A Tale of Two Kingdoms | Part 1 | Divine Soul Covenants and Second Order Change
“Ezekiel, son of man, condemn the prophets of Israel who say they speak in my name, but who preach messages that come from their own imagination. Tell them its time to hear my message...
Those people lie by claiming they speak for me, but I have not even chosen them to be my prophets.
And still they think their words will come true. They say they’re preaching my messages, but they are full of lies - I did not speak to them!
Those prophets refuse to be honest.
They tell my people there will be peace, even though there’s no peace to be found.
They are like workers who think they can fix a shaky wall by covering it with paint. But when I send rainstorms, hailstones and strong winds, the wall will surely collapse.”
Ever since I was a little girl, all I ever wanted was to belong.
Somewhere. To Some People, or Someone. In the same place. Forever. I had a fantasy of being planted like a tiny acorn in some nice fertile ground, and being allowed to grow into a sapling, and then into a giant mature tree. Unmoved and unmoving. First all I wanted was a mother, and then, a mentor. A boyfriend was usually available when I wanted one, so you see, I tried lots of different ways to belong. I tried fitting in, I tried standing out. I tried staying quiet, submitting, following the rules. Truly, I did. I tried breaking them all. I found a woman once, she felt like home to me. I loved her with every fibre in my being. I married her son. I had her as a mother for seven beautiful years before cancer took her. I didn’t understand this bond I had with her until recently, until I discovered Divine Soul Covenants, and how they work. About how they set us free whilst at the same time absolutely holding us fast to their pattern. How they catalyse our growth even while they decimate our interior landscapes and turn everything we thought we knew upside down.
In my search for how belonging works, I have crossed some very interesting terrain. I have discovered there is a kind of belonging which cannot be explained using language, but only entered into experientially, and described later to others using metaphor or archetypal frameworks of understanding.
In my journey, I have, in fact, mapped the Two Kingdoms that we all must choose between in our quest for belonging: The Kingdom of Empire, and the Kingdom of Love. I have learned what it takes to belong in both, and I have some tales to tell you tonight, dear reader, about that. I write to you now from the wilderness between them, in the Void. The place I have learned to call home. Because ironically, that is where I have been called to stay, for now. I’m under higher orders about that and there is really nothing I can do about it, and so I have also begun to map the void. It has bestowed to me my most potent tools. Gifts that are so precious that I do not speak of them or even use them except in very specific circumstances. The Void taught me how to belong to myself, finally. And so now my quest for belonging is over.
Until 2019, I thought I was living in the Kingdom of Love, because the Kingdom of Empire is tricky like that. I didn’t find out the truth until I had been unceremoniously tossed out on my ass, left to rot and exiled by those who had all the power in that place. It wasn’t until I had been stripped of my credentials, shamed, silenced, fired and sent away by a man who had been like a father to me, that I had enough time and space to finally do some deep work and reflection. The last thing this man – my mentor - said to me was that he would never be alone in a room with me again, I think that was one of the worst parts of all of it, to be honest. The most hateful thing anyone ever said to me, came from the lips of this highly respected man who preaches and teaches in churches and schools and platforms across the country regularly. I know for sure that he thinks he is serving the Kingdom of Love. It is above my paygrade to judge anyone, but Jesus taught me to look at the fruit.
And I am still looking.
“With the perspective that comes from hindsight, this was really a very rich opportunity to dig deeply into some unresolved cognitive dissonance which had been bugging me for decades, and I had never been brave enough to really look at it, pay attention and learn. Through this time, I did a lot of thinking and reflecting on this idea of belonging, and asked a lot of questions that made a lot of people, including me, really uncomfortable.”
How do you measure the quality of human connection?
How should it feel when we belong to one another? Does it really matter how it feels?
At the point where I realise I have not yet learned how to belong to myself, what steps must I take to rectify this?
What do I do when I discover that some of these steps are going to cause intolerable pain not just to myself but also to others?
