The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly much that is good has been accomplished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embrace it under the Tree of Life.

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

Where is God?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Worship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suchness and Form

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, the infinite mystery of the universe, is described in many ways: word, breath, spirit, formless, suchness, energy, nameless with a thousand names. We turn to look and do not see. We listen, but the sound escapes us. But somewhere in our being, everywhere in and beyond our being we know, we revel, we delight.

This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine – he passes judgment on the ten thousand things but he doesn’t think himself severe; his bounty extends to ten thousand generations but he doesn’t think himself benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity but he doesn’t think himself long-lived; he covers heaven, bears up the earth, carves and fashions countless forms, but he doesn’t think himself skilled. It is with him alone I wander. Taosim. Chuang Tzu 6*

The sages have sifted and filtered the light for us and with us, spoken pieces of the word, cast metaphor on the formless, seen spirit in the manifest:

Just as light is diffused from a fire which is confined to one spot, so is this whole universe the diffused energy of the supreme Brahman. And as light shows a difference, greater or less, according to its nearness or distance from the fire, so is there variation in the energy of the impersonal Brahman.

Vishnu is the highest and most immediate of all the energies of Brahman, the embodied Brahman, formed of the whole of Brahman. On him is the entire universe woven and interwoven: from him is the world, and the world is in him; and he is the whole universe. Vishnu, the Lord, consisting of what is perishable as well as what is imperishable, sustains everything, both Spirit and Matter, in the form of his ornaments and weapons. Hinduism. Vishnu Prana 1.22*

C/S/M/S is the essential energy and spirit. We are not separate. We and everything are embodied temporal expression of that spiritual reality. We fool ourselves into fear when we hide alone in seeming separate ego. But we hide only from the falsehood of fear. There is no true hiding from our essential being, the Self that breathed us and is us – the Self that is every rock and tree and is at the same time the no-thing, the mystery we can only sense, only trust, but not fully grasp.

When appearances and names are put away and all discrimination ceases, that which remains is the true and essential nature of things and, as nothing can be predicated as to the nature of essence, it is called the “Suchness” of Reality. This universal, undifferentiated, inscrutable Suchness is the only Reality, but it is variously characterized as Truth, Mind-essence, Transcendental Intelligence, Perfection of Wisdom, etc. This Dharma of the imagelessness of the Essence-nature of Ultimate Reality is the Dharma which has been proclaimed by all the Buddhas, and when all things are understood in full agreement with it, one is in possession of Perfect Knowledge. Buddhism. Lankavatara Sutra 83*

We move, we feel, we see, hear, judge and act. We must never forget who We are as we do these things. The talent is not to be buried, but to be used to its fullest in the creation of beauty, wonder, compassion, the newness and suchness of each breath.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. Christianity. John 1:1-4 NRSV

We are the Word, spoke into being by I AM. Thinking ourselves alone we hide in fear under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Awake, we breathe, we create. Growing, becoming, we heal. We are, suchness and form, in the image, under the Tree of Life.

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

The World We Dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Birth of Willingness

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

When I was in high school, back in the late 1960’s, I was a bright young man, full of hope and promise – class president, student council president, president of my church youth group, co-salutatorian of my graduating class, a good singer. OK, I was depressed. I know that now looking back, but I was working so hard on persona, trying to figure out and be who I thought “I” was or should be that I had no concept of the reality – which at that time was a pretty scared and depressed young man yearning to break out of and let go of so many things.

I was busy busy willing my way forward. And, while I didn’t know it, I was struggling and fighting my way toward a spirituality of willingness. It was a long fight, something like a 35-year engagement with an oxymoron, this battle of willing (an action verb) my way to willingness (a state of being).

It’s a necessary struggle, this discovery of individuation. And it involves picking up and wearing so many masks – a little like Adam and Eve trying on clothes in the Garden of Eden, eyes opening to the discovery and awareness of themselves. It’s a path of necessary loneliness, a path that, without fail, for every human, leads us out of the garden.

