we get a calcified hardness. Wounded as children and watching so much of life and relationship in the world around us, we paint ourselves with layer after layer of lies. Year after year, layer after layer, we build up our defense.

Mostly we try to create an image, a projection of something. Like Alice, we may make our images bigger or smaller. We may give the appearance of hardness, of knowing, of being aloof. We may project power, weakness or defense. We may paint ourselves servile or happy or the color of pity. We bake our colors on with fear, anger or greed.

And after a while, we actually begin to believe in what we have created – to believe, in fact, that we are what we have created. Our belief becomes the motor and wheels that move our bigger than life image around under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

We meet and confront other images. We create alliances and do battle. We bully and jockey for position, seeking protection through both defense and offense, wheeling around in our armor, busy being the thing we have made of ourselves.

Sometime, some place, our illusion is shattered. The bigger we become, of course, the harder we fall. Hitler, Qaddafi, the various empires that have come and gone, Elvis – any one of us, or any communal collection of us, can only push this thing so far.

Let’s bring it home. Whether it is in a violent, surprising or dull demise, whatever it is we have created comes to its end, at some point, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We die, and while we may have done some damage, the illusion we have created is gone. The shells fall away and turn to dust.

Our shell is shattered in the relational, institutional and political pile ups we engineer on the autobahn we have built around the base of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If we are fortunate enough to walk away from the wreckage with breath and years ahead of us, we have a choice. It’s the same choice, of course, we had before we painted on the layers. It is the choice between willingness and willfulness, the choice between experiencing the giving tree in our garden as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or the Tree of Life.

Our hearts are not broken. It is only our shells that shatter. Our hearts are pure and supple and everlasting. Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa all knew this. To the extent that they were able to set aside ego and fear, they expressed their true selves, their pure hearts. They chose the fruit of the Tree of Life.

None can avoid the end, or protect themselves from the hazards of mingling with all in this life. The little hard-shelled knights with their wheels and motors of fear and greed shot Gandhi and King to get them off the road. Jesus got nailed to a tree. Mother Teresa, well, I think she pretty much died every day she went to work.

But when we are open, when we are open and willing, we stop painting on the layers, and the layers get stripped away, and away, and away. They crinkle, break and roll off. They peel and are rinsed until all that is left is our heart, the one we were given from the start. All that is left is the undefended. All that is left is kindness, regard and compassion. All that is left is true creativity, a creativity that gives and receives, rather than forces and grasps.

All that is left is what always is, the heart and breath of C/S/M/S that we truly are, under the Tree of Life.

Scientism and The Tree of Life

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

My son John called a few months back to tell me that he had spoken with my father. That’s a sweet and common thing, right, for a child to speak with a grandparent? And it was especially nice that he bothered to tell me. The thing is, Dad died suddenly more than 27 years ago. We adopted John, then just under three years of age, 26 years ago. John never met Dad on this plane. He just gets these kinds of visits.

There was no life-changing message in the conversation, at least yet revealed. Mostly it contained well-wishes for all of Dad’s descendants, with a heartfelt sentiment about how much he loved them and was proud of each of them. John received a distinct sense of each, including far-flung infant first cousins once removed that he truly did not even know.

There were other uniquely identifying memories in the exchange, a particular car, for instance, that Dad talked about. John described it to me in detail, a car I had no photos of and would never have had reason to mention to my son. I knew immediately which car it was and found a photo of one just like it on the Internet and sent it to John. He recognized it with certainty as the car Dad was talking about.

And my Grandma Schertz was pushing some kind of greeting through in the background, too. She would have done that, while she was busy busy minding her plants.

I am probably thinking about this today because my good friend Ki Johnson sent me Eben Alexander’s wonderful book, Proof of Heaven, last week. If you are not familiar with it, Alexander is a neurosurgeon who experienced an extended and particularly deep NDE (near death experience) in 2008, an experience that has changed the course of his life and expanded his view of science and spirituality.

We have become, over the past four hundred years, so enamored with science that we have created a new religion, scientism. Perhaps nothing in the world has greater allure and power to hold us under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and to blind us from the fullness of the Tree of Life. Scientism would certainly dismiss or rationalize in some material way my son’s experience.

There is, of course, so much to be grateful for in the scientific method and its fruits. In addition to the amazing advances in medicine, transportation, communications, daily comforts and understandings of the physical universe, there has been the very valuable checkmate of the abuses of religious dogma and the crushing power of the super-institutionalized church.

But scientism is no different than its religionist adversary. Scientism turns an essentially useful tool into an abusive force when it claims ultimate and exclusive truth. Scientism says that if science has not seen it, touched it or named it, it does not exist. Scientism becomes especially queasy, if not downright dogmatic and fundamentalist, when spirituality enters the room.

Science, itself, in an interesting turn of events, may be approaching spirituality. Or at least a perhaps necessary but over-exuberant burst of human pride at the discoveries and advances of the scientific method may be coming to a more balanced and humble correction. We have been presented with the observations of astronauts as they view the earth from space, the photos of galaxies from the Hubble telescope, and, in another direction entirely, the almost infinite tininess of the Higgs boson. And we learn that rocks and trees and skies and seas are all made of the same stuff – the tiniest of particles whirling and attaching in relationship with mostly space in between – just like the universe – just like us, the most sentient of beings on our speck of a planet.

And, of course, Hinduism, perhaps the oldest of the major religions, can point back to its roots and say “I told you so.” Its philosophical underpinnings and observations of its sages reflect the kind of unitive creative force and energy to which physics now also points.

So as we consider our own spiritual path, what are the implications?

We begin to experience our old concept of God more as Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source than as an image of us, a human form, who lives and rules from somewhere in a direction that we have arbitrarily chosen to label up.
C/S/M/S is no less real or personal. In fact, just the opposite. C/S/M/S is in and through all of that creative space and energy, the stuff that you and I and everything are made of.
The immanence and transcendence of C/S/M/S begin to seem more like the realities of the physical universe and less like theories for discussion. In fact the distinctions between physical and spiritual, immanence and transcendence, begin to blur, if not disappear altogether.
Our role clarifies. Somehow, because we have been granted the gift of consciousness (insofar as we can say what that is and that we possess it in some unique and special way), we have both the power and the responsibility of co-creation, of participating in our own way in the ongoing act of creation and its care. That is perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of being in the image of C/S/M/S.

Scientism and religionism duke it out in a futile and unending struggle of ego under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Science, the observation of what is, and spirituality, the willingness to be, rest and act comfortably in each other’s presence, without judgment, under the Tree of Life. Let’s be there.

