In the first pages of Genesis there stands in the midst of the garden a tree of life, and in the last pages of the Christian scriptures it stands again, by the river of the city of God, bearing twelve kinds of fruit and leaves for the healing of the nations. Between those two pages it appears in a hundred forms: in the menorah of the temple with its seven branches, in the vision of the prophet who saw trees by the river whose leaves do not wither, in the wisdom books where the Law itself is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her.
The fellowship uses the Tree of Life as the frame for the third of the key teachings. We must be honest about its pedigree. The scrolls speak of the community as an eternal planting and of the Teacher as one who planted a garden by the waters, and they number the heavenly beings in sevens; but the fourteen-fold Tree as the fellowship teaches it comes from later tradition, taught in the last century as Essene and received by many. We have found it true in practice and we hand it on as a teaching of the fellowship, not as a text from the caves.
The Fourteen Forces
A human life, the teaching says, is sustained by fourteen forces. Seven come from the earth and are met in the body and in the daylight. Seven come from heaven and are met in the soul and in the dark. The earthly seven are the roots of the tree; the heavenly seven are its branches. A person is the trunk, standing between, drawing from both.
The Earthly Forces: the roots
- The Earthly Mother, the whole nurturing matrix of created life
- The Earth, which feeds and bears us
- Life, the vital force in all growing things
- Joy, the gladness of simply being alive
- The Sun, giver of light and warmth
- Water, which cleanses and renews
- Air, the breath we share with every creature
The Heavenly Forces: the branches
- The Heavenly Father, the source of all spiritual being
- Eternal Life, the soul's continuance beyond the body
- Creative Work, the sharing in the ongoing making of the world
- Peace, the stillness at the center
- Power, the strength to act rightly
- Love, the bond between all beings
- Wisdom, the knowing that lives rightly
A note on the names. The fellowship speaks of the Earthly Mother and the Heavenly Father as the two poles of the one God's self-giving, not as two gods. The Hebrew scriptures speak of God as both the one who begot us and the one who gave us birth, as an eagle over her young and a father who carries his son. The ancient Essenes, as far as we know, did not use the phrase Earthly Mother. The fellowship uses it to name the truth that creation is not merely raw material but the nurturing body through which the one God sustains all bodily life.
Starving at the Roots
The teaching's practical force is this: most of us are starving at several roots and several branches without knowing it. A person who works indoors under electric light, breathes conditioned air, drinks water from a bottle, eats food grown by strangers, and has not felt the earth under bare feet since childhood is cut off from five of the seven earthly forces, and wonders why he is tired. A person who has no stillness, who does not believe she will live beyond the body, who makes nothing and loves grudgingly and has never once sat in the knowledge of God's power, is cut off from five of the seven heavenly forces, and wonders why she is afraid.
The Essenes, whatever they called these forces, lived in daily contact with all of them. They rose with the sun. They bathed in living water. They worked the earth and the loom. They prayed and studied by lamplight. They held all things in common and called each other brother. The fellowship does not believe we must live in a desert to do the same. We believe we must do it deliberately, because our world no longer does it for us.
Communion
The fellowship's practice for this teaching is the Fourteen Communions: a brief morning contemplation of one earthly force and a brief evening contemplation of one heavenly force, so that in a week every root and branch has been visited. The word communion is exact. One does not think about the sun. One stands in it. One does not meditate on water. One washes. The earthly communions are done with the body, outdoors if possible. The heavenly communions are done in stillness, after dark.
Students report, almost universally, that within a few weeks of beginning the Communions they feel better in ways they cannot explain. The fellowship can explain it. They were starving, and they have begun to eat.
The Trunk
A tree with roots and no branches is a stump. A tree with branches and no roots is firewood. The teaching insists on both. The fellowship has known students so heavenly that they forgot to go outside, and students so earthy that they forgot to pray. Neither is the Essene way, which bathed in cold water and sang hymns of the heavenly host in the same hour. You are the trunk. Your work is to stand between and draw from both, so that the sap rises and the fruit comes.