Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

A Loving Voice Calls, Awaken
By Jim Palmer

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The meaning we have assigned to life in this world is, "Have."

Look around… look within… every single soul on this planet is in…

The hunt to get, to add something to itself it obviously has not - or has and wants more of.

We want

…a house

…a car

…a career

…a social status or image
…a man

…a woman

…an affair
…a child

…a perfect body

…vacation

…power

…fame

For that’s where happiness and fulfillment is. Right? It has to be somewhere out there.

And if there be a thing we do not want, then we are told we really do. We hear it long eneough and so now we want it too. So, you have everything? Not so fast! What about the supply? Supply is limited. So we go out, grab this and more - we hoard.

Toil

Sweat

Worry

Fret

Everyone a threat

Look out for number 1. Play the game well, and you can get others to toil for you. Defense, attack, deception and lies are all fair game, and if in the course our brother bleeds to death… well… it’s justified. Some can’t handle the fray so they settle for less along the way and point fingers of blame… and harbor hate and resentment.

This game of survival has rules, we write them down into books and teach them in schools, so our children learn how to play the fool’s game. We teach them well, to prepare them for this hell.

The game of getting keeps us constantly immersed in a battle of a gain and loss. This keeps fear alive and well…

What if I lose what I have?

What if I don’t get what I don’t have yet?

We lock it up behind a bolted door but we lay awake at night, designing plans against some future loss we fear, events which have not even yet occurred…but they could, we say. If the entire wealth of this planet was distributed equally to every man and woman, within two years the rich would be rich and the poor, poor again. If we stopped for a day to make every homeless person sheltered and every hungry person fed and every victim of oppression rescued, within two years they would all be homeless and starving and victimized once again. That’s the insanity of the game; move around the parts, the outcome is the same.

The meaning we have assigned to life in this world is, Have.

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Once upon a time there was an Apple tree. One of its branches had an absurd little dream and imagined it was a tree on its own. As a branch, it had all the power of the tree and as such, made the dream its reality. The branch forsook the tee, and dreamed it fell to the ground. For a while, things went well. It was still full of sap and sprouted a few new shoots. But after a while the sap did not flow as it used to and it began to struggle. The fruit it so desired to bring forth were instead small, shriveled up, bitter, pathetic-looking apples. To make matters worse, all kinds of creatures trampled upon it without any consideration. Suddenly the branch felt alone, fearful, frail, and uncared for. Its dark green leaves were now dry and just a shadow of what it was before. So the branch began to accuse the tree for leaving it in such misery.

The tree responded with the call to awaken. It send small birds to it, messengers, which began to sing to the little branch, that its experience was only a dream and urged it to awaken. For the tree yearned for its branch to awaken and to participate again in the full awareness of its bounteous dance of life. Yet the branch insisted on its dream, but felt its sap running dry - it withered and died. Its death did not release it from its dream, of course, its death was the central theme of the dream. It first feels relief, but soon it remembers again its desire to be a tree on its own, and the original dream begins again all over again… and again… and again. The birds come, they are refused, and the dream continues over and over.

Then one day, the song of an especially persistent bird pierced its dream. And somehow, for the first time, an ancient memory began to stir, it felt the promise of something so much greater that its continuous misery. It took courage, dared to open and eye and lo - it felt its sap flowing and found itself as part of the tree. It now opened the other eye and before long it knew it was the tree! For where does the tree begin and end? The joy was great! All the birds celebrated together the awakening of the little branch. The little branch had finally come home. The Apple tree was complete once more.

Jim Palmer is the author of Divine Nobodies: Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you), and Wide Open Spaces: Beyond paint-by-Number Christianity. He encourages the freedom to imagine, dialogue, live, and express new possibilities for being an authentic Christian. This was originally posted on his blog at www.divinenobodies.com.

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