Tag Archives: Fruits of the Spirit

It’s Not Always Clear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Choice of Devotion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science, Religion and the Engagement of Mystery

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Let’s be clear.  Humans made religion and not the other way around.  We created our myths.  We were not created by them.  And religion has been, is and will always be no more nor less than our myth making, our dialog with, our effort and yearning to address and connect in a meaningful way with mystical matters of spirit.

Science, on the other hand, and also a discipline of our making, casts ever new light on the physical horizon of mystery.  We learn, with the tool of science, about the material manifestation of something we can never fully name.  And we use what we learn, for better or worse, to fuel our own evolution.

We want to think that our religions have stood forever.  They have not.  They have grown from the seed of our awakening.  They have adjusted and adapted continually, if often reluctantly, to changes in knowledge and culture.  Heresies of only a few centuries ago, like the notion that the earth is a body moving around the sun, are now accepted as simply good science.  And archeological finds, like the complete Gospel of Thomas in the scrolls at Nag Hammadi, give us pause and reason to reflect anew on things we once thought certain, like what Jesus did or did not say.

But our view is too often reactionary, when it should be engaging and embracing, welcoming change while being ever in amazement and awe at the new mystery that unfolds continually before us.

Good science and true religion are never at odds.  They are simply independent disciplines serving completely different purposes.  Science observes and tells us – always provisionally – what and how.  I say provisionally because deeper and more complex discoveries constantly change our view and understanding of things.

Religion explores meaning and gives us – always provisionally – a sense of purpose in the void beyond our physical circumstances.  Again I say provisionally, because the edge of the void, the event horizon between the measured and mystery, is constantly moving.

This change need not be the threat it is so often perceived to be for religion.  We want the event horizon to stay fixed.  And so we focus on battles over the fault line.  We hold tight to ridiculous claims about the number of years since creation or our vision of a Creator that we, more likely than the other way around, made in our own image.

Religion locked in this backward view sets itself up for little more than an equally immature “told ya’ so” from those that claim the latest finding of science as total and ultimate truth, the undoing of dogmatic religion.  But true science is never ultimate and always only provisional.  It is just the next tiny discovery in the puzzle in the face of mystery beyond measure, words or imagination.

When we become stuck in scientism or religionism, we waste time heaving rotten eggs and tomatoes at each other across a false divide of our own imagining.  Respect and wonder are the appropriate positions as we journey relentlessly and together into our home in mystery.  Science pulls back the curtain on amazement at manifestation, things that can be seen and measured.  Let us continually appreciate each new discovery, each speck and marvel revealed on the emerging horizon.

Spiritual experience and exploration grant joy, gratitude, a sense of meaning and blind direction in the engagement of the unmanifest, the mystery within and beyond.

May all who go forward into exploration of the void bring back forever the gifts of knowledge and of the spirit, to be enjoyed in fullness, celebration, appreciation and humility, together, under the Tree of Life.

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

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

Keeping the Appointment of Our Life

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I’ve been reading a lot lately about second half of life tasks – Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward and two books by James Hollis, Hauntings and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.  I guess people of a certain age (right now, perhaps especially children of the ‘60’s) become concerned about these things.  In Hauntings, Hollis speaks often of “showing up” in our lives.  He says that “what Jung called the Self, the natural wisdom, the organic drive, and the will to meaning, lives in all of us and waits for us to show up, keep the appointment.  How many of us really keep the appointment in our lives?”

Good question.  The “second half” of life is more about a place than a time, a point of response to a confrontation with Self.  The first half place is the place of constructing an ego, a place of defining our fit and space in the world, of making ends meet.  How will we make a living?  How high will we climb the ladder of organizational hierarchy?  How will we dress the kids and what activities will we steer them towards?

These are, for most of us, necessary tasks, if only for the sake of finding out who we are not.  I have known just a few souls who seemed to grasp their true task, following it with joy and deep satisfaction, almost from the start.  Sometimes I have wasted time envying them, time that might have been used figuring out what the real difference was between them and me, the difference of acquaintance with true Self.

If we are not one of those clear-sighted souls who, from childhood, know and follow their call, it generally takes a crisis of some kind to wake us to the emptiness of our first-half pursuit.  The Peter Principle comes to mind:  “An observation that in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence.” (Investopedia)  The disparaging follow-on assumption in the Peter Principle is that people just stay stuck in place when they arrive at their incompetence, constructing a mask and pretending until retirement or an early death, contributing little of worth to the organization – most certainly, missing the appointment with their Self.

But if we are half awake, if we are listening or open to God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, we will know when we encounter that incompetence in any area of our lives.  Maybe it is in relationships, maybe it is in professional contribution, maybe it is in following a path other than the call of our hearts.  The Angel of Truth will stand in our way, will challenge us to a fight.

G/C/S/M/S stands always at the ready to break us open, to remove the mask of whomever we think we are, to offer us not a new name, but our real name.  The encounter inevitably involves suffering and pain.  It is never easy to admit or to accept that we have chased a lie in any area of our life.

But if we engage it, if we turn toward it and walk through it, the encounter is not forever.  It is just a marker, a place on the road, a directional sign.  It is not the road ahead.

The road ahead is our second half place.  It is the opportunity to let go of the struggle to construct something false and to embrace a free and useful truth.  It may mean something very different and new.  Just as likely, it may mean a new engagement with our present surroundings, an engagement that relinquishes the fight and becomes one with what we thought was our opponent.

Achievements are replaced with relationships.  Performance is replaced with people.  We begin truly to see, encounter and embrace others because we have seen, encountered and embraced our true Self.

We will know when we are there, when we are truly in this second half place.  We will know because we will have eaten the true fruits of the Spirit.  We will encounter and become “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control.”  (Galatians 5: 22-23a, NRSV)

We will have shown up for our appointment under the Tree of Life.

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