We learn something of our gifts, certainly. But we struggle and fumble with how to use them. The fight continues just as long as we wield those gifts for the purpose of creating our particular place in the world, as long as we struggle with willing our way toward being something or other. Eventually the path leads to destinations of numbness, delusion or brokenness. We settle into a numb acceptance of a rather meaningless life and go through the motions for the duration. Or we achieve something of material grandeur and success and delude ourselves with the image of power and status that we have created in our comparison to the others around us. If we are lucky, we, like Jacob, see the angel in our path and engage a fight that we (our self-created image) will ultimately lose, a shattering of the mask, a wounding sufficient to make us want to give up the fight, a wounding that heals us all the way to willingness.

But when we are broken, oh, when we are broken, it hurts like hell, it hurts like birth. We may be angry about the pain. We may be bitter about the loss. We grieve the fight, we bemoan the years of struggle and, if we are fortunate, we exhaust ourselves to a place of rest. We resign ourselves to the passage, to second birth.

Birth, the actual process, is something that happens to us. Even if, as some believe, we choose a particular birth – whether by will or by karma – the actual passage, once it is engaged, is a movement of power and transformation that is beyond our particular control.

The image that comes to me is the bud of a flower. We are clamped tight in protection, thinking that is all we are and all we have. We resist change. We resist birth. But one day we are torn, the husk is ripped and pushed aside. We lose our grip, we give up and the beauty begins to emerge.

When we give up the hold of individuation, when we give up our will to dominate others and to protect our separation, the surprise is that we gain Ourselves. The only thing we lose is the fight of isolation, our fear of personal annihilation. We learn that we are indeed something, that we are a necessary, useful and beautiful part of an unfolding grandeur beyond our imagination. We are all that we are created to be. Instead of the struggle to will, we flow in the beauty of being willing, to be the flower that we are, to offer that beauty in the urging forward of creation.

It’s like that, this path from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, all the way to the Tree of Life.

Born in You this Day

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Luke 2:11, NRSV.

There are so many ways to wreck a good story. In fact, we might as well call it Christmas Cancer for all that it has become in the last two millennia: grafted onto holiday trees from other traditions; the insanity of soldiers stopping to sing carols to the enemy across the front lines of WWI, resuming the fight in the morning; Santa Claus and Rudolph; enough lights to outshine a supernova; a worldwide binge and burp of the economy big enough to make us confident that Jesus has finally entered the temple and whipped, once and for all, the rogue dogs of evil empire.

What was born? Who was born? Lamb of God? For all our focus on blood sacrifice to grab salvation, Jesus might as well have been a 4-H calf, corn-fed and off to the fair, sold at auction to the highest bidder, the owner of the fanciest restaurant in the state.

What was born? Who was born? The birth narratives of Matthew and especially the iconic scene of the stable, manger, angels and star in Luke, are memorialized annually from the tiniest of crèche scenes reconstructed in the shell of a bird’s egg, to the bigger than life plywood or even living crèches that, despite our silly doublespeak laws about what religious freedom is or isn’t, stand in front of churches or town squares worldwide. God almighty, the things we fight about to avoid our own truth.

What was born? Who was born? Without doubt, a true Rose of Sharon, a balm in Gilead, a little Prince of Peace. And stories like these pasted onto the front of Matthew’s and Luke’s life narratives are effective “sit up and take notice” calls that here was a birth and a life of great importance.

Alas, we are so prone to losing ourselves in icons, drama and worship – anything to avoid personal responsibility.

The real birth of Jesus, good friends, took place in the silent stretch of nearly twenty years between Luke 2 and Luke 3, a gestation of learning and practice, of formation in the womb of wisdom and spirit. The real birth of Jesus was the birth of authentic Self, the hero’s/heroine’s journey to which we are all invited when we are silent in the presence and willing in spirit.

