“Enter by the narrow gate. The wide gate puts you on the spacious road to damnation, and many take it. But it’s a small gate, a narrow road that leads to Life, and only a few find it.” Jesus, The Gospel of Matthew
Dear Earth Creatures,
It is an unprecedented time of GIGANTIC EVIL, with incomprehensible suffering, death and destruction for humans and non-human creatures here on our common home, planet earth. We have never needed spiritual guidance more and many of us find the teachings of Jesus lead to Life. Walter Wink is a rare bird, a biblical scholar who does not shy away from telling the truth about the enormity of the "GIGANTIC EVIL" of our modern world. He also offers us a key to the small gate on the narrow road as we follow Jesus. The spacious road to damnation is taken by all of us sometimes, we know that, for we have all been on that road. According to Wink, there are three demonic manifestations on this road to damnation and they include; outer personal possession, collective possession and the inner personal demonic. The recent anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone and the Empire continues to lie about history and the past and lies unabashedly about the present. Wars, massive ecologic destruction, crimes against humanity and the natural world are so massive we become numb with disbelief. "...the evil of our time has become so gigantic that it has virtually outstripped the symbol and become autonomous, unrepresentable beyond comprehension. We have killed Satan.........While the symbol may have fallen on hard times, the reality to which it gave expression has become all the more virulent. Satan, did not begin life as an idea but an experience.......Without a means of symbolization, however, evil cannot come to conscious awareness and thus be consciously resisted. Like an undiagnosed disease it rages through society, and we are helpless to produce a cure. Evil must be symbolized precisely because it cannot be thought."
If you are anything like me, you tire of hearing people rage about certain individuals as the evil doers responsible for all the gigantic evil. Unfortunately, our present gigantic evil is made up of many corrupt systems of injstuce. "A megalomaniac like Hitler would get nowhere if he were not riding the cresting wave of resentment from milllions of would -be megalomaniacs longing to be released from the restraints of truth and civility."
I am not sure how we can recast Satan and rewrite a useful modern story about the forces of the Powers and Principalities. We need new stories and symbols. God's Garden, Paradise, The Garden of Eden remind us of ancient stories of beauty, complexity and meaning. For many of us the book, by Frances Hodgson Burrnett, The Secret Garden made the story of the Garden of Eden come alive for us as children. It is a story about the miracle of love in a garden of natural beauty. The imaginal realm is not about the imagination and it is not a geographic place. It is "the substratum of human existence where the most fundamental changes in consciousness take place." It is the secret hidden place Jesus is referring to in the psychic realm that makes manifest love and miraculous healing, transformation and LIFE!
You may say, what does this have to do with finding a key to the locked and abandoned garden in the children's book, The Secret Garden, a modern day Story about a Garden of Eden?
Everything...............for evil, as well as divine blessings of love, healing and transformation, come from the alchemy in the imaginal realms, within the vast regions of our hearts. "It is a prejudice of modern thought that events happen only in the outer world. What Christians regard as the most significant event in human history happened according to the gospels, in the psychic realm, and it altered external history irrevocable. Ascension was an "objective" event, if you will, but it took place in the imaginal realm at the substratum of human existence where the most fundamental changes in consciousness take place. The ascension was a "fact" on the imaginal plane, not just as an assertion of faith. It irreversibly altered the nature of the disciples consciousness."
May we alter our consciousness during this time of "gigantic evil" by devoting ourselves to our relationship with God, spend time in "secret" and private prayer and study the teachings of Jesus. We do something counter cultural as we commit to developing the, "Fruits of the Spirit" within ourselves during these desperate times. The narrow road takes us to the outer walls of God's Secret Garden. God calls us to find the key to the small gate and to enter the Secret Garden where together we plant seeds of, "....love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control ” in our hearts. (Galatians 5:22)
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A friendship between Mary, in The Secret Garden, a ten year old girl and a bird begin Mary's planting seeds that become fruits of her inner spirit. Like many of us, she begins life seemingly with hopeless wounds from abandonment and the self centeredness that often follows. Mary begins her inner transformation in part because of her new friendship with a bird and the divine presence in the natural world. This surprising pair, bird and wounded girl, work together and voila! they find the hidden key to the Secret Garden. “…….the most interesting thing happened to her….She heard a chirp and a twitter, and when she looked at the bare flower-bed at her left side there he was hopping about and pretending to peck things our of the earth to persuade her that he had not followed her. But she knew he had followed her, and the surprise so filled her with delight that she almost trembled a little. “You do remember me!” She cried, “You do! You are prettier than anything else in the world!” She chirped, and talked and coaxed and he hoped and flirter his tail and twittered. It was as if he were talking. His red waist coat was like satin, and he pulled his tiny breast out and was so fine and so grand and so pretty that it was really as if he were showing her how important and like a human person a robin could be." Mary has found a spirit guide, a companion in her journey to love and be loved.
Please join us for weekly worship, as we, interact with the barn animals during worship in the barn. Many of us experience the divine in the natural world. We are like a Manger Church as we worship with the goats, chickens and ducks in the barn. May we enter the small gate, with Jesus into the imaginal realm, The Secret Garden as we pray for the "Fruits of the Spirit" love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control to flower within us and amongst us.
Sending love always, Bonnie