I Believe

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Two Trees in the Garden grows out of more than sixty years of experience in Christian community, with a steadily growing awareness and restlessness about the boundaries and limitations of that experience and particular discomfort with the dominant narrative of creation, fall and atoning sacrifice. Twenty-some years of study and reflection across the scriptures and religious traditions of the world, carried out in the context of a constant, simple breath prayer (“Thy will be done.”), have led me to the following working statement of faith, the themes of which are expressed in the weekly blog:

I believe in Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source (C/S/M/S) – immanent, transcendent, omnipotent, omnipresent, love, essence, ground of our being and so much more, beyond all language, in whom/which we live and move and have our being. I grew up with the name God, but choose in general not to use it in this writing because it seems especially important in these times to break out of the cultural trappings surrounding that name. Names of any sort speak only to the limitations of our gift of language and intellect and fall inconceivably short of the reality. Most succinctly: C/S/M/S is; C/S/M/S is love; love is.

I believe we are expressions of prana, the Sanskrit term for life essence breathed by C/S/M/S. We are created in the image, like Jesus, like the Buddha, like Aunt Susie and every other Child of C/S/M/S who has walked the Earth. We are enlivened by the breath of life.

I believe in basic free will choice. When prana enlivens a body, we gain awareness, including awareness of our temporal limitations. This body needs resources to live. This body is born and dies. We can choose the isolation and limitation of our bodies (the choice of ego), which results in fear and its countless expressions in efforts to possess and to control, coupled with its rage when those efforts are thwarted, as they ultimately are. We can also choose our higher Self, the fruit of which is confidence and rest in the eternal and enlivening C/S/M/S essence which both pervades and transcends all things temporal. Our life is the journey of that choice, with consistent results, individually and as societies. We grow to the extent that we learn from our choices, moving toward Self and away from ego.

I believe that revealed scripture –whether Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Mormon, Islamic or other – is inspired. It is full of Truth. This Truth is filtered and interpreted over and over: by the person to whom it was revealed; by the scribe; by the translator; by the reader; by the listener; and by the responder who turns it into human action. When the human interactor is aligned and free in Spirit, the truth of scripture is revealed and results in acts of creative beauty, kindness, healing and compassion. When the human interactor is aligned with ego and fear, scripture is twisted and misused.

I believe there are no closed canons of scripture. My friends Jeff Gundy and JD Martin write scripture – the expressions of their C/S/M/S essence – in poetry and song. Georgia O’Keefe painted it and a million voices sing it in every instant. Scripture is the very essence of our created hearts, yours and mine. Time and historic comings and goings do not begin or end the Word, nor do the sacred and secular labels that we apply to justify our egotistical judgments. An open and willing heart is an open canon.

I believe that historic scripture is a useful record of the human experience with C/S/M/S, subject to the limitations of vision and experience for the writer, requiring and welcoming constant conversation, evaluation and fresh revelation in the context of the present experience and expression of C/S/M/S in our hearts and being.

I believe that religions of any label — Pagan, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Islamic and hundreds more, past, present and future – are neither more nor less than our corporate (communal) expression of the maturity of our understanding and expression of C/S/M/S. A powerful social tool, religion holds the potential for the communal expression of an open and willing heart, with hands, feet and voices of compassion, healing, welcome and stewardship. It holds the same potential for chasing useless sacrifice, empowering hierarchical mediators of the sacred and profane, instituting rules of obligation and shame, and justifying hatred and violence of all kinds. Either way, we choose, engaging and using the tool under our own gifted power.

I believe that worship means to be engaged, individually and corporately, in the creative activity of C/S/M/S. It is to be engaged in joy, beauty, healing, compassion, curiosity and creation. It has nothing to do with noises of adoration separated from these acts of creation, especially when these sounds and acts are engaged primarily for self-indulgence or a hope of gaining points for access to an eternity to which we already belong and of which we already partake. As with so many of our religious terms, we do well to let go of the baggage laden worship label and engage in being the true article, our essence, that for which we are created.

I believe in life everlasting – that prana, as the metaphorical out breath and in breath of C/S/M/S, never changes as it enters and leaves any particular body or temporal expression. We – our spirits – are part of that breath, enlivening and departing the bodies we inhabit. While some report direct awareness of lives before and beyond the one we experience in any given present, I have yet to possess, and do not strive for, that particular gift or awareness. Yet I trust that, to the extent we are open and willing, we are always (before, in and beyond time) growing, learning in grace and love, with deeper and deeper Self-awareness, which is to say, experience of our C/S/M/S essence.

Who knows where that may take us. I love our journey.

The Fruit of Our Heart’s Desire

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

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.

Learning Everlasting

Posted on July 20, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Lifelong learning. It’s a great concept. Now that I work for a library, it helps to pay the bills. It keeps the minds of millions occupied, distracted. As a busy lifelong learner, I can avoid the contemplation of death and the possibility of the end of me as I know me – or perhaps not just as I know me, but just the end, indeed, altogether. Maybe all that is left is a whirling dispersion of atoms, quarks and Higgs Bosons, randomly traversing the universe and likely as not getting trapped for something close to eternity in a gas giant like Jupiter. There is some small comfort, in that case, in the present thought of having no awareness at that time.

“Well take another look, and tell me baby: Who’s zoomin’ who?” (Thank you, Aretha Franklin). Who is looking through these eyes at these words? And tell me, Mr. or Mrs. Higgs, how did you think up your boson? And why is there a race track, just for electrons, underneath a couple of countries in Europe, all for the joy of catching one of these little buggers? And why does my spruce tree smell so good in the afternoon sun, while the aspen leaves shimmy in the breeze, the hummingbird hovers inches away at the feeder and the most beautiful swallows in the world dart with abandon through all of it?

I don’t believe for a moment that this is just a chance material world. But then, neither do I believe in any hard and fast predestination, where we are pawns on a stage for the entertainment of some cynical cosmic audience.

The sages that dreamed the Upanishads called it prana – the life force or essence, the breath of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, exhaled and inhaled by all that is. Prana given and prana withdrawn is the life experience of the material. Prana is expressed in senses and awareness, but its presence or absence does not change it. It just passes through creative stages, one form, one life to another. Prana spins, organizes and reorganizes itself. And at our level, prana wakes to the awesome joy and fear of awareness – the ability of the created to be so fully awake that it can observe itself participating in the very act of creation. What an accomplishment and gift! You, I, we are part of that.

We can dance, we can play, we can create. We can care, we can tend, we can nurture. We can also bury our talent – our prana – in fear, invest it in greed and control, or try to obliterate it in self-destructive behavior. No matter, ultimately, I think, beyond whatever joy, sadness or learning we experience from the consequences of our behavior, individually or corporately.

