The world is still evolving.
I think those of us steeped in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg tend to lose sight of that. We're understandably focused on the 18th century, that great event some two-hundred and fifty years ago when Heaven bent down and touched the Earth for only the second or third time in its multi-billion year life span; that brief embrace that left us with a tangible impression of the beautiful, spiritual reality perched just beneath our time-and-space mammalian existence. And yes, it deserves such focus. Cryptic only in its girth and intellectual rigor, a careful study of the Writings promises its readers a consistent, comprehensive blue print of the Lord's intentions for the human race. It fills in historical and theological gaps that the Christian world has fought with for millennia. It offers hope, and a plan of action. Freed from dogmatic constriction and endlessly interpretable parables, the Writings also feel true. And we have them now. Awesome.
And we've had them now for two-hundred and fifty years.
And a lot has happened in that time. Electricity happened, for one. That was a big deal. Democracy happened. As a result of both, the future happened: globalization, computers, satellites, horseless carriages powered by Japanese magic, and hand-held machines that can draw from a virtually infinite pool of the world's collected knowledge while simultaneously beaming videos of Korean babies playing Beatles songs on acoustic guitar. We went to the moon. We went to war as a planet, twice. You, whoever you are, can contact me right now by calling 814-DYLAN-84. We could be talking to each other ten seconds from now, from wherever we might be on the planet. You, in an airplane thirty-thousand feet over the Atlantic, and me riding my bike over the Golden Gate bridge. That wasn't even true when we were born, but it's true now.
From the very futuristic vantage point of the year 2010, I think it's safe to say that the world is still evolving. It didn't end with the Writings. We're still going.
But again, I think we tend to lose sight of that. Looking back into our personal organizational history, we find a Swedenborgian community borne out of long-standing Protestant traditions, a direct hand-off from the spiritually defunct Christian church of the middle ages to the truth-seeking worldview of Swedenborgian theology. We also find a world increasingly disenchanted with organized religion, where those same Protestant traditions are migrating from the mainstream to the side-streets, and terms like 'Christian' and 'God' have become hot button words that seem to vilify and polarize as much as they harmonize and unify. They're political words now, and carry heavy political gravitas. They're words that everybody knows, and that everybody's already made up their mind about. And rather than forming a united spiritual community bolstered by the plain truth of the Writings, it looks sometimes like the last two-hundred and fifty years have left us more fractured than ever—more world-focused, more spiritually ambiguous. And hey, let's address the elephant in the room: the New Church is not growing. Organizationally, it's dying. With all of the world's technology and future magic at our command, there are fewer 'Swedenborgians' today than there were a hundred years ago. That's scary, right? What are we supposed to do with that?
Well, I'd like to suggest something. Something challenging.
And not challenging in the way that we like to be challenged. Not challenging like 'let's reach a million people' challenging, because hard work has never been that threatening to us. It excites our Protestant work ethic, gives us clear meaning and direction. That's how we want to be challenged. It's too easy, and I think deep inside we know that. What I'm suggesting is much more personal, much closer to our carefully protected egos and communal identities. Much closer to our deepest fears. Ready?
We're not entitled.
We're not the chosen tribe.
The Lord did not intend for the Truth to be accessible only to those with minds capable of reading and assimilating 18th century Latin (which should actually be something of a relief).
There is a very good chance that the Lord's plan for the human race does not involve New Church banners hung from every patio terrace. It likely does not involve globally recognized veneration of Emanuel Swedenborg. Bryn Athyn, PA will probably never be a major center of world culture.
And scariest of all: we do not need to wait for the world to come to us. It's evolving very well on its own, faster and more ambitiously than ever before. It's crazy out there. Changing, growing, evolving.
And the good news? The Lord is still there. He's still running the show.
He still speaks to us through the three testaments. But He hasn't stopped evolving either.
If a two-week timespan in the 1750's did not herald the end of the Lord's communication with the human race, maybe it just heralded the last communication that we specifically noticed. The last interjection that required words we'd never heard and ideas that had been lost. The last intervention that required a plan so ambitious and crazy that it set in motion a wholly new path for the human race. A series of events that started with a man in Sweden and led our species through the most dramatic cultural and technological upheaval in our multi-thousand year life-span. A series of events that have only picked up speed since that time, a growing snowball with now two-hundred and fifty years worth of momentum and accumulation: electricity, democracy, Korean babies, the future.
And maybe the Lord doesn't need us to focus so much on that original snowball. Maybe He doesn't foresee a perfected world where spirituality is so distinct from people's daily lives that it requires special terms, special services and officiations.
Maybe His plans are even bigger than we thought.
In my next article, I'd like to suggest a potential path for the next twenty years, a parable of hope and solace for the future. But in the meantime, I'd like to leave you with this: the world is full of uncertainty right now in every conceivable way. And amidst the countless confusions, there are just two observations that I would like to not just suggest but to emphasize. These are constants, the things I know to be true.
The world is evolving. And the Lord has a plan.