Heart and Lungs

Brian explores what the essential actions of the church ought to be in light of what the heart and lungs correspond to in Swedenborg's writings. This essay is the first of two on this topic. The second part is found here. -Editor

About fifteen years ago I fell into a late-night New-Church-camp conversation with two cousins of mine—who were, like me, church-indoctrinated from birth—and Martie Johnson. Martie would go on to become a minister and Navy chaplain, but was at the time still a rather wide-eyed newcomer to Swedenborg and the concepts in his Writings, and was probing us for information.

At some point, one of us mentioned the Grand Man, and Martie stopped us.

“What’s that?” We explained how heaven is organized in the human form, with societies performing functions that correspond to the various parts of the body, and how that same human form is reflected in the earthly church, human society, nature, and creation itself.

Slack-jawed, Martie shook his head. “You historical-faith people amaze me,” he said. We bristled at that. “Historical faith” is a term in the Writings for knowing spiritual things but not valuing them or trying to live by them. To us, it was not a compliment.

“I don’t mean it that way,” Martie said. “What I mean is, you guys just KNOW these things. Do you know how mind-blowing this is?”

He had a point. I’d been raised with the idea; it was like part of my mental wallpaper. But how much had I really thought about it?

So we delved in, and someone raised the idea that the church is the heart and lungs of the Grand Man. For me, that was just another section of my mental wallpaper.

Not so for Martie.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What does that mean?”

To some extent, my whole outlook on the church, on the Writings, and on my own potential use changed in the next few minutes.

As we explained the concept, we started asking some questions of our own—and reaching some conclusions. What we arrived at was this:

If the church is the heart and lungs of the Grand Man, then the function of the church in the world should correspond to the function of the heart and lungs in the body. That function is, of course, adding oxygen to the blood and circulating it through the body. Since “air” corresponds (roughly) to truth, then the function of the church should be to pump truth out there into the world.

Period. That’s it. The whole story. The answer to everything.

Concerns about growth? Just pump truth out there into the world. Concerns about educating our children? Just pump truth out there into the world. Concerns about the divorce rate in the church, about recruiting ministers, about the viability of the college, about governance or starting new congregations or what have you? Just pump truth out there into the world. If we do our job, then the other parts of the body will be able to do their jobs and all will be well. That is overly simplistic, of course, but that idea has stuck with me ever since, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that it is fundamentally and crucially important. As New Church people, our collective role is to pump truth out there into the world. The collective goal of New Church organizations should be to pump truth out there into the world. And ultimately, the answer to our challenges—whatever those challenges are—is going to lie in looking toward that collective goal and serving it. We need to pump truth out there into the world.

As stated, that concept is likely to draw unimpressed shrugs from thousands of New Church shoulders. “Sure,” people will think. “Our goal is to spread the Writings, bring more people into the fold, share what we have. Always has been. So what?”

But that’s a misunderstanding. I’m not saying our goal should be to spread the Writings. I’m not saying our goal should be bringing more people into the fold. Those are related goals, and they might be byproducts of the true goal, but they are not themselves the ultimate goals; if we look deeply at the correspondence they do not represent our use, our function in the Grand Man. Let me restate that, for emphasis.

The collective, fundamental use of the church is NOT to spread the Writings, or increase their readership, and it is NOT to grow and bring in more members.

While I’m at it, I’ll add this:

The collective, fundamental use of the church is NOT educating children in New Church principles.

And another.

The collective, fundamental use of the church is NOT doing good works.

Finally, a catch-all:

The collective, fundamental use of the church is NOT ministering to our flocks, or offering worship services, or training ministers, or nurturing marriage, or helping individuals with their spiritual growth.

That, I imagine, should do away with the agreeable shrugs; it’s a list that hits almost every major use I can think of in the church. But I think if we really follow the model offered in the Writings, we have to conclude that while those uses are important and serve the ultimate goal—a point to be addressed in the second half of this article next week—none of them actually describe the goal itself. Examinded closely, adding spiritual oxygen to spiritual blood and circulating it through the spiritual body—“pumping truth out there into the world”—has a precise and perhaps surprising meaning.

We’ll get to that also in the second installment of this article. Before we go there, though, let’s establish the idea of the church as the heart and lungs; it’s something referred to frequently in the Writings but stated well in number 246 of New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine:

The church of the Lord is with all in the whole world who live in good according to their religious principles. All who live in good...and acknowledge one God are accepted by the Lord and come into heaven.