If I belong to a person, or a family, or an organisation or a friendship group, which suggests that in order to continue to belong I must sever belonging to my own soul, which threat to my survival is greater? To remain a stranger to myself? Or to choose certain rejection and exile?
What criteria must I use when I’m making this choice about my own survival? At what point does the wisdom of the pre-flight safety demonstration on an airplane break down? (“You must put your own mask on first before attending to others…”)
How does the Christian tradition’s cruciform pattern of self-donation unto death factor into these questions?
How long did I really believe I was going to be able to protect my kids from pain and suffering?
It turns out, even in this day and age, there are questions which are dangerous to ask. Especially when it comes to the question of survival through belonging. Asking the wrong questions of the wrong people is a one-way ticket to social exile. Which is still, now the same as it always has been, quite literally akin to death.
This is especially true if those questions cut to the quick of things like morality, sexuality, spirituality or, weirdly, doctrine.
Because the truth is, none of the deep questions we ask in these fields can ever really, truly be answered with anything even approaching certainty. Each question reveals a deeper layer of more conundrums and questions and so on and so on. I have learned that even asking these kinds of questions has the power to disrupt the fabric of another person’s universe, has the potential to unseat them from their centre of meaning-making and control, disturbs their internal equilibrium.
I used to teach classes on pastoral and spiritual care, and one of my favourite topics to discuss with my students was the concept of first and second order change. First order change seeks to restore homeostasis. A person in the throws of first order change feels the disruption and chaos when it hits and just wants it to stop; wants the symptoms and pain and feelings of dis-ease to go away.
First order change is the alcoholic going in for another drink to chase the shakes away, rather than reckoning with an addiction which is ravaging their body. First order change is returning to the relative safety of a toxic marriage, because a well-worn script, even a deeply dysfunctional and harmful script, is more reassuring than charting the waters of uncertainty. And in this particular example, we get the added bonus of ‘not disappointing everyone.’ First order change is screwing up at work, and then forever after allowing your boss to dictate the terms of your existence to you, because you feel like that is all you deserve now, and security under the protection of a powerful person buys you a short term insurance policy against having to meet your own power which would blow your world into a million pieces. I think this is basically how the clergy works, to be honest. Lots of spiritually potent and powerful people pretending to be less than who they are in order to not threaten the oligarchy, so they can keep making a difference in the ways that they can in the patch they’ve been allocated. First order change is mediated to our consciousness by the language of fear which tells us that change is death, and death must be avoided at all costs. The language of fear will keep us in first order change until we are ready to embrace the deeper truth that death is just a portal to resurrection. First order change is where we can hear the soul’s wisdom calling us, and where we deliberately drown it out, disown, numb or deny it in order to avoid what we know it is calling us to.
When we live in this space, we live as strangers to ourselves and we live out of step with our bodies.
I will tell you something about first order change which I learned from going back to it again and again hoping (stupidly) for a different result, because I too, resisted what came after as long as I could.
When we stay looped in first order change cycles, which are as predictable as seasons by the way, all the people in our life who we hope will come in close and truly know and love and respect and nurture us, are kept at arms-length, by God. Most of our most vibrant, healthy and alive connections are not allowed to arrive for us while we are stuck in first order change cycles. There is a very good reason for this. If we were to be rewarded for listening to fear by having deep, nourishing, intimate and supportive relationships, we would never finally turn and face our own gnawing dissatisfaction with the status quo, with emptiness, with denial and façade, and finally go where we know we have to eventually. There are so many of life’s richest blessings which are just not available to us at this level, which we continue to miss out on the longer we dilly dally. I did not make these rules, they are just universal truths.
But, I digress.
I have learned that if we insist on returning again and again to first order change eventually, the body will tell you about it. Eventually you might end up with an auto-immune disease, or chronic fatigue, back pain, migraines or persistent sinus issues (that’s your blocked third-eye chakra, free tip) or multiple weird food sensitivities, or something more serious, something which is systemic and mysterious and doesn’t respond to treatment like your medical team think it should. You may even decide to dabble with numbing strategies like smoking illicit substances or drinking excessively or (if you really hate yourself) fucking strangers, in an effort to retrace your soul’s steps through other seasons where you can remember the body trying to get your attention; but this is invariably a bad idea and should be avoided if at all possible.