I believe in learning everlasting. Paul talks about seven heavens in the New Testament and others speak of many planes of existence. We toy with questions of the edges of our universe. Is it expanding? Is it contracting? Are there others? What does all of that mean?

The Prashna Upanishad goes into great depth about prana, speculating that prana divides itself into five expressions when it enters bodily form. The Sanskrit term for the fifth of these is udana, the force that gathers our prana at the end of each lifetime and moves it forward to the next. Question III, verse 7 of the Prashna, says this of udana:

At the time of death, through the subtle track
That runs upward through the spinal channel,
Udana, the fifth force, leads the selfless
Up the long ladder of evolution,
And the selfish down. But those who are both
Selfless and selfish come back to this earth.

Could be. I find myself at home with this thought of learning everlasting, of an eminently patient and persistent Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source that breathes us full of prana, the very breath of life, and lets us choose, in perfect freedom, how we will use the gift, one lifetime after another. Can we spin ourselves off to an isolation of no return? I doubt it, despite our longest and worst efforts. Can we stay stuck at one level, torn between isolation and connection for a very long time? I suspect so. Is there always a loving call home? I believe it with all my heart and soul.

“Softy and tenderly, Jesus is calling. Calling to you and to me.” (Will L. Thompson, 1880) Born under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whispered forever to the Tree of Life, let’s go home.

Scripture today, from my friends Jan Garrett & JD Martin:

Red Rock Canyon (We Go On)

Red rock canyon loves the light, juniper pinon sunrise
And the sweet earth is still damp from last night’s rain
The smell of the sage is a simple prayer
Rising up in the morning air
Saying welcome home again
And oh, what a wonder, I cannot begin to say
Such unspeakable beauty calling my name

We go on, like a beautiful song
We are carried on great winds across the sky
We go on, we go sailing free
We come shining through, we go on

There are secrets singing in the breeze at dawn
A fresh familiar song
And everywhere I look, the world is alive
The soul of the river is one and the same
As the holy blood running through my veins
Like a father’s smile in his newborn child
So, stand still, let me look at your face
Everything keeps changing, but this love remains

We go on, like a beautiful song
We are carried on great winds across the sky
We go on, we go sailing free
We come shining through, we go on

(Lyrics and Music, Jan Garrett & JD Martin)

George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin and the Path Between the Trees

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I speak of this journey on the path between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life as though it is an individual adventure. It is, certainly. But it is also a social journey, the journey of the family, the journey of the community, the journey of society, the nation and humanity. Yesterday George Zimmerman was acquitted, in the State of Florida, on the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin. There was never any question that Mr. Zimmerman shot and killed young Trayvon. The question had to do with the crime of murder. And by Florida law, which says in essence that if you are afraid of someone, you can shoot to kill, Mr. Zimmerman was not guilty. He was afraid of young Trayvon. He is exonerated under the law. The case is closed.

I believe, truly, that Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, with infinite compassion and wisdom, will in good time call everyone involved to healing and to home. But somehow, in this twisted travesty, I have difficulty imagining the task complete in my lifetime, or in yours. Who knows what the path holds for Mr. Zimmerman. Nor can I imagine any quick and easy cleanup for the Florida legislature, and their voting electorate, that chose to pass laws that embrace and codify fear and its cousin, hatred, as legitimate bases for the function of society. And what of this life so rudely cut off for young Trayvon?

We have a common phrase in English, “the straight and narrow.” It is an allusion to a teaching of Jesus quoted in Matthew that many of us learned as kids: “For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matt 7:14, NRSV) The common meaning of both the phrase and the way it was taught is, “Be good, really good, which is really really hard, and you might, after you die, get to heaven.”

But that is not at all what these words are about. They are about finding our way, as individuals, as communities, as societies, nations and humanity. These words are about finding our way off the merry-go-round of fear that keeps us travelling round and round the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, one lifetime after another. As Joni Mitchell wrote, “We’re captive on a carousel of time.” (Joni Mitchell, “Circle Game”) The lights are bright and the music is loud. It’s hard to imagine, riding in the nighttime of this blaring sorrow, that the Tree of Life is just a few steps away. It’s hard to leave the cotton candy and the popcorn. It’s hard to venture into the quiet darkness. And when we do, there’s a pretty good chance that our leaving will threaten the whole show enough that someone will just shoot us in the back. Because the merry-go-round, friends, stops when the riders all walk away. And that’s a major threat to those who can’t imagine anything besides that ride.

The way, the truth and the life, friends, looks like a tiny path in the darkness from up here on the merry-go-round. It is not illuminated by the lights of fear or greed. It is not paved and policed by laws that say the right thing is to live behind a gate, to be afraid and to shoot to kill whenever we have the least worry about our seat on the painted pony, or that someone might have the audacity not to be aware of or paying attention to us and to our rules about our street, full of our possessions. Too bad about that, young Trayvon, too bad.

It’s hard, today, not to run right back to the merry-go-round and jump on a pony and just chase Mr. Zimmerman down the same way his neighborhood and the laws of Florida are set up to hate and chase down folks like young Trayvon. But friends, the way, the truth and the life demand that we close our eyes to a false light that draws us like moths back to that endless circle of fear, hate and despair.

Yes, we must, with complete detached engagement stand in the path of fear. Yes, we must with complete detached engagement let our government and the Florida legislature know that these laws point us down an easy path to certain destruction. Yes, yes, yes and YES!!!

But we must do these things from the clear path that leads to life. It’s not really that the path is so small and narrow. It’s more that we refuse to look for it. It’s more that we keep coming up with reasons, even when we have found the path, to stop singing and to turn around and run back, get on our pony, claim our seat, hold on to our righteous stuff and hate someone. We dare not. We dare not forget our song.

We sing it with confidence, forward to young Trayvon. We sing it with confidence to Mr. Zimmerman. We sing it with arms around mom and dad Martin. We sing it with clarity to the Florida legislature, and to the judge and to the jury, and to all the corners of our own hearts that want to turn our tears back into bullets.

The way, the truth and the life leads only one way between the trees. It is lit by one light and sung by one song. Let us close our eyes. Let us open our hearts. Let us sing our song and let us walk forward on that path.

Deteng, Baby, Deteng!

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Two Trees in the Garden

I keep talking here about letting go, relinquishing attachment. You might get the impression that I am advocating the life of a hermit or an ascetic. Not at all, not at all. In fact today let’s talk about engagement, true action, the kind of action that happens without grasping, without attachment to outcomes. Perhaps there is a good word in English for this. Since I have not found it, I have invented one – deteng, or short for detached engagement.

What we seek to relinquish is not action, but the grasping at hopes or the shrinking from fears about outcomes of our actions. These things, in fact, obstruct pure action in life and destroy the beauty and benefit of true living experience.