The universal church on earth before the Lord is as one man—as heaven is—because the church is heaven or the kingdom of the Lord on earth.

But the church where the Lord is known and where the Word is is like the heart and lungs in man in respect to the other parts of the body, which live from the heart and lungs as from the fountains of their life. Hence it is, that unless there were a church where the Word is, and where the Lord is thereby known, the human race could not be saved.

“The church where the Lord is known and where the Word is...” what does that mean? The Christian world has the Word in its literal sense and worships the Lord. The Jewish church has much of the same version of the Word and worships the Lord. Islam even has part of the Word and the same basic idea of one omnipotent God. It could be argued, but my interpretation is that this is actually a narrow definition, meaning those who have the full version of the Word including the Writings, and from the Writings have a deeper understanding of the Lord—what we would call the New Church or the church specific (to use a term from the Writings).

Our function as a church, then, is to be the heart and lungs of the “universal” church—the church made up of all “who live in good according to their religious principles.” They need to live from us “as from the fountains of their life.” That’s quite a responsibility, if you pause over that phrase a moment. People in the rest of the world need us desperately. They depend on us. They live from us “as from the fountains of their life.”

That’s strange to say. We’re so small, so seemingly insignificant. Who would even notice if we ceased to exist? And frankly, though we certainly try, it doesn’t seem like anything we do or say has much impact on the greater world at all. How can we be so vital?

The answer lies in exactly how the heart and lungs—and, by extension, the veins, arteries, and capillaries, as noted elsewhere in the Writings—actually function in the body, and the correspondential function the church fills in the spiritual body of the Grand Man.

And since the primary funtion of the heart and lungs is to handle blood and oxygen, understanding those is key to everything.

Most references in the Writings identify “blood” as representing Divine Truth. That makes sense; in its essence, blood, like Divine Truth, is unchanging. It circulates through the body, bringing us what we need, but its own structure doesn’t change.

A few passages in the Writings, however, are equally emphatic in identifying blood with charity. That might be because of the nutrients carried by enriched blood; food represents the desire to do what is good and the energy to do it, which is a state of charity. That’s reinforced by the fact that the passages in question are mostly in reference to Scriptural prohibitions against eating blood as part of a sacrifice.

For the purposes of this study, then, it seems most reasonable to go with the more common correspondence and regard the blood itself as the Divine Truth. But in what form, exactly? The quote above would have it be the truth contained by the church “where the Word is and the Lord is known.” Again, that could be taken as the entire Christian world—but without the Writings, do they truly have the Word and know the Lord? That could probably be debated, but to me it makes most sense to regard the Divine Truth here as the truth revealed explicitly in the Writings. Oxygen, meanwhile, was isolated for the first time—by a Swede, ironically—in 1772, the year Swedenborg died. So there is no direct reference to oxygen in the Writings. But it seems clear from a number of references that air and breathing have to do with the understanding and perception of truth. Here’s one of the clearest:

By "the air" is signified all the things of perception and thought, thus of their faith...for by "the air" their respiration is signified; and respiration corresponds to the understanding, and thus to perception and thought, and also to faith. (Apocalypse Revealed 708)

It seems safe, then, to conclude that oxygen, or “good air,” corresponds to perception and understanding, and carbon dioxide, or “bad air,” would have the opposite sense of falsity clouding our understanding.

Based on that, our function as the heart and lungs of the Grand Man is to gather elements of perception and understanding—bits of truth, essentially—connect them to the Divine Truth and pump them together out through the body. Period. That’s it! And if we’re doing that, then we’re serving as the fountains of life for the rest of the church universal out there. That sounds pretty straightforward, and half of it—the heart part—really is. The heart and blood vessels contain, protect, and circulate the blood; the analogous function in the church is to contain, protect, and circulate the Writings. Frankly, the dedication to preserving, translating, and publishing the Writings has been astonishing over the years, and to my knowledge no one really questions its importance as a use of the church.

And we can justifiably be pleased by that, because the Writings identify the heart itself as the celestial aspect of the church, the most internal part, motivated directly by love of the Lord. It’s not hard to identify the love and reverence shown for the Writings as a reflection of celestial love of the Lord.

But where there’s a celestial, there’s generally a spiritual—a layer outside the celestial, motivated by love of the neighbor, more intellectual and more practical. The Writings identify the lungs as the church’s spiritual aspect. And the lungs, of course, have that tricky job of gathering ideas and attaching them to the Divine Truth.