Luke tries to hammer this home with his genealogy, the long list of names at the end of the third chapter, almost entirely ignored by 2,000 years of Christianity, that ends, for both Adam (read “you and me”) and Jesus, with “Son (child) of God.” This genealogy marks the line of transition, the end of gestation. It is followed immediately by a baptism of grown-up spirit and the launch of Jesus into his brief public life of healing, bathed and swaddled in an honest and consistent call to peace, compassion, fairness and, most of all, the pleading invitation to each of us to join him in our own true birth.

What was born? Who was born? A human was born, like every human, who gained his life with the whisper of prana, the tickle and nudge of the breath of God, the life force of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Self. Born a human, you and me, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This one grew up. This one accepted that suffering (true love, while it may cast out fear, just as often draws fire) was the price of second birth, the true and human birth to capital “S” Self, the birth canal of silence, prayer and practice that bore him all the way to the Tree of Life.

How utterly astounding that for all the effort to tell us in symbol and story, for the repeated invitation of Jesus to each of us to grow up, to enter and to walk through the inevitable suffering of birth to true and mature life, we choose instead to worship the stories. We shield our eyes in the waving of palms and drown the voice in our din of praise. Truly, for the most part, we would rather kill the guide than hear the call, hear the invitation and embrace the path.

Born in you this day. Born in you this day, kind friend. The invitation to embrace the path, the invitation to second birth. Born in you this day. The call to accept, without judgment, the pain and suffering of growing up. The call to embrace and transform it with the practice of peace, of compassion for self and others. The call to be authentic sons and daughters of C/S/M/S, true birth under the Tree of Life.

Born in you this day. Let it be.

Adoration

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

So much of our connection and relationship with others is shaped by our emotions. We don’t like this person, because they do things that annoy us. Someone else made us angry. Another just sweeps us off our feet because they are so incredibly attractive.

These feelings are powerful. If we try to ignore them, they find ways to keep popping up. Or sometimes we just give into them and let them shape our responses. We may vent our anger. We may carry a grudge. We may pine away with hopeless longing for connection.

Long term intimate relationships can be especially confusing. We are never another and they are never us. We never fully understand another, and so we often interpret their actions as somehow directed at us. That leads us to an emotional response.

And feelings, of course, wax and wane for a huge variety of reasons. Our partner can become the unwitting object of all these changes. While they are always the same person, there are days when our feelings for them may be wonderful and other days when we really don’t want to be with them.

We can chase our tail for life, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, responding to one feeling and another, giving those feelings power over how we act and how we use our energy. The end of that chase is generally exhaustion, and never satisfaction.

We have an alternative – a Tree of Life alternative. Somehow I suspect that the Spirit that created us absolutely adores us. We do not always act adorably. Yet the choice of our Creator was and is an ongoing act of adoration. We block it and don’t respond to it for much of our life. But that is our choice, not the action of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

While we may say we adore something or someone – you know, the warm fuzzy feeling – adoration, as I am using it, is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is an ongoing active choice.

Really. Sooo – how does that work? Well, let’s say we start by choosing to adore our long-term committed partner in life. We acknowledge that our feelings in that relationship will ride the usual roller coaster. We accept and don’t fight those feelings. Rather, we choose to own them as our own, not something created by our partner, or for which our partner carries any responsibility. And we choose not to let those feelings, positive or negative, carry the day with us. We observe them and we learn what we can from them about ourselves. And we own that our actions and reactions are ours, by personal choice.

That realization is called being free from attachment. We are ourselves. We are not the feelings to which we thought we were attached.

OK, step two. Once we are free from attachment, we can choose not the feeling, but the practice of adoration. Suddenly we are free from the blame game and the tail chasing, because we have stepped out of that vicious cycle. We can stand still and truly see. We can observe, we can soak in our partner as they truly are – an adored creation of C/S/M/S, just like we are. And we can choose to adore them.