Take the moment I am in at present. I have committed, right now, to write this week’s blog entry. It is very tempting to worry about what the…

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Deteng, Baby, Deteng!

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Take the moment I am in at present. I have committed, right now, to write this week’s blog entry. It is very tempting to worry about what the little readership graph on my blog administration site will look like tomorrow. Will there have been more viewers than last week? Any comments? What will you think of me after you have read this, if you have read this – if anything at all? This represents the attachment of desire.

And sometime soon I really should build up the email list to expand distribution of the blog. I could be distracted by that thought, which feels like work, a chore. I don’t want to be bothered, which is the attachment of aversion to action.

In either case, desire or aversion, I am distracted by my attachment to outcomes. I want to have, or to avoid, a certain result, and that becomes my obsession. And In either case, I compromise the fullness of current action, which is to sit in the recliner with my laptop, writing exactly what I am able to write, without concern that it will not be complete or enough, in the time that I have at present. Deteng. I am doing what is before me. I am relaxed in spirit. I am fully and completely doing what I am doing. I am at peace. Deteng.

I believe that the best result of my action, my writing in this case, always happens when I have “given up” on outcomes and have gifted and immersed myself and you, to the extent that I am able, in Spirit, before, during and after the process.

How do I do that? Very simply. Call it prayer, call it meditation, call it relinquishment. I engage in the act of bringing you to mind in the all-encompassing presence of Spirit before I write, and I pray the prayer I pray throughout every day – “Thy (Spirit’s) will be done.” I breathe Spirit into me – Thy will – Spirit’s will. I release Spirit to you – be done. This is for you. It is through me. It is of Spirit. It is interactive. It is one. It is just us together, at one, in the breath of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

The more I am mindful of that before I write, the more fully I am engaged and at ease in the act of writing. And the more open and engaged you are with Spirit as you read, the more complete, blessed and useful the outcome is for all.

The same is true for us in every action. Life in Spirit is not about inaction. It is about moving in Spirit. I encourage you, if the language or some form of it works for you, to practice this before every action, before every interaction; to ground yourself in Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source by bringing the action and its intended recipient to mind. Hold them in heart and mind. Breathe in, “Thy will.” Breathe out, “be done.” Bless them, experience being blessed together.

And then act, in complete trust, with full engagement in your action – so much engagement that there is no room for worry about results or outcome. Trust that you are in Spirit, in the flow and beauty and power of the universe. So is your action. And if they choose to be, so is your recipient. Nothing could be better. Nothing carries more health, peace power or goodness. Nothing could possibly require less worry. Nothing will ever find us more at home under the Tree of life.

Deteng, baby. Deteng. Will will be done.

Scripture today is from the Fifth Teaching, Renunciation of Action, of The Bhagavad-Gita:

A person who relinquishes attachment
and dedicates actions to the infinite spirit
is not stained by evil,
like a lotus leaf unstained by water.

Relinquishing attachment,
people of discipline perform action
with body, mind, understanding, and senses
for the purification of the self.

Relinquishing the fruit of action,
the disciplined person attains perfect peace;
the undisciplined person is in bondage,
attached to the fruit of their desire.

For Shouldness Sake

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Many of us grew up with the notion of God and God’s religion – which was God’s complicated way of getting to us – as being a big list of shoulds and should nots. All of this, of course, had nothing at all to do with the intentions of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source in the establishment of our being. Nevertheless, I look back on a good bit of my life and realize that I could have been a lead character in a blockbuster children’s book, The Little Engine That Should.

It all started right there under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, where we learned that long long list, and the certain knowledge that we would never be good enough to stay in the garden because there was no way that we could ever possibly be all that we should be.

Should, in its very essence, is an endless chase that lasts beyond any concept of exhaustion. Because any time we should be doing something, we are either:

not doing it, which is totally unsatisfactory and fraught with guilt; or
doing it because, well, we should – an External Motivator, which, chances are, leaves us perpetually falling a little short of full expectation. Duck and run, here comes the big Unsatisfactory Rubber Stamp again.

Questions of should also lead to endless and useless discussions of how much and how often. These questions imply giving up things in a zero sum game where, if we give what we should be giving (a tithe, for instance), we will have less of what we had. If we do have more, it will, of course, be only because that External Source has rewarded us in some way for our good/should behavior.

Or we go to this meeting or belong to this church or that organization because we should. Then we must attend x number of times per month or, once again, we are not measuring up for the Shouldness Judge. Not to mention the time and energy wasted on worrying about this stuff.

And then there are the opportunities for humans to dress up like little Shouldness princes, princesses, priests and judges, casting shouldness spells on their scared and foolish but quite willing little subjects who pay exorbitant sums for the privilege of running around, all in a dither.

Ah, sweet life of our little ego creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Krishnamurti said it so well: “You might as well put a piece of stick you have picked up in the garden on the mantelpiece and give it a flower every day. In a month you will be worshiping it and not to put the flower in front of it will become a sin.”

True creation is the flower, friends, and it is us. Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source the Universe – that, who, what, beyond concept and language, whether noun or verb – Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source breathed the flower and breathed us, too. There is no should under the Tree of Life. There is only being. And the essence of that being is both noun and verb. It is the will and the willing to trust, to love, to appreciate, to give and to receive, all in the in and out breath of kindness and compassion. These are action and stillness, a complete fullness, all in one.

There is no obligation, there is only essence. There is no bondage, only freedom. There is no shortage, no need for hoarding, only and always enough.

The one by Galilee got it so right: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” And what did we do under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? The usual thing, of course. The shouldness thing.

We put him on a stick on the mantel and started to worship him.

Oh my shouldness. Oh my shouldness.

Master Of The House: Teaching the Children of Our Dreams

Posted on June 22, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

No one really touches us but ourselves. Yes, bad, even horrible things happen to us. Parents may have loaded us with guilt and shame. Others may have stolen our innocence, our confidence, our health or physical abilities. Even our own actions create wounds that bite and tear at us relentlessly, year after year.

We are filled with anxiety, self-doubt, hatred of ourselves, hatred of others, anger and bitterness that wear us down like a weight we cannot shake or a leaky tire that never has enough air. If we lash out, we only engage a vicious cycle, with temporary relief replaced by acidic guilt, refueling anger, stoking the fire of seemingly justified rage, releasing itself in another inappropriate and damaging outburst – all of this often triggered by even just a single action that may have happened years ago.

Ignoring these lingering emotions is also counterproductive. If we repress them, they may resurface in unhealthy ways, triggered by incidents and people that have no relationship and no proportion to the original wound. Or they may turn on us, causing illness – true dis-ease, eating us alive from the inside out.

