returning to the garden of Love...

Poetry, parables are acts of imagination that offer and purpose "alternative worlds" because they are open, door ways to infinite possibilities. Can imagination be indeed a legitimate way of knowing?

 Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a profound insidious way, numbness robs us of our humanity, and makes us infinitely smaller. It is taking an eraser and removing the God-image in those who do not fit. Has our imagination been claimed by false lenses of perception and idolatrous theology that we protect and defend as absolute “truth?”

 Are spiritual nomads, navigating a changing landscape and taking seriously, the shaping of their own field of perception and language of understanding? When we become so at home in a belief system, do we become oblivious to the points of contact in our neighborhoods, in culture, in technology, and art...do we drift and drown in an ocean of irrelevance?

 The dominant partisan religious culture, now and in every time, is grossly uncritical, cannot tolerate serious and fundamental criticism, and will go to great lengths to stop it.

Jesus dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing their gods and showing God was profoundly more mysterious than their “truth.” Jesus dismantles the religion of oppression and exploitation by countering it with the profound mysterious reality of “truth” being God’s infinite love.

When we leave our theology unexamined and unquestioned, we end up being slaves to it. When believe in our theology at what ever the cost...do we end up suffocating the redemptive imagination of Jesus?

William Blake called imagination, " the body of God ".

( Eve in the Garden of Eden )

The Garden of Love 

I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And 'Thou shalt not,' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

by William Blake

                                                                ( Mary in the garden of the tomb )

William Blake called imagination, " the body of God ", or even more profoundly, " the existence of humanity." As I begin to pull on this strand of imagination the images I placed at the beginning and end of William Blakes poem, " The Garden of Love ", will begin to make sense.

I continue to struggle with the restlessness of the question, " Could we have gotten Jesus wrong?"

Did Jesus come to start a new religion? Did he come to renovate and restore an old religion? Or could it be something profoundly more intimate...something found in that imaginative reality between the body of God, and the existence of humanity. If Jesus is infact the God-man, that profound simple relationship in the Garden of Eden would have filled his redemptive imagination. The resurrection is the mind blowing profound mysterious reality of a new creation.

Adam and Eve wander the garden in the cool of the night, the cosmic darky mirky ocean filled with glittering surf fills the ceiling of creation. By day they walk in the beauty of the garden, shafts of light cut through the vegetation, reflecting and refracting green and gold. With God in the midst of everything, it is conversations of intimacy...as beloved friends.

There is no rituals, no doctrine, no theology...just one command, " Don't eat of the tree of knowledge." They are tempted...and they eat. This is what Augustine mused as the " orginal sin." I wonder if we still aren't sinning then?

It could be this was infact the original lure of religion...our pirsuit of God. We could become God-like by climbing the ladder of religion. We've made Eve the scape goat from the very beginning, and women have never really recovered from the acusation, " If it hadn't been for Eve." But, isn't it we've made religion's greatest purpose... to know God...have we made religion more about knowledge than anything else.

The Old Testament seems nothing more than humanity's wreckless pursuit of religion. We delude ourselves in thinking religion was God's idea. We wanted laws, rules and commandments to keep...and when we failed we wanted ammendments to the laws. This was so far from the intimacy in the garden of Eden. But we were hoplessly hooked...it was always just one more chance and we'll get it right. We never did...and we never will.

If anything it must be crystal clear, there is NOT a whole lot of religion in the gospels. If anything a journey through the gospels is Jesus bulldozing every obstacle religion places in people's path. If it's anything, it is the perveyors of religion selling God as their commodity. Or access to God by way of their elaborate maps, a hopeless maze that kept people lost in religion.

And in the misdt of the religious business, it's Jesus meeting the woman at the well. Weary, tired and thirsty, and tired of maps, she asks, "How?" Is it in some temple, is it on some mountain? I'm imagine Jesus filled with love, smiling and saying, " God doesn't care about where or how...it is all about a spirit of truth."

As many times as I have read the gospels...I never come away with an image of a religious Jesus. I come away with my imagination ignited of a God who doesn't occupy a church, but a God who walks in the midst of his creation...as a friend. There are no barriers, no rituals, no confession of beliefs are needed to abide with this profound mysyerious God, who Jesus called, " Love."

In the Garden of Eden, I think of Eve who's sin maybe wasn't so much sin...but more humanity's confusion over knowledge, rather than relationship. A thought just came to me, " Can we really know God as knowledge?" Can we really know Love as knowledge?" I don't think we can, and maybe that is the tension Eve found herself in.

In the Garden of the tomb where Jesus lay, I think of Mary Magdalene, a woman, a prostitute, the least credible person to witness the resurrection...and she waits...or maybe more pofoundly, she abides. The resurrection really is the profound reality of the Garden of Love, of Love burtsing forth in full blossom.

I think Blakes poem is prophetic and should speak to us today. Have we made "Christianity" a religion that is solely consumed about itself, its self preservation. I wonder if we couldn't read Blake's imagination and see some truth.

I wonder if Jesus in the profound mysterious redemptive imagination he lived and spoke...if he didn't envision a new creation like the Garden of Eden...where it wasn't so much religion, but more life. Or as William Blake called it, " the body or God...and the existence of humanity ", as one...God again walking in the midst of his creation. Man and God, walking and talking as friends.

I wonder?

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[Bill Dahl]

Book...book...book!!!