This is the second part of Brian's essay on what the church would do if it were aligned entirely with the correspondence of the heart and lungs. The first section can be found here. -Editor
In the first half of this article last week, I launched a discussion of the true meaning of the place of the church specific—meaning the church which has the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg—as the heart and lungs of what we call the Grand Man, the human form of society.
I concluded there that the blood corresponds to the Divine Truth of the Writings and that the function of the heart specifically is to circulate that Divine Truth out to the world—a relatively straightforward function, and one that church organizations have done quite well, in my view, through their devotion to translation and publication of the Writings.
The function of the lungs, however, is a little harder to visualize. The lungs draw in air—ideas, perception, understanding—and provide oxygen—true, legitimate ideas, perception, and understanding—for the blood.
What does that mean? Can we really do that? And even if we can, can it really be as important as circulating Divine Truth itself? That sounds just a bit ridiculous.
But consider: As the blood circulates, it stays inside the blood vessels; it does not contact the cells of the rest of the body