As I checked my email on Monday, I received the following message from
Robert.
Hi Jerry,
A couple of months ago I ran across your web site and began to read some of
the articles. While I liked some of your stuff, much of it was quite different
than what I was used to, but I figure different strokes, for different folks
and life is really an art after all, not really science. I thought you might
like to hear my story. And since you were from Seattle I could still recognize
its influence on your thoughts, and I could also see you had spent time in the
mountains.
About 5 years ago I sold a software program I had developed to Microsoft for
more money than I ever dreamed I could make. All that money really messed up my
life for a while, but now I believe I am headed on the right track.
First my marriage came apart, I had an affair with this great looking woman
who worked for me. But it didn't work out. I had married this wonderful
Christian girl and we had been married about 10 years when this occurred. She
kept telling me this religious stuff, but I didn't want to listen. Any way she
met this guy at church she really liked and when I found out about it I accused
her of having an affair, even though I knew that was something she would
actually never do. But it got me to thinking, and before I knew it I was the
one having the affair, and I liked it, and that led to the next thing, I was
getting a divorce and I was free from her. Finally, free to be my self. I heard
she married that guy at her church shortly after our divorce was finalized. I
know she will be a lot happier with someone who understands her religion. In my
own way I still love her and wish her well. It's kind of a relief that it isn't
with me.
After the divorce my relationship seemed to lose its luster and I thought I
would like to get back to nature, to investigate my roots. With some of my
money I bought this ranch down in south central Oregon. It is about half way
from Lakeview to Winnemucca. I tell people driving in from either direction,
"Just drive until you think you reached the end of the world, and then
drive another half hour and you will be getting close."
The reason for this email however, is that I like your story about the
Betting Oak. I have a tree on my property that is quite like it, so I could
really understand your analogy. It has even been hit by lightning several
times. My oak is an Oregon White Oak. (Quercus garryana) and is several hundred
years old. Even though it is some what outside its normal range it does quite
well in the particular microclimate in which it lives. The story around here is
that it is the only survivor of a number of trees planted by the Indians after
the Great Spirit blessed them with a mild winter in my particular valley. They
planted their remaining acorns, in hopes of not having to make a trip to the
Cascades every fall to gather nuts.
Anyway, after I bought the place, I use its shade as the place I go to contemplate
life and study nature. It is really beautiful here, and for about a hundred
years this property was used as a cattle ranch. Since I am a vegetarian, I
decided to let Mother Earth renew the ecosystem. I grow a small garden, but
most of my organic produce I have shipped in from a CO-OP in Portland by UPS.
Let me tell you about my religious experiences I have had under my Oak tree.
Since I have lived here I see that all life is interrelated. I can see how you
can say that all paths lead from God, but I disagree with you that they don't
lead back. I think that God is love and all hell is just here on earth. Good
and evil are just isomers of God's love, to use an illustration from Chemistry.
I think the Catholics have it right in their concept of Purgatory. Those things
you don't get right in life, the Great Spirit reorders the compounds in a
purgatory reaction vessel. There it is all changed into perfect love, which is
required in heaven.
I learned this, as you said from reading my Bible and from some of the books
of Tom Brown Jr., which I started to read when I first got here. Reading them
together sure has made this life a blessing. It was under that great Oak I met
my spiritual guide and teacher. It was he who told me your illustration was
from Genesis Chapter 2. He has taught me so much about good an evil, sometimes
my mind is blown away. Which reminds me he showed me this reference in my plant
book about a plant the Indians used to smoke in their pipes. He said he taught
them all about it, over 30,000 years ago. That wisdom of the ages he makes
available to me for free, it isn't even illegal, and is free for the gathering.
Kind of like manna from heaven.
He likes to be called Wormwood III (The Third). I don't know where he came
up with that name. It must have something to do with the wisdom of the ages and
an analogy of trees. Over these last few years Three, that is what he likes to
be called, has led me to the internet and brought me a new lady from Sweden, to
come and live with me. We have been living together here a little over a year
now. We plan to start a family in a year or so, but neither one of us can see
any reason to get legally married. The love here is so good. Neither one of us
wants to spoil it, and a man made paper would only take our eyes off the
natural evolving love we share.
I'm looking forward to what you have to say about Enterprise Symbiosis.
While I still have some money left. I would like to start a new company, so my
potential family can be well cared for. But without all the greed that takes
place in the city and in the corporation, I look forward to learning how to tap
into that higher power of symbiosis. I told Three about it the other day, but I
don't think he is really into that. I told him it was a far-out concept. Just in
line with all that he taught me, and showed me in the Mother Earth. That is
really what I and Amy have learned since we have been together. It is a mutual
vision quest, climbing up the Betting Oak of life. Using our own discernment of
right and wrong. Making choices using our free will, knowing the Great Spirit
will work it all out in the end. In the process we become, just like Jesus. In
that regard, just like my first wife, we all are Christians. Just like Three,
Buddha, Mohammed and Confucious, Amy and me. We know we can really connect with
that higher power stuff and make it work successfully for us out here in the
wilderness.
Thanks for the great information. Keep up the good work. Your friend, living
a half an hour beyond the end of the world in southern Oregon.
Robert
This little story is fictional, pulling different points from different
situations I have encountered or may encounter. But it paints a picture of the
jumble of branches on the Betting Oak. All those branches are knowledge, true.
But how many are true knowledge? How do you discern if any are lies? Are those
lies good, or are they evil, and can we really be able to judge the difference?
If your branch is wrong, is it still possible to move to a branch that leads to
a better, more productive life? The bigger question, is the good life really
what you get out of it, or is it what you put into it?
Is the leadership of your church or ministry
able to understand and respond to the Robert's and the Amy's of this world? Do
many of your programs solve problems and answer questions no one is asking?
Those non-answers can be doctrinal, or they can be spiritual. The real answers,
the real truth, must contain true, non-situational elements of both in the
proper context. That context comes from the systematic expository teaching and
preaching of the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, the Bible to the present day
individual and eternal personalties, in the context of the historical
covenantal community, in communion presently and sacramentally with the risen
Jesus Christ. Those answers flow directly from the answer that Jesus ask his
disciples some two thousand years ago. "Whom is it you say that I am? That
answer is confused by trying to look at the branches on the Betting Oak. The
answer is resident in the other tree of the garden planted in the east so long
ago. That tree is the tree of life. It is like the conifer that grows straight
and tall with all its branches growing around and out from the central trunk.
Evolution would tell us that conifers are a more primitive, than the deciduous
oak. Basically, because conifers do well in conditions that a hearty old oak
would perish.
When you come to the end of the earth and drive
another half hour what do you find? A place were the City of Man, and sad to
say, the City of God do not do too well. This world and where ever you may be
planted in it, compared to your concept of heaven, must be viewed as that
wilderness. We isolate ourselves in urban cities so that we think we can
control, that which we have no ultimate control. The church has given its
temporal leadership in all areas, in which she should lead cultural
development, over to many with a limb to promote, or nurture on the Betting
Oak, whether they be Mohammed, Buddha, Joseph Smith, Tom Brown Jr. or other
latter day guru, or even Wormwood III, the descendant of Wormwood in C. S.
Lewis's Screwtape Letters.
Please continue to pray for financial provision as well as other help to
bring this ministry into the place of service that we have been called to
fulfill.