If you are a person who *knows* that they have some sort of divine mandate on their life, some kind of calling to either healing or teaching or creativity or spiritual mastery, here is the bad news.
“If you insist on remaining divorced from your body’s wisdom past this point, second order change is coming and you best buckle up because shit is going to get real.”
This is because we are so much more deeply loved than we have ever dared to imagine (if we were raised in the Kingdom of Empire-masquerading-as-Love). Our loving Divine Mystery has things to do, and we have been woven into their plans for this planet, and many of us are under higher covenants and just have to awaken because its time to get on with it.
Divine Soul Covenants function exactly like covenants that you can read about in the Hebrew Bible, where God holds up his end of the bargain, and Israel pretends not to notice, runs away, begs to go back to slavery in Egypt, makes golden calves, appoints their own leaders to replace God and generally act like fuckwits. You would think this would make God pack it in and move on to find another people group with whom to make a covenant, but unfortunately, when the covenant is Divine, there is no getting out of it. This means that God is left loving the Israelites unconditionally regardless of whether they notice or care, or reciprocate. This is a bit of a raw deal for God, but its okay, because this is the mechanism by which God discovers Gods own ontological raison d’etre,(spoiler alert: incarnation) and this is in fact, how Israel becomes so much more than one tiny little people group and in fact swells and grows to become a universal Self, and eventually is drawn back to the Godself because unconditional love is the strongest force in the universe. This is God’s Great Big Story which we all belong to whether we want to or not, and which you will not learn about in Christian Ed or at church because they aren’t allowed to use this kind of language in schools or in pulpits.
In fact, what we have now, is a state of affairs where the churches and the Christian NGOs and schools have dropped the ball *so badly* on communicating the Great Big Story. The Story has been twisted into a series of Great Big Rules and Dividing Lines Between the Sacred and the Secular, and feminine wisdom and energy are almost completely missing from it, and so Divine has gotten a bit fed up. Divine is fed up with corruption and greed and injustice and racism and misogyny and the idols of “whitemalegod” doctrine, colonial theologies, capitalism and the apathy of all the dudes who are currently running the Kingdom of Empire and think they are the good guys and so feel free to live unexamined lives out of their unconscious bias and fear. Divine is on a timeline for the restoration of all of creation and – as we were so clearly shown, is nowhere near the power bases, is always working at the margins with the exiled, oppressed, silenced and disqualified, to bring this about. Divine has smashed the sacred into the secular through the body of Jesus, then allowed it to be crucified and then resurrected in order to leave us a brutal bread crumb trail into how it looks to follow this plan, and almost no-one has gotten this yet. But we are starting to. We are starting to because of the powerful voices of those who have been living under Divine Soul Contracts.
Praise Be.
Part of this pivot-plan is that Divine has placed people who have Divine Soul Covenants with a number of different archetypal patterns, all over the world, in all sorts of fascinating fields which are either adjacent to or articulate into spirituality in some way, and then woken them up gradually. An interesting feature which I am discovering that Divine Soul Covenants have in common is that they are not reliant on human obedience; which is to say, there is a fine line where human free will and Divine will come into conflict, and guess who wins? This is actually fascinating, because here is how this works: Divine tries to wake someone up from their Kingdom of Empire slumber. Person refuses to wake, insists on Avoiding the Void and staying in their slumbering / belonging state in Empire-land where the pay-checks are steady and the community belonging masks the existential dread. For a little while. Next what happens is that Divine lets them do this. And then the natural consequences of having the Divine imprint of unconditional love and belonging written into the soul, and living in denial of that, makes the person so sick, either in body, mind our soul, that they eventually turn to Love to be healed.