Jung and others have taught us to view the characters in our dreams as aspects of ourselves, qualities hidden in our subconscious that enter the house of our dreams and tell us hidden things, things we may or may not want to see or hear.

I would say that the emotions that linger from hurt and harm, whether inflicted by others or by ourselves, are the same. Think of them as our children, clamoring for attention in our house, demanding that we do something, perhaps never enough from their perspective, to satisfy their wants and needs; to feed them, to protect and to defend them, to shelter them, even to go out and to fight on their behalf. They are hurt. They are ours. We are responsible for them. They demand satisfaction.

If they are children, somewhere, one would hope, there is a parent. And of course, there is. We are the parent. As with all our children, we can choose how to parent these emotions. We can parent from a place stuck under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We can choose anger. We can choose to ignore. We can argue with them on their own level. We can let them, in essence, parent us, as we run around madly to meet their incessant demands.

The demands are incessant, of course, because they are not the real needs and, therefore, can never experience satisfaction on their own terms.

Satisfaction comes when we choose to parent our emotions from a position of life under the Tree of Life. In that place, we are an adult. We are spirit connected. We are in charge. We are caring and compassionate. We are also separate, observing and directive, guiding and nurturing toward health.

The children of our wounds are primarily hurt, anger, shame and guilt. We will choose our responses to them depending on their true level of need. When wounds are fresh, or reopened for any reason, we need to show compassion and comfort to our children/ourselves. We need to sit quietly, perhaps visualizing holding ourselves as a hurt child.

When our wounds are pestering us for attention and distracting from our work, daily living or relationships, we need to expect them to be quiet for a time, assuring that we will spend the time needed with them when it is appropriate. Their gratification can be delayed. That is different than repression and we must, of course, take the private time that is needed for listening, reflection and healing; time that can appropriately be set aside and used for that attention and purpose. Otherwise our emotions will find us unworthy of trust and will strengthen their assault on our attention.

When our emotions are out of control and just wrecking the house, firm boundaries are the order of the day. The time-out chair should be used without hesitation. The good parent is clear about acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

And, of course, when either the wounds or the behavior are more than we can manage alone as a parent, professional help is in order. Good parents make good decisions about when to take their children for medical or counseling attention.

I have found Getting Through The Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children, by Nancy J. Napier (W. W. Norton, 1993), an excellent practical resource for learning to take a healthy adult role in relation to our emotions, the children of our dreams that clamor for food and attention at the table of our heart.

The best place to deal with the fruit, the children, of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, is from our own grown up place under the Tree of Life. It is our true home. We can welcome our children to the table there. We can treat them well. We can raise them up. They are never us. But they are our charge until they are grown and ready to manage for themselves.

For today’s scripture, a fresh look at a well-known word from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young:

Teach Your Children

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s, the one you’ll know by.

Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

(Second verse counter-melody)

Can you hear and do you care and
Can’t you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.

Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s, the one you’ll know by.

Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

The Doorway: Life Between the Creeds

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I don’t believe in a physical Father Almighty, though I suppose Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source (C/S/M/S) could choose to take that form in some very limited but specifically useful expression,
Who fathered through the Holy Spirit an only-begotten Son of God who was physically or spiritually put together any differently than you or I.
I do believe in C/S/M/S, that is the breath of life in all of us, in whom we live and move and have our being.
I am much more inclined to believe in reincarnation than I am to believe in the actual resurrection of my specific physical remains (yuck!). Or let’s say I think “I”, whatever spark of C/S/M/S “I” am, can likely be reconstituted in any way, shape, time or place Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source desires.
I have a completely unfounded faith and confidence – call it a firm suspicion and longing – in/for life everlasting.

For me, as for many people I know and love, the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds just don’t cut it. I live life between creeds. An important disclaimer: Growing up Mennonite, I was not raised in a creedal tradition. We didn’t talk about it much, so I didn’t really know why. I was aware of the creeds. I think we read them occasionally, incidentally, accidentally. We were just more concerned about following the teachings of Jesus about everyday life. Looking back, I am grateful.

Liminal space, the threshold, the doorway between – spiritual directors like to talk about that as the creative place to be, the place where C/S/M/S can act for our growth. It’s a place of wonder, of openness, but also of uncertainty and sometimes loneliness. It is a place of leaving behind, of preparing to move forward, of not yet having arrived. We live in liminal space and, I believe, in uniquely liminal times.

The people I connect with most don’t go to church anymore. Or they confide, when they know they are safe, that there is nothing there for them spiritually – that they go for the sense of community, but that their spirit is hungry for something no longer found there.

I participate in two separate and independent gatherings, one called Journey and the other called, of all things, Journeys. These groups both discuss questions of spirituality. They are composed largely of people who grew up Christian, and who, for the most part, no longer participate in traditional church. The average age in both groups, for whatever reason, is probably people in their early eighth decade (70’s, if you don’t want to do the math). At 60, I am a relative youngster. One meets in a church, sponsored and at least tolerated by a church, before the regular service. Few of the perhaps 50 participants stay for service.

Liminal space is restless, like the times after a revolution and before the formation of a new nation. These times lack definition and structure. They are creative and risky, uncertain. Traditional community is gone. There is something within us, like the Israelites in the period of the judges, that at least subliminally (interesting, the derivation of that word) wants a king, and probably a creed.

It is 2013. The world was supposed to end last year, just like it was supposed to end so many times before on so many calendars. Perhaps it did. Perhaps something truly tipped and the grip and bands of twenty centuries of Christianity (not Jesus, folks, but Christianity), broke, lost hold. The bands did not disappear. They did not dissolve in a flash, but they finally rusted through. And the staves of the barrel are loosening. The old wine is seeping and even running down the sides.

There is sadness, grief and pain in that loss. It’s the music that hits me hardest. So much incredible beauty, longing and hope, but with words that are hard to mouth and to articulate as we stand in this present doorway. One day, and even now, I hope it can be sung with affirmation, as metaphor that, like all good metaphor, touches deep aspects of our human and spiritual condition, not as hard dogmatic reality. I will not let the music go, or much of the scripture for that matter – language of healing and hope, full of C/S/M/S, beauty beyond beauty.

And there is hope and light in the doorway. I can’t, even if I want, rush through it. And the truth is I don’t want to. Younger people will move past, and they should. They will find their new creed and community. And I might, too, in time. But for now, I am at peace in the doorway, in this liminal space. Both feet are perhaps on the threshold. I am no longer in the past. But neither have I moved on into some hard fast future.

I trust a bright tomorrow. I trust the spirit of today. I am grateful.

Redemption

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Redemption is the follow-on act to forgiveness in the transformative process that moves us from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life. It is the action that makes our human experience useful for a life of spiritual growth and compassionate service.