We can choose not to judge or to criticize. We can choose to appreciate and to love what we see – all of their unique expressions, all of their hopes and fears, all of their work along their own path, as a creature learning and growing in all that C/S/M/S has for them. And we can give thanks, and appreciation and adoration. We can choose, in reality, to see them exactly as we can choose to see ourselves and all of creation around us.

We can accept and be grateful for the gifts they offer, rather than grasping or demanding what we think we need or deserve, or being disappointed that somehow they haven’t figured out what we really want from them. We can give up “want” altogether, because we know we have what we need, and we are satisfied.

Adoration is not blind. Rather, it is compassionate, knowing that we have far more to work on for ourselves along the path than we can possibly expect of or get from another. Adoration reflects back, helping another shine her or his own light, rather than hitting back.

There may be times when safety or wisdom require separation – even permanent breaking off of an intimate relationship. There is still no need to engage in the blame game. Self-adoration, self-care, is our first responsibility – and then to love our neighbor. Becoming stuck in hatred or bitterness is really just another way of giving up adoration of our self – another form of unhealthy attachment to feelings and to what we project about the other.

Practice is the key to success. We practice the adoration we have received from our Creator. And we practice letting go of our attachment to emotions and to our dependency on blaming someone else for the way we feel.

There were two special trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. Practicing a different way locates us under the one that yields true satisfaction.

Willingness vs. Willfulness

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Two hearts diverge in the center of my chest. One is right, absolutely certain of what it deserves, red, furious, sulking, adrenalized, ready to explode. This one does not like change, at least not change that does not go in the direction it wants – the right and fair direction, the direction that I can see so clearly.

The other is quiet and at peace, in relationship, observing, taking in the whole, engaging without attaching, nimble as a stream flowing over rocks, flexing with what truly is.

What a grip the first heart has, and how complete the blindness and stranglehold. And how utter and painful the defeat if it carries the battle to the end and loses. Or how empty the victory if it wins and beats its perceived opponent into the ground.

It is all the same heart, of course. It is mine and I make the choice, just like choosing whether or not the giving tree under which I live is going to be the Tree of Life or the other one.

But how can I make that choice when I am so thoroughly blinded? The truth is, sometimes I can’t, or don’t, and I drift further and further into the hell I create with my own sightless determination. How difficult, but how important it is to change course and to bring it all back home. Sometimes the path is long and painful because of the bitterness built up inside and the damage inflicted on others around me.

What are the turning points, the places of repenting? Sometimes it is awareness of the misery, sometimes it is the voice of another who can see me more clearly than I can see myself. Sometimes it is the practice of quiet prayer, the prayer that seeks, in a mantra of willingness or a broken open silence, to let in a small sparkle of light, a trickle of healing water, finding the pinhole through which a larger landscape can be seen.

Always the turn involves practice. It involves breathing and conscious letting go. It involves releasing my death grip attachment to a self-determined and willful outcome.

We do not diminish ourselves when we choose willingness, the open connection to the whole. Rather, we become our true selves, the Self of paradoxical oneness with all that is.

The picture is always larger, and I am only a part of the whole, not the entire thing, as I want to believe.

When we practice willingness, when we practice being open and available, expanding our vision and releasing our determination to have the speck of sand we thought was everything, we experience healing. We find that the ache and inflammation begin to subside. The poison is leached little by little from our system and the blinders fall away. We are able to see both the detail and the landscape. The stream flows in its ripples and pools, turning with ease to follow its natural course.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. (Psalms 51:10, NRSV) It’s not so much a new one, but rather a connected one. And it is already there. We don’t have to beg or grovel for it, nor do we have to tear out anything as though it is wrong or defective.

Rather, we choose. Will we be willing or willful, separate or connected? Our spirit and our heart are not other than that with which we are gifted in our creation. There are no defects. There is only choice, the choice of isolation or the choice of connection. When we are real and whole, we are both individuated and connected. We are the gift of our own place and being. And we are the gift of the entire universe. It is the paradox and beauty of being a thread in the fabric.

