The Trees in Galilee
In Tuesday’s Academy class Ken told a story about Helen and the trees in Galilee. Jane-Admin kindly offers these notes:
Ken told the following story about Helen and the trees. This is Ken speaking, I’m repeating word for word as best I can and paraphrasing when I don’t remember.
I remember one time when I was sitting with Helen on her couch. It was the end of the day, and Helen had gotten all her shopping, and all her complaining about Bill, out of the way. We were talking, when she seemed to go into a kind of altered state. She began to describe what she was seeing, and as she described it, I could see it as well. She was standing in the ruins of Kumran, wearing a white dress. She was dirty, and her dress was torn. I was with her, but younger, perhaps as a child. There was a relationship there, whether it was mother/son, or aunt/nephew, I don’t know, but it had a maternal feel to it.
For those who don’t know, Kumran is the ruins of the settlement of the Essenes which Helen and I once visited. Whilst we were there, Helen wanted to visit a certain area of the site. She then said that it (the way she always referred to the voice of Jesus) had told her ‘Let the dead bury the dead’. Helen was uncomfortable with the notion of past lives, but she understood that to mean that she had lived a past life in Kumran, and been buried there.
We were standing in the ruins of Kumran, and Helen began to walk. We walked together out of the ruins. This vision continued over a few evenings together. Some other things happened along the way, but the point of the journey was the destination. We arrived one evening at a grove of trees. We knew that this was Galilee, and the end of the journey. Helen saw Jesus in the grove, and began to cry. She said ‘I never thought I would see these trees again.’
For me, this story is a metaphor for the journey everyone must make. As Helen did, we start in the ruins of the ego thought system, and end with Jesus, in the peace of the grove. We believe that we can never regain our lost innocence, or be forgiven. Nothing in this world can compare with the experience of knowing that you are forgiven, and that your innocence was never lost.
November 14th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
The photo in this post is of Galilee. Here is the caption.
A few miles northwest of the Sea of Galilee, the terrain begins to rise sharply to form the high rolling hills of Upper Galilee.
Just beyond the ancient city of Safed, the highest city in Israel, stands the highest mountain in Israel, Mount Meron, at 1,208 meters/3,955 above sea level.
From Mount Meron, one can view the Sea of Galilee below, especially, the shoreline that extends from Tiberias to Capernaum to the Decapolis. Mount Tabor, twenty miles to the south and Mount Hermon, some fifteen miles to the northeast, are clearly visible. The whole Upper Jordan Valley lies more than 4,000 feet below.