Recall, again, that we are journeying from attachment and revulsion, to detachment from the controlling power of both our desires and also the burdens and pains of our human experience. Detachment, in this context, is not disengagement from life. Rather, it is a choice about control. We detach by deciding that neither our desires nor our fears will have authority over who and how we are. That authority comes from a different place and will be the topic for another week.

For the person engaged fully in this journey between the trees, forgiveness – relinquishing control – and redemption – accepting back as useful – are the paired constant tasks of life. They are no more nor less than breathing in and breathing out.

Remember our experiential list from last week:

Desires that we chase, never to complete satisfaction
Fears and discomforts that we avoid
Wrongs that we inflict on others
Wounds and injustices that we receive

Forgiveness is the act of letting go of these things, of stepping off the merry-go-round, of no longer chasing our tail in our mad dash around the trunk of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Redemption is when all these things we have chased or run from, and now release, come back to us as useful tools for life. Notice that I say tools. We do not have to use them. We do not have to go back to them. Some we may choose never to touch again in any way. Some traumas are too deep and the healing too long and painful to be picked up and put into active use as personal tools for the healing of others. And I would never imply some kind of cosmic purpose dictated by the learnings from a horrible accident, for instance.

But at the very least, redemption is an action of sufficient personal healing to make it possible to move forward in life. Perhaps, in fact, it is that very act of moving forward once we have been able to forgive and relinquish:

When I have let go of my attachment to a desire, I may choose to experience that pleasure when it is available if I know that it will not harm me or another, no longer controlled by my attachment to it. Or I may know that the possibility of reattachment holds too much risk for me. In that case, I might choose to live my life without touching that experience again, while neither despising nor praising it. I have experienced forgiveness. I move on through redemption.

When we have let go of a fear we have long carried, we may simply move forward without it. Or perhaps we will be comfortable enough with what we have learned that we can, in turn, help others on the path to name and to release similar fears. Redemption is the move forward. Redemption is also the new tool we have in service of others if we choose to use it.

When we have been able to give and to receive forgiveness for things we have done or for wounds we have received, redemption makes it possible for us to remind ourselves, with humility, when we might become critical or judgmental of others. Or it may help us to empathize, to hear and to participate in the healing of another who has experienced a wound similar to our own. In either case, it clears the path for us to move more freely and openly toward the Tree of Life, where all people experience and share healing.

Redemption touches and heals memory. It does not take memory away, but it can make memory our teacher. Redemption is our constant companion, if we are listening for it on the path, conversing with us, drawing wisdom and understanding from our experience. If we allow it, redemption opens the ear of our hearts so that we can hear others with compassion. It is the gift we become for each other on our journey to the Tree of Life.

Forgiveness

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

On May 11, the little viloet-green swallows returned to the greenway and stream behind our home in the Rocky Mountains. There is really no adequate explanation for the joy and delight I get from watching their antics in the air – a rhythm of alternating flutters of acceleration and daring/darting swoops and glides. They are much smaller than the barn and bank swallows, cuter and less graceful, like torpedo cigars with curved wings and a white band across the rump. The analogy in flight might be a small propeller driven aerobatic craft as compared to the sleek Learjet look and performance of the barn swallow.

The swallows, of course, are feeding on tiny bugs in the air. We never really notice bugs here, but they must be around, because the swallows come back every summer and are busy as can be, morning, noon and evening, swooping/sweeping out the ravine, transforming the air to absolute clarity.

Forgiveness is like that, I think. Forgiveness cleans up the bugs. Forgiveness seems to me the transformative act that moves us between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life.

There is so much that cries for transformation in the experience of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We all participate. We all partake, whether we want to or not. Each of us carries memories and scars of hurts and crimes of the heart, things we have done to strangers and enemies, friends and loved ones, that we can never call back or undo. And we bear as painfully and heavily the injustices and hurts that others have cast off on us.

There are the passive acts: the circumstances beyond our control; the accidents of place and rank of birth; the onset of illness; environmental tragedies; the inevitable loss of loved ones, whether by age, illness, accident or even the screaming silent choice of suicide.

On the other side of the tree we encounter the insatiability of desire: the disappointment of pleasure that is less than we hoped; a relationship that somehow does not “meet my needs, too (with the unspoken implication that I am clearly fulfilling my end of this devil’s bargain);” the money that never quite buys all that we want; the status and recognition that we never fully achieve.

Forgiveness is not just our childhood concept of getting off the hook because we have said, “Sorry.” Rather, forgiveness, like the feeding of the swallows, is a continual ongoing life process. It involves, at least:

taking in and accepting
transforming
relinquishing as something useful

I could go into a descriptive analogy with the digestive process of the swallow, but I’ll leave that to imagination, if you find it personally useful.

We cannot avoid our participation in, our daily consumption of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It brings us – and we must embrace and consume, if we are to live and to grow – the full scope and continuum of our human experience.

But we can let go of both our horrid disgust and our choking grasp – our judgment and avoidance of or attachment to the inevitable fruit of our daily existence. It is what it is, the fruit of human life. If we manage it in the image of God way in which we were created, we can:

accept it, take it in and embrace it as it comes
allow it to be transformed for our growth and learning, our movement along the path to the Tree of Life
release it back to the earth, transformed, for our own health and the health and nurture of all those we touch.

I have an acquaintance who reads this blog, a gifted healer who works with energy in this way, somehow sensing, drawing out, transforming and returning energy – energy that has accumulated as a negative build up, but is returned for healing. It is an amazing gift and perhaps she will consent someday to write about it here.

But for you and me, let us be transformed, daily, by and in the Spirit, our Creator and Source. Let us eat all that is set before us from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Let us accept it, present it for transformation and relinquish it for healing and nurture, finding that when we do, we are indeed flying with delight in the valley of the Tree of Life.

From Jackson Browne:

Don’t You Want to Be There

Don’t you want to be there, don’t you want to go?
Where the light is breaking and the cold clear winds blow
Don’t you want to be there in the golden glow

Don’t you want to be there, don’t you want to fly?
With your arms out, let a shout take you across the sky
Don’t you want to be there when the time’s gone by

Times there was love all around you
Times you were strong and alone
Times you believed love had found you
And you fell through time like a stone

And those you have wronged, you know
You need to let them know some way
And those who have wronged you, know
You’ll have to let them go someday

Don’t you want to be there?
Don’t you want to cry when you see how far
You’ve got to go to be where forgiveness rules
Instead of where you are

Don’t you want to be there, don’t you want to know?
Where the grace and simple truth of childhood go
Don’t you want to be there when the trumpets blow

Blow for those born into hunger
Blow for those lost ‘neath the train
Blow for those choking in anger
Blow for those driven insane

And those you have wronged, you know
You need to let them know some way
And those who have wronged you, know
You’ll have to let them go someday

Don’t you want to be there?
Don’t you want to see where the angels appear
Don’t you want to be where there’s strength and love
In the place of fear

Words and Music by Jackson Browne
(Swallow Turn Music, ASCAP)

Who is Jesus?