In any case, our heart is truly only one, our very own, offered willingly in connection to the whole. Ah, the wonder and taste of the Tree of Life.

Suffering

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

My wife is a special educator. She tells me stories about kids who are and will be, no matter how hard they work, miles and miles short of successful functioning in our society. I hear about the amazing ways that she confronts them and engages them to draw out even the most basic responses to external stimuli – things like pointing to or grabbing a particular picture that indicates something they want or need, communication in its most elemental forms. My mind spins off into the future for these little lives and I ache. Something in me inclines toward discouragement.

According to Wikipedia, 230,000 people died, in 2004, in the Indian Ocean Tsunami (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami), triggered by an undersea megathrust off the west coast of Sumatra. The millions that survived carry the soul etching memory of terror, and the loss of loved ones, places and ways of life that were wrenched irrevocably out of their being. Even from a distance, the collective soul of the earth feels and bears the rip, the wound and the scar.

The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (see http://costsofwar.org/article/afghan-civilians) estimated, in February 2013, that between 16,700 and 19,000 civilians have died in Afghanistan as direct or indirect casualties of Operation Enduring Freedom. iCasualties counts 3383 deaths of coalition troops since the war started in 2001 (http://icasualties.org/oef/), not to mention the traumatic head injuries, loss of limbs and suffering of families of the injured.

Life as we observe it and experience it is full of suffering, whether natural, psychological or of our own making. And it is so for the observer and survivor just as it is for the victim.

The Sanskrit term dukkha captures this completely. The Wikipedia article on dukkha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha) explains it in three categories:

The obvious physical and mental suffering associated with birth, growing old, illness and dying.
The anxiety or stress of trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing.
A basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of existence, due to the fact that all forms of life are changing, impermanent and without any inner core or substance. On this level, the term indicates a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.

When we choose to stay stuck under the metaphorical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, life is indeed dukkha. We see everything through a lens of a battle to eliminate the pain of our current existence, even to the point of killing others and increasing pain because we think somehow our own security will be enhanced and our dukkha decreased. In reality, we just pile it higher and deeper.

I have a friend, Vern Rempel, who postscripts his emails with these words of his: “The code of the universe is written in beauty.” The Buddha said: “I have taught one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha.” Somehow I think these two assertions are headed in the same direction.

We cannot judge the pain of temporal existence any more than we can judge – as good, bad or indifferent – the unfolding of our universe and the emergence of life itself. It is. It is, it is, it is. To say “it is” is not indifference, but rather acceptance of and wonder at the mysterious whole and trajectory of creation.

The cessation of dukkha is no more nor less than the choice to live under the Tree of Life. It is, I believe, a more complete nirvana, and the essence of the Greek term metanoia, translated in the Christian Bible as repentance. That word has become heavy laden with the trappings of a religion of judgment. More accurately, it simply means to change, or to turn away from.

When we turn away from our judging and fearful view of life under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we find ourselves, simply, under the Tree of Life. We repent of dukkha. We let go of, we turn way from our limited and temporal view of suffering and we engage fully in the ongoing act, the revelation/evolution of creation.

We, in our evolutionary state, have been given at least the level of awareness that comes with observation. And we have been gifted as well with the ability to judge what we observe. We also have the ability to choose our response.

We can willfully try to manipulate life and the world around us, desperately seeking to avoid what we perceive as dukkha. When we do this, we only create more.

Or we can willingly accept and participate in the beautiful and staggeringly powerful onslaught of creation, sharing compassion, soaking in the beauty and mystery, acting in the creative initiative of God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source.

There is a tremendous ache, the ache of birth, in the act of creation. We are part of it. The birth, the code of that ache, is the handwriting of the universe. The child of it all, the child of us all when we participate in and do not fight the unfolding, is beauty beyond words and saying.