What exactly does that mean? Can we really do that? And how can that function be so important that it’s part of those fountains of life? It seems that getting the Divine Truth out into the world would be far more significant.

To me, that is where the correspondences get the most interesting, and surprising. We’ll explore that further in the second part of this study next week.

Brian David

Brian, New Castle, PA, graduated from the ANC Boys' School in 1982 and Grinnell College (Iowa) in 1986. He worked for twenty-four years as a writer and editor for several newspapers in Western Pennsylvania, the last ten at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but opted to leave the field last fall and is currently looking at new options. He and his wife, Rachael, share five children: Hanna David, 19 (a freshman at Bryn Athyn College); Corey Conway, 18; Luke David, 16; Matty Conway, 14; and Sam David, 4. He has a strong interest in using media to share the truths of the Writings. To this end he has proposed a website offering the text of the Word linked to plain-language explanations of the internal sense. He also recently won an award for a planned book: Move Over Einstein.

Comments

[Pearse]

Great article. I look forward to part two.

[Todd Beiswenger]

I agree, great article. I must admit though, I'm having a hard time embracing the idea that the only thing we're supposed to do is pump out truth. I follow the logic, and really agree with your list of things that the New Church really doesn't need to be, but something is holding me back from buying in.

That said, I really find it quite interesting how so many people in the General Church put so much effort into defining what it is the New Church is all about. Having been raised in the GC, I don't really know what happens in Catholic, Lutheran, or other religions, but I can't help but speculate that they don't spend so much effort defining who they are. Yet we feel the need to have New Church Education, New Church Marriages, we have to find the BEST way to do worship, etc. I guess that's what happens when our theology embraces the line, "Behold, I make all things new." Maybe that includes embracing the idea that all we have to do is pump out truth.

Thanks for bringing up this though provoking subject. I'll be working with it all week. =)

[Ropemaker]

Amen, brother Brian.
So my question is, how can we more effectively be the heart and lungs? You got into it a little saying that we have live it and practice charity, but what would you say that looks like? Very inspiring, thx.
~Ronnie S

[Normandy Alden]

An interesting thought experiment. I appreciate Brian's willingness to radically re-envision our church organization. Cheers! However, I think that pumping air through the body is an inaccurately simplistic explanation for the function of the heart and lungs. I kept stumbling over the idea that it is not air that is pumped through our body, but blood. The lungs function in conjunction with the respiratory system to oxygenate blood and remove carbon dioxide. The heart functions to pump blood to the body and the lungs.
Also, I would like a definition of "church" as used in this article. The people who show up on Sundays? Those who are baptizes? The General Church?

[Brian David]

Normandy: Thank you for reading and commenting! I think your questions about the lungs and oxygen will be addressed next week in part two. As for "the church," I attempted to define that as the "church specific," or the collective society of those who have the Writings, though in practical terms uses would generally be approached by subsets of that group.

Cheers!

[Amos Glenn]

Good stuff, Brian!

I'm especially interested to learn how you define "attaching ideas to Divine Truth"—which seems a little backwards at first blush.

And I'll wait for Part 2 before really challenging you (in a friendly way!) but your catch-all seems quite limited, especially the part about "helping individuals with their spiritual growth." From a lot of other doctrine in the Writings for the New Church, promoting spiritual growth could easily be considered a, if not the, central use of the church on earth. A priest's motivating love, for example, should be the salvation of souls, which must include individual souls as well as souls generally.

Quickly for now...
The angels who occupy the heart and lungs of the Grand Man are those who are ruled by love to the Lord, who are motivated to do good because it is good. The role of the church on earth is to provide a foundation and support for the heart and lungs, which is done by assisting the Lord in creating angels with that character. So, couldn't we say that a central, if not the central, function of the New Church is to use the Word to support an individual's reformation and regeneration, or in other words, "helping individuals with their spiritual growth?"

I find a lot of support for this idea in the lengthy discussion in the Writings for the New Church of the correspondences of the heart and lungs with the will and intellect of an individual person (a discussion vastly longer than the heart and lungs of the Grand Man), especially the development of proper functioning of the will and intellect through regeneration.

Very much looking forward to Part 2 (and beyond?!). Really enjoying reading this!

[Charles Ebert]

Brian,
This is very provocative. A challenging concept is "attaching ideas to Divine Truth". Is that the role of New Church Education in all forms?
I look forward to part II. Thanks for getting a good conversation going.

Chuck