Alanna Rose shares a beautifully simple practice for enjoying and engaging with the Lord's Word. Revelation can often feel intimidating in length or confusing in content but Alanna describes an approach to taking small, bite-sized pieces at a time. This method offers the opportunity to cherish and delight in the Lord's truth. -Editor
Among the things Swedenborg charged himself with was “diligently to read and meditate upon the word of God” (Documents Concerning Swedenborg, R. Tafel, p 26). This idea has been oft repeated from the pulpit. I recall being encouraged many times to go to the Lord’s Word. This is a simple instruction. What I don’t remember being told was to meditate on it, or more specifically, how to meditate on the word of God. At present, I don’t know of an esoteric chapter of the New Church. If there is one, and I have overlooked it in ignorance, please inform me, because I would like to take part. In my own life I have sought instruction in meditation from yogic traditions, meditation instructors, and more recently Sufi texts. They all repeat the same things in slightly different ways. I have found absolutely nothing incongruous between these practices and the writings of the New Church. On the contrary, meditation appears to me as one of the only suitable avenues toward embracing the radically unified vision of reality offered in Swedenborg’s writings. Take this quote for instance,
Heaven, taken as whole, is a heavenly person because the Lord alone is a heavenly person. He is the totality of each and every thing in heaven and in the heavenly individual. (Arcana Coelestia 162)
Sweeping ideas like this can be read with enthusiasm yet can still pass quickly out of the mind. Holding this same truth in meditation will offer the individual a new experience of it. I have read many beautiful things, but ultimately experiences are what change me. Meditation gives me a way to experience the truths in the Lord’s word within my own body.
Within us faith becomes both spiritual and earthly, in that everything spiritual has to be received in what is earthly to become anything to us. Something purely spiritual does indeed enter us but we do not accept it. It is like the ether that flows in and out of us without having any effect. For something to have an effect, we have to be mentally aware of it and open to it. We have no such awareness or openness unless something affects our earthly self. (True Christianity 339)
The principles of meditation as I have come to know them are simple. Come into a seated position. Close your eyes. Bring your awareness to the breath. Make the in-breath and the out- breath even. This will quiet the mind. Let your breath lead you to areas of tension in your body. Release any tension you find as you exhale. From this silent vantage point you can repeat the Lord’s name or a particular quote from the word. Surrender your will and let your heart become attuned to the One. You will go deeper and deeper into an experience of this truth as you keep your mind steady and let your breath unfold.
Every meditation is different. There are times when I have been meditating and wonder if anything at all is happening, but when I open my eyes I always feel a shift in my energy, in my consciousness, in the degree that I am holding onto the thoughts that occur in my mind. I make a space for meditation every day because of the joy and the peace that it brings me. These positive experiences are at hand throughout the rest of the day. I can call them to mind when I find myself forgetting.
In the Arcana Coelestia this statement occurs,
To meditate in a field, said of Isaac, is to think in good. (Arcana Coelestia 3196)
It is a very simple definition, but its practice is profound. I think what is most valuable is the personal nature of the approach. We can all be preached to but to open the door of your experience to the God of all life is to embark on something only you can. It vivifies the variation and magnificence of the Word because no two people will receive it exactly the same way. We can then live from this new perspective, from an intimate connection with the truth.
Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me. (Revelation 3:20)
Alanna is an artist making paintings and meals on the farm in upstate New York. She and her husband Garth Brown are in the process of building a house together and co-creating a cheese farm with Edmund Brown and Normandy Alden.