Come, turn, breathe, care, steward and create. Live under the Tree of Life.

Environmentalism and the Two Trees

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

In some big way, the Earth is the tree in our garden. Going back to the C.S. Lewis view of the garden of creation in the Narnia books (Two Trees in the Garden, “The Fruit of Our Heart’s Desire”, July 26, 2013), our two trees – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life – are really the same tree. The difference is in how we approach the tree and our use of the fruit we take away.

The Earth is the giving tree of creation. It is full of fruit. We choose, each day of our lives, which tree we will make it.

When we view the Earth from our perspective under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we view it through a lens of scarcity. Whatever the Earth might provide us, there is never enough. The natural response is to grab, to grasp, to hoard and to engage in glutinous consumption. The consequences of that view are apparent. There is a rapidly increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots in the United States, the wealthiest nation on Earth. (A recent president referred, with some chilling sarcasm, to “the haves and the have-mores”, blatantly celebrating the disparity.) Resources are gathered and consumed without regard to the social or environmental cost. And, ultimately, this gathering and hoarding is protected with violence and the cost of life. War after war has been waged in the name of some lofty principle or other that masks the underlying defense of access to natural resources and the associated wealth.

We can swing our environmentalist, social justice and peacenik bats as fast and furiously as we like. Certainly we must take positions of clarity on this issue. Ultimately, this is a spiritual problem and needs to be addressed at that level. We should be neither blind to nor distracted by the possible consequences.

Jesus, Gandhi and King are exemplary here. Certainly there are others, but these we know in the West, the United States in particular. In our objection to greed and abuse of power, we should never overlook the obligation and compassion of call to the one lost under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Jesus’s call to Zacchaeus, whose greed and fear were expressed in the abuses available to the tax collector, is a clear and simple picture. There was some spark for Zacchaeus, at least enough curiosity to cause him to climb the tree so that he could see Jesus. Jesus called him out. He confronted him with compassion. Zacchaeus changed his behavior.

Under the Tree of Life, our response to greed and fear must be the call of compassion, a call that cares for the perpetrator lost in self-centered fear and greed while at the same time fending for, protecting and improving the lot for the victims of the perpetrator.

We should never delude ourselves about the grip of power and wealth. The human heart lost in that grip will resort to killing and devastation of anything to avoid freedom from and relinquishment of those false protections. But neither should we be deterred or dismayed.

If we save the world from devastation through violence, we have saved nothing. We have only lost ourselves to our own isolation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

There are no guarantees of success in the short-term. We could lose the Earth to the violence and environmental degradation caused by those who are themselves lost in the grip of plunder, convinced that comfort and ease in this particular life will somehow protect them from bodily demise. And we could easily die, as so many others have, standing in the way and making the compassionate call to view the Earth as our shared Tree of Life, with enough for all, and with a vision that is longer, broader and deeper than our current incarnation in the here and now.

In fact, there are no guarantees of success in the long-term, either. There is only a choice of faith:

faith that the choice to live under the Tree of Life is the ultimate path of spiritual progress
faith that sets aside both hatred and fear
faith that expresses compassion and stewardship in ways that transcend our necessarily limited physical view and understanding of the world around us

I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist about the future of our planet. It is a beautiful gift, one that calls for nurture, restoration and compassionate stewardship that seeks the good of all. We choose what tree it will be – a nourishing Tree of Life or a depleted and exhausted Tree of the Know ledge of Good and Evil.

What I am convinced of, deeply, is the challenge and importance of our choices, personally and collectively. My spirit rises to the call of the Tree of Life:

the call to steward, to stand, to confront and to call with compassion and welcome
the call to take the bullet or to be nailed to the tree when a frozen heart is convinced that our death will clear the path for the temporary safety of wealth and power
the call to rise up again – and again and again – to rise up again and to live in the home of love under the Tree of Life.

There is no end. There is nothing to fear.