Divine Soul Covenants have exactly zero correlation to earthly contracts like jobs, marriages, home ownership, car loans, business deals and things of that nature. Higher covenants bear no resemblance to these kinds of contracts, and do not respect their authority. They will bulldoze straight over them, and often do. This is interesting, because these earthly contracts have become the idols of the evangelical church. Particularly in the west where people are usually wealthy enough to have all of them.
Finally, and to segue back to where we began, those who are under Divine Soul Covenants (and you will know instinctively if this is you, because it will terrify you and pique your curiosity all at once) are not allowed to stay in first order change loops endlessly. Again, I don’t make these rules, they are just universal laws. Plenty of people around us *are* allowed to stay in first order change, and are allowed to stay in lovely, well contained earthly contracts too, and those earthly contracts can absolutely level up into divine soul covenants, but that is God’s business, and not my area of expertise.
Second order change is not for everyone. But if you are still here reading, its probably because it is for you.
Second order change is the kind of change in which the option to return to the status quo is removed from the table all together; and a total transformation is now unfolding, and it may well be unfolding against your wishes. The part of your soul which holds and bears witness to your deepest truth, your Divine Soul Covenant, has now hijacked the steering wheel and your ego can’t get back into the driver’s seat, no matter how hard you try.
You can go into this transformation kicking and screaming, or gracefully; but you will go into it and it will have its way with you.
On the other side of second order change, nothing is the same anymore. In second order change, we are forced to confront the many ways in which we have been betraying ourselves, in which we have been betrayed by others, and in which we ourselves have become the betrayer. This is a devastating and complex dynamic indeed, and only the very sturdiest of souls can wade into these murky waters with us and bear witness to its unfolding. This is the moment all the false relationships fall away, and where we are sent into the Void. This is the moment of exile from the Kingdom of Empire, where we are shoved off the wide road and onto the narrow goat trail. This is the moment that those of us who were raised in church will feel betrayed, because we were not equipped by the very place that had the equipment to give us. We were told, but not instructed. We were warned, but not accompanied. We were admonished, but not allowed to truly transform.
When we are in the grip of second order change, we find that should we try and return and go back the way we came, we cannot. We have become exiles from the places we once belonged. We no longer fit into the roles we once occupied in those spaces. We may feel like a stranger to ourselves. Others will tell us they don’t recognize us anymore. We become aliens in a land we once knew. The rejection we usually experience in our outer world at this point reflects a deep inner rejection of our own soul, that which we have kept at arms-length. This double rejection cuts like a sword, piercing our very marrow. It is a reckoning of epic proportions. For those of us who have a Divine Soul covenant with another human being, the kind the flies in the face of all the normal earthly contracts we’ve become accustomed to, this is the moment we realise that while we continue to reject them, we continue to reject our own soul, our own Christ-Consciousness DNA, and all of it finally surfaces to be acknowledged.
There are days when choosing life over death in this stage is all we manage. Just survival. These are the days where our ego dies, and we enter into a participation with the Christ of crucifixion, death and burial. These are our three days in the belly of the whale. Where we have no sense of time, where we realise that time is an illusion and there is no way of knowing if it is three days, or three decades we will spend swimming in the deep darkness with no comfort, no light at the end of the tunnel, no relief in sight. I wrote a series on this season, called the Cocoon. If you are going through it, you might find some encouragement there. There are, as it turns out, discernible stages to this part of the process because we live in a deeply liturgical universe.
Eventually, if we somehow find the courage to stay with it, we find that second order change ultimately delivers us into the fiery embrace of a loving Divine who is deeply invested in us becoming more aligned with our own Soul’s covenant and with Divine. And once this happens, we understand, that everything else which flows from this re-calibration, re-organisation of priorities, re-orientation toward integration, truth and clarity must just happen and there is no stopping it.
On the other side of second order change, is the expansive and generous land called “Perspective”. Living in the land of perspective means that we now see things utterly differently than we did before everything changed; before all the pieces on the chess-board of our lives were unceremoniously tossed up in the air and came down higgledy-piggeldy and we had to start again. In the land of perspective, we are content with our not-knowing, not-having, not-being. We learn the apophatic pattern of Divine in fresh and intuitive ways.
