Talking to Trees: A Journey into Soul

The Author's New Book

I always felt that faith was more than just believing what I was taught and doing what I was told. I think Jesus felt that way, too. In three of the four gospels, he seems uncomfortable talking about himself, pointing instead beyond himself to what he called the Kingdom of God (what we might want to re-christen as the Realm of God, it being dubious that God is best characterized as a king).

This imaginal Realm to which Jesus pointed was where God's will becomes manifest; where creation fulfills its purpose by bringing glory to its Creator; and where people reflect the extravagant goodness and loving kindness of their God by the extravagant goodness of their own hearts and the loving kindness of their own actions.

Jesus' entire ministry could be thought of as an invitation: to live, here and now, as if in God's Realm, thereby bringing heaven to earth, where it belongs. By both his words and his deeds, Jesus tried to open something within our hearts so that we might become, each in our own way, anointed, christs and healers and messiahs in our own right. We were not to become like Jesus--that was his own unique calling. We were to become like ourselves, inimitably reflecting our Creator through our own lives, just as Jesus had done through his.

But, somehow, the church just couldn't get past Jesus. Christians spent the first few centuries debating his nature (was he human or divine?) and they have continued to fall out with one another over the meaning of his work (how is it that are we saved by his death?) right up to the present age. They have even killed heretics for their dissenting views, sometimes torturing them first, to cleanse them of their wrongful ways. As if getting it right was ever the point.

Even the mythic story told by the church, a beautiful tale of a Creator so loving creation as to suffer on its behalf, was turned into a cloying system of appeasement. The cross became a symbol not of God's self-giving love, but of God's need to be satisfied, someone suffering on behalf of all who'd gone astray, which was everyone. The resultant theological system reeked of both a shrunken view of humanity and a bloated estimation of the church's role, as it claimed for itself the only means by which one could be saved.

Being professionally tethered to that system for almost forty years, constrained in following my own leanings beyond what the church sanctioned, when I retired from my ministry as a priest, a ministry I loved, mostly, I virtually rose again to find myself free of it. Finally, I could pursue the path I believed Jesus himself was offering to me, a journey of faithful seeking and service that would reveal my own unique gifts to offer to the world, my own unique way of living in God's Realm, here and now.

The result was reflected in the podcast I started, The Mystic Cave, where I've shared with my listeners whatever I myself was learning, exploring "the soulful terrain on the far side of conventional religion." At the same time, I was writing and compiling a collection of personal essays that chronicled that spiritual expedition, essays that would tell a story of leaving the fold, but not the faith. Because I didn't think I was leaving Jesus--just the opposite, in fact. I was going where he had pointed.

Those essays, arranged more or less chronologically, have become Talking to Trees, a memoir of my explorations of what I call Soul. The book comes out this summer and, when it does, there will be great rejoicing, perhaps even in heaven, though certainly here on earth, where love labours long on such things. There will be a public launch and opportunities for people to purchase the book and, hopefully, the chance to share it with new audiences.

Every so often, we spiritual pilgrims might stop, look back at the path that brought us here, and be filled with wonder and with gratitude for the extravagant abundance of it all. That's what Talking to Trees is about. Because, as it turns out, I was right. There was, indeed, more.

To hear me read the Introduction from Talking to Trees: A Journey into Soul, just click on the Play button below. Then stay tuned for news about the book's arrival and availability, later this summer.