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

If we are created in the image of God, and if, metaphorically, our bite from the apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was just an intended and natural part of our awakening and growing up as humans, then there really was no utterly damning fall of humanity and there is no such thing as blanket original sin. Ergo, there is no universal need for atonement – least of all blood atonement, the topic for another day. But popular Christianity has made that the whole point of Jesus and the Bible. So if not that, then what? Who is Jesus?

This is just plain painful. There is so much clutter in American Christianity. Jesus, in the current culture, is more likely to be associated with the right to carry a gun than he is with the feeding of the five thousand and certainly than he is with the elevation of women or social outcasts and religious minorities (the lepers and Samaritans in his day). There are hot air balloons in the shape of Jesus and portraits of Jesus that have changed to fit popular perceptions and religious movements of all kinds, from tough guy to Jesus freak. “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus . . . .” WWJD indeed!

Son of God? The common title for a king. Son of Man? The common title for what? Second person of the Trinity? An entirely human concept created by a council to satisfy certain theological and political needs.

“I am the way, the truth and the life.” You will recall that, word for word, the same was said of Krishna in the Srimad Bhagavatam several thousand years before Christ. What does it mean?

Let’s keep it simple. The net effect of getting rid of the fall and focusing on our creation in the image of God is that it elevates the view of humanity – something up from worm to more, say, human. Jesus himself, over and over, said that when we act like children of God, we are children of God. And the people that he recognizes as brothers and sisters are not the ones that say to him, “Lord, Lord.” They are the ones that breathe the breath of God, that choose willingness over willfulness, that have become in action and spirit the instruments of peace and healing that they were created to be.

And when we strip away the clutter we have piled on Jesus, he is, surprise surprise, a child of God. Hmmm. . . . Jesus a child of God. You and I, children of God. Have I just demeaned Jesus? Have I just blasphemed by making us into little gods? From the age old perspective of the fall and blood atonement – the perspective that can only see the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – indeed I have. But sit with this for a little, and listen to the voice of Jesus without the static of the ages. Consider honoring the poor man by just, for once, honoring his call to grow up and, as he chose so consistently, to do the will of God. Be the brother or sister this good man suggested you are.

What does it mean to be the way, the truth and the life? Let me suggest that it simply means to be the path that leads from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life. It means to shine a light of truth and recognition on the shock and fear, attachments and repulsions of our awakening to the experience, possibilities and limitations of our humanity. And then it means to extend the call and to offer to walk side-by-side on the path that leads away from the temptation and delusion of willful control over these things, and toward willing and active participation in the eternal creative goodness for which we were intended.

Jesus is, indeed, the way, the truth and the life. So are you and I when we choose to join the path before us to the Tree of Life. Who is divine? Who is a human? Those are questions of the judging realm of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is neither elevation nor diminution under the Tree of Life. There is only openness and action in the spirit of willingness. Follow the path. Be the path.

The Most Important Thing

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

About 25 years ago I read a short book on breath prayer. I don’t remember who wrote it, what the title was or much detail about it. I do remember that the author believed that, with empty and open reflection, a person would be given a brief, mantra-like breath prayer. The idea was a two-part phrase, the first part to be thought or spoken on inhalation and the second part on exhalation. It would be repeated throughout the day. And it would be just the right thing to meet the petitioner’s need, likely for a long period of time.

Being a fairly trusting soul, and thinking this sounded like a pretty good thing, I sat quietly and asked to be given my breath prayer. And sure enough, it showed up: “Thy will be done.” Breathe in, “Thy will.” Breathe out, “be done.” So the idea was, just like breathing, to say, to breathe this over and over. About a million times. Seriously. Just literally graft this into my autonomic nervous system.

And I have. For twenty-five years, when I wake, before I go to sleep, riding in airplanes, when I am driving by myself, confronted with challenges or opportunities, for a few minutes before I enter a meeting, I breathe in, “Thy will,” and breathe out, “be done.” Incredible things have happened. Incredible learning and growth have come my way. Not to mention the numerous times I have been brought rudely to my knees.

I advocate the concept and practice. Find your breath prayer, whether you are theist, agnostic or atheist. Whether you think of God/Spirit/Mind/Source as a person, concept or force, I suspect your subconscious will offer up some useful breath mantra. And when you incorporate it seamlessly into your breathing habit, it will find, strengthen, shape and heal something centrally useful for you over time.

But breath prayer is not what this piece is about. It’s about choosing the willingness of connection to the Tree of Life over the willfulness of attachment to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As it happens, I backed into this learning through my breath prayer, and have experienced the goodness of it for many years. But the more I experience it, the more I think it is the most important thing.

Psychiatrist and spiritual director Gerald May wrote the most amazing book, Will and Spirit, which I have mentioned on this page before, and it is all about choosing willingness over willfulness. The choice I am describing is the choice of abandoning personal control in favor of submission to something larger and greater. It is the choice of trust over suspicion, of grace over judgment. It is the wholeness of Zen over the mechanics of technique, openness to epiphany over grasping for contingencies. It has nothing to do with abandonment of responsibility, but everything to do with balance and perspective.

The root of all our anxiety and most of our unhealthy behavior is our desire, our drive, personally to control everything about life. This is a natural response to the sensation of individuation that comes with human awareness. We feel vulnerable and alone. We feel solely responsible. We have enough awareness of our environment that we think we can and should govern it entirely.

But we cannot. Our perspective and our grasp are necessarily limited. We are, in essence, missing the “omni” part of omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. We are created in the image of God. We are filled with the breath of God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” But we are never complete in and of ourselves. And we are willfully deluded, headed for destruction and despair, if we think so.

“Use the force, Luke.” There is so little to worry about in life when we approach it from a stance of trust and willingness. Which of our biggest fears or greatest challenges have we changed with anxiety? What problem have we solved or outcome have we truly influenced in a positive long-term way through willful control? Healed any relationships lately with a swing of the old ego bat?

I grew up with a fairly positive experience of a personified God. So even though “God” is now to me beyond the confines of concepts and language, “Thy will be done” works pretty well for me – very well, in fact, as I breathe in and breathe out every day. But maybe you did not experience God that way, or maybe even the term God is totally off-putting. No matter. I think your breath prayer could be “Eat Jell-O,” so long as it takes your mind off yourself and opens you to a place of greater trust and less willfulness.