We feel spacious and sparse, like a bleached carcass picked clean by the vultures and baking in the hot sun.
We are reminded of ancient mythologies which speak about the re-enfleshment of dry bones and we wonder if we are partaking in some ancient mystery that is calling our name.
We find that where we used to have certainty, we now have curiosity.
Where we used to have judgement, we now have compassion.
Where we used to have pride, we now have true poverty of spirit.
Where we used to have owning, we now just have longing.
As a side note, and because I’m feeling kind of preachy tonight, funnily enough, these are all characteristics of belonging to the Kingdom of Love. They are nowhere to be seen in the Kingdom of Empire, where the hallmarks are squabbles over the minutiae of doctrine, who is in charge of what happens to someone’s uterus, which junk goes with which gender, where people should put their junk / not put their junk, and who has the most impressive cathedral / creative arts ministry / mansion / YouTube following / book sales. If that sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. So sorry to tell you, Jesus is nowhere near any of that nonsense. Jesus has rolled his holy eyes and walked off in disgust, and he is not done flipping tables in the temple yet, not by half.
Jesus is not interested in attending the arguments of the rich and powerful, because he is off extending his consciousness into Buddhist monks during their training. He is, right now, awakening farmers to the possibilities of growing sustainable crops and healing rifts in the ozone layer and watching a fox buried deep in her den birth her litter safely. Jesus is sitting in the mud with the refugees in the camp who have given up hope of ever seeing home again. He is holding tight to the soul of the woman who has been raped more times than she can remember and is sitting on the edge of her bed with a bottle of pills and a bottle of whiskey. The Christ Consciousness is busy tending to the tattered hearts of the transgendered who are slowly finding the courage to emerge from their mysterious and wonderful skin-chrysalis into their fullness of Being, is ministering to the many thousands of children who are locked up, in this very moment, in fetid, windowless rooms and being used as sex objects. The Christ Consciousness is not interested in mediating a squabble between denominations, because it is busy training the people to have the courage and smarts and authority to go and smash those doors down and rescue those kids.
Here are some things that I have learned by looking in the rear-view mirror at my own dance between first order change and second order change and how together, they facilitated my homecoming, the moment where I finally came into inner union – my masculine and feminine energies harmonised and supporting a sustainable wellness, flourishing and abundance that I didn’t even know was possible.
The body always tells the truth; and we ignore it at our peril.
The story of our lives is never over, and nothing is impossible.
Our own becoming journey shines a light, leaves a breadcrumb trail for others who are just a couple steps behind us. If we can be real and honest about the paths we’ve trodden, we have a powerful opportunity to let our own becoming set others free to do their own difficult work.
Avoidance and choosing to remain stuck in the first-order-change-loop is a short-term strategy at best, and it keeps everyone around us bound to a false version of reality where they are not truly free either. Truthful living is often brutal to begin with, but always sets us, and others free in the end.
We never do this in spite of our children, and how it will affect them. We do it FOR our children, because our children know when we live out of step with our souls, and it leaves them with a deep abandonment wound – they become spiritual orphans. Most of us who live under Divine Soul Covenants, also have children who are either highly sensitive, gifted, spiritually switched on or all three. These high-frequency star-seeds cannot flourish when their parents live in denial about their real selves. They will push us again and again and again until we finally pay attention. I will never forget the moment I realised my son’s rage was because I had checked my soul out of my body in order to survive my life. This was the moment I was forced to stop hiding behind the narrative of ‘doing it for the kids’ as a justification for my fear, and instead start ‘doing it for the kids’ and healing, integrating and walking headlong into second order change.