Spiritual but not Religious

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

In the past few years I have heard people describe themselves, and have sometimes described myself, as spiritual but not religious. The label begs definition. I guess, on a very simple and literal level, it means having a sense of larger connection to something we might call spirit that envigorates, guides and, in truth, is us, but having checked out of, or never been part of, institutional religious expression of a particular faith.

I have admired that position, at least insofar as it represents a bravery about rejecting or not being actively concerned with blind dogma and positions that separate rather than unite humanity – demands that people say this or that and assurances that if you follow the particular company line, heaven is just around the corner.

But there is, at least for me, something significant lost in that position, as well. What is lost is the sense of belonging, of being part of a close-knit community of commitment.

Every fall, just after Labor Day, the community of Estes Park hosts the Long’s Peak Scottish Irish Festival. There are bands and dance competitions, jousting, and real cannon firing bowling balls to try to sink an inflatable plastic dragon in Lake Estes.

And there is a parade. It features, I think, just about the biggest collection of pipe and drum corps in the nation. And it features clan after clan marching in alphabetical order, families in their tartans and kilts, marching proudly and happily together behind their particular plaid. I have to admit there is something that grabs me at the root and brings tears to my eyes as I see them march by – little children, old men and women, their little Scottish terriers all decked out, heading to no war, setting aside their own squabbles and differences for a day of being part of something that reaches way back and commits to going forward, reveling in pure belonging. I can’t help it. Tears just run down my face.

I don’t know how long it has been true, but it is true now that something very special has happened in those ranks. Yes, there are tall lordly Scotsmen – some kind of purebred marked by a particular demeanor and full white moustache – and strong women capable of cutting down forests with only a few strokes of the axe. But there are also, in the clans, marching with all the same pride, people of Asian or African descent, fully Scottish just because they have married into the clan and everybody says so.

There is nothing inherently bad about religions. They are just the tools we make them. And there is value and meaning in belonging – in a commitment to community that says, come hell or high water (or, as we have in Estes this week, the hell of high water), and regardless of our petty differences, we are one. We will stick together and care for one another and we will take pride in and celebrate our values and commitments.

There is nothing inherently bad in this, so long as there is a significant grain of salt in all our sacraments. Strength comes in offering and welcoming, in serving and caring. The stories we tell and the lessons we teach are nothing if they don’t result in true humility and compassion. We may display our colors with pride, so long as the door is open and says come in if you like. And so long as we know our door is just one of many on the street.

At the end of the day, we may take off our clothing, grateful that it has protected us and provided a vehicle and context for our service. But that is all it is, a bit of pretty decoration for a body that is no different, or better or worse than the one inhabited by each of our global and religious – or not – neighbors.

And our religious families are wasted and nothing if they are not chiefly a magnification of service and welcome at the level of community, rather than just the individual.

Spiritual but not religious is, I believe, a wonderful position that sheds, appropriately, the strictures when community has lost its way, more concerned about the clothing than the body, wrapped up in pomp, power and appearances. It is a sign of prophetic rejection of all that is hollow and false.

But it is also lonely. Grant us community, a family that makes us part of something broader and stronger, that accomplishes so much more than we are able on our own. And gift us, Great Spirit, Breath of Life, the vision that whatever our community, we are always part of a larger family still, a family that flourishes on strong humility and confident sharing, founded on a bedrock of compassionate service.

Make us one, be us one, under the Tree of Life.

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 –

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.

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.

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.

Two Trees in the Garden

Thoughts on a New Spirituality

Tag Archives: Mindfulness

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New Worship

Suchness and Form

The World We Dream

The Birth of Willingness

Born in You this Day

Adoration

Willingness vs. Willfulness

Suffering

Environmentalism and the Two Trees

Spiritual but not Religious

A Good Read Under the Tree of Life

Heading for the Information Wars

The Day of Non-Judgment

Deep Wounds, Pure Hearts

I Believe

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