Let go of willful attachment to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Connect willingly to the Tree of Life.

The Right Path

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

What to do? What to do? So many religions and so many right ways to worship. Catholics pass by the baptismal font on the way to the Eucharist. The priest is the medium who performs the ritual that transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. I am a Mennonite and we say that you can’t be a follower of Jesus and go to war. (Hey, I do, truly, believe that!) Some forms of Buddhism note the requirement of assistance from certain deities on the path to enlightenment. Depending on how one views it, every religion eventually evolves or devolves into a distinctive identifying set of rituals and requirements.

J. Krishnamurti, in the collection of his teachings titled Freedom From The Known (p. 115, © 1969 by Krishnamurti Foundation, Harper & Row, Publishers), says, “You might as well put a piece of stick you have picked up in the garden on the mantelpiece and give it a flower every day. In a month you will be worshipping it and not to put a flower in front of it will become a sin.”

Our fear runs so deep that we are easily intimidated by religions and religious practices. We become frantic in our efforts to do the right things, to find the one right way to salvation. And instead of happily being a dog, we are a dog madly chasing our tail. Or we become busy busy with “shoulds” and “should nots” and “rights” and “wrongs”, so much so that we lose awareness of where and who and how we are – ultimately to the point where we are righteously, or even violently anxious and obnoxious about how right our path is and how wrong all the others are.

What a wonderful situation for the worldly powers looking for the raw material of war and domination. It’s the devil’s dream playground. Our God, our might, our right. But powers of domination and governance come and go. None of them last forever. None of them bring any real protection. None of them create ultimate happiness.

And the religions. Ritual and sacrifice bring no hope or assurance, no matter whose label they are under. While they might each have a lens on capital T Truth, the religious institutions of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam; none of them will save our hide from death and decay.

God/Mind/Spirit/Source – whatever inadequate label we choose to try to name this beauty and compassion that we know is here inside – God/Mind/Spirit/Source needs no rituals and practices. God/Mind/Spirit/Source – true religion – is alive and kicking, loving, truthing and connecting, heart to heart, hand to hand, no matter what the institutions are doing around us, no matter what the circumstances of life may bring.

Some would call it end times. To me, we are at a time of beautiful convergence. Think of it as a mountain with many paths. As we get closer to the top, the paths come nearer and nearer to one another. They are visible, one to the next. We can see the travelers on the other way and wave to them, or stop for greetings, conversation or a meal. The paths might even crisscross or merge. Meanwhile the top of that holy mountain of our hearts is closer as we travel.

There is beauty to behold in each traveler and each robe and costume. There is music and art, sound, sight and utility in each ritual when it is just a tool to help bring the attention of the mind to the leading of the heart as it opens to the Spirit. Or there are walls to divide and altars upon which to sacrifice and scales upon which to judge, if we choose to make the rituals gods to worship, weapons to defend or blinders to fool our vision and thinking.

Let us be humble, open and without judgment. Let us observe the things we carry with us, the rituals and practices that guide us, in the context of all that we see and, most of all, in the light of the Spirit as it shines on all the paths and all the travelers we encounter on the way.

All are called to the mountain. All are invited to drink from the river. All are welcome at the Tree of Life, and its leaves are indeed for the healing of all nations.

Whose Will is it Anyway?

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

So we’ve chosen to let go of ego, small “s” self, and the attachments that drive us relentlessly to the pleasure and away from the pain we experience under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And we’ve embraced the Lord of Life, the capital “S” Self of the Upanishads under the Tree of Life. Furthermore, we did this as a free will choice. It seemed like a good thing to do.

But who did it, if not my ego self? And who are we, or, in fact, are we at all, once we have made that move? These are not small questions or little fears (ego fears, admittedly). I remember when I was in high school, early in my years as a follower of Jesus, and I read a lot of the things Paul had to say in the New Testament about “Not I, but Christ.” It troubled me that I had been given a brain and the ability to think and to write, and then, at least as I understood it, I was being told to throw all that out the window and somehow someone else was going to live in me and witness on street corners and say embarrassing things I didn’t want to say.

And then I went to college and took a philosophy course from our college president, a Harvard trained philosopher and a true follower of Christ, and learned that in the Eastern religions a person really arrived, achieved nirvana or enlightenment, when the self was completely annihilated and merged into this formless unitive mass. I still see the circle on the chalkboard. OK, supposedly it was blissful, but if I didn’t exist, how would I know? I mean, how attractive is that?

Not long after, what with the busyness and confusion of early middle age, I just let it all go pretty much numb. But the question of if not me, than whom, continued to poke its head up and nag me every now and then. Am I mine or am I someone else’s? Or am I even asking the right question?

Hamlet, as it turns out, pretty much nailed it in his simple and eloquent conundrum: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Or even better, Billy Crystal’s wonderful impersonation of Sylvester Stallone doing Hamlet: “To be, or what?” The answer, friends, is in “being,” not in “whoing.” The answer is in the “am” more than in the “I.”

There is a good bit of speculation that Jesus studied under spiritual masters in India, Egypt and perhaps even with the Druids of the Celtic Isles during the many years of silence. Someday he might tell us. Whatever, much of his behavior is consistent with this thought. When James and John asked to be seated at his right and left hand in glory, he responded that true leaders serve and are not served. And his final act of teaching for his followers was, as a leader, to set aside the “who” thing and engage the “be” thing of washing their feet. He consistently rewrote his “I” as “to be.”

In the Hindu classic, The Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna adopts a similar stance. He is not the mighty warrior. Rather, he is the charioteer – the servant and counselor of the very human Arjuna, who is struggling over the “I” issues of the tasks that have been set before him. There is no more profound and lucid explication than the Gita, when it comes to detachment from outcomes (the “I”) in favor of full engagement of the satisfying acts of service that represent our true nature (the “be”). This is rich and joy filled reading.

Gerald May, the late psychiatrist and author who founded the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, in his profound book, Will and Spirit, asserts that we find meaning in life when we abandon “willfulness” (the “I” stance) in favor of “willingness” (the “be” stance).

And if there remains any doubt, in the clearest identifying statement of the Biblical narrative, God declares to Moses (Ex 3:14, NRSV), “I AM WHO I AM . . . . Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source is not “who.” GCSMS “is.”

So whose will is it anyway? The answer is to detach from the struggle of the question and TO BE, in action, who we ARE, created in the image of God. We are not “Who (ego).” We “are (Self).” Our true nature and satisfaction is to act, to serve, to be accordingly, with every cell and atom of our creation.

Today’s scripture, from the Gospel of John Lennon:

“Imagine”

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

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