Inside the Kingdom of Empire, I was taught and perhaps you were too, that in order to “love and serve”, I had to live in a façade where I abandoned myself in order to avoid being disconnected from an entire network of communities who had proclaimed themselves the only true holder of blessing. This key marker of Empire, was very cleverly marketed as ‘denying oneself’ but the people who taught it fundamentally did not understand the proper meaning of this important principle. They used it as a form of crowd control by brainwashing millions of people to deny their own soul’s wisdom, which was manifested in the physical reality with the epidemic of witch-burning, for just one example. This was a sure-fire way to stamp out the feminine (intuitive, soulful) wisdom in those generations -whilst completely missing the point – which is to crucify the ego. The mystics always understood this, but their voices were always marginal and the Empire kept doing what Empire does, and getting larger and more powerful and drowning out the voices in the margins, including the Jesus-voice, which has always been heard in the margins and ignored in the Board Room.
What I now understand about my own second-order-change experience is that what was designed to feel like being exiled from Eden, turned out to be a deliverance from the grips of the Kingdom of Empire into freedom. At first all I knew was terror, like any other wild creature which has become accustomed to captivity. That which was designed to take me down, silence and relegate me to the fearful beast of ‘the secular’, was actually the seed which germinated the first sacred harvest of my life. I was told I had been disqualified. And I believed that to be true, because I had also been taught to ignore my own soul’s wisdom and give away all my authority to the men who had long governed the spiritual community I belonged to.
What I have discovered, is that you can’t be qualified in the Kingdom of Love without first being disqualified from the Kingdom of Empire. Now that I have gone and recovered all the power I once gave away, I have discerned that this is simply an initiation. Its supposed to feel scary and disorienting. Its supposed to turn your whole life on its head. When the alchemy has completed its work in our crucible moments, we are supposed to have nothing left except divine unconditional love. All fear, insecurity, attachment, ego-addiction, numbing and denial has to burn away. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about dying to ourselves. This is what it takes to have the mind of Christ. Which is why so very few people who call themselves Christians will ever have it: because post-modern evangelical Christianity is one of the strongest pillars propping up the Kingdom of Empire, which has literally nothing to do with the Christ Consciousness. The two are diametrically opposed. So much of what happens in churches these days is like a weird cocktail of superstition, tradition, leadership seminars and group therapy.
While I was still enslaved in the Kingdom of Empire, I looked to the church to bring transcendence, mystery, encounter with Divine, consciousness and beauty, because she is under a Divine Soul Contract too. And this is what she is supposed to be doing. And what I found was that the Leaders of the Empire don’t actually want transcendence, they want the mundane. Transcendence fucks with the tithing and doesn’t tie in nicely with the end of financial year sermon series on generosity. The Leaders of Empire don’t know what it takes to walk into real freedom, because they’ve never had to fight for it so they settle for emotional manipulation. They want king-like leaders, who can be politicked around at a Council meeting, rather than a shit-disturbing mystic prophet like Jesus, and so they enable egoic posturing and image-management in their leadership teams. They want the appearance of soulful truth, because it makes their presentations look better, but they aren’t willing to pay the women who can bring this essential ingredient to the table. The Leaders of the Empire have utterly failed to heed Jesus when he spoke about gaining the whole world and losing their very souls. And so they have become powerful and strong, and soul-less.
To be clear, I loved the church, and I tried really hard to bring in the things I knew it needed to fulfil her Divine Soul Contract, her mandate. I tried to change it from within and from without. I tried to shift the needle on some of these metrics by throwing myself into the beast of theological education, going to the source.
I failed.
I failed miserably.
I failed because my own Divine Soul Covenant was designed to bring cosmic exposure to the Kingdom of Empire, to which the Church has sold her soul. I failed because I believed the Kingdom of Love could burst forth inside the Kingdom of Empire, but I was wrong. It can’t. Love is the higher covenant, and the Empire has been built on the success of earthly contracts, which are all under review right now, and many have reached their expiration date. Love is the higher authority, and Empire will give way to it eventually. Its just a matter of time.
I failed because ultimately my soul knew something more beautiful and transcendent and powerful than I did, and I went in search of it.
And I found it. The pearl of great price. The map to the Kingdom of Love.
And it cost me everything I had.
I lost the whole world, and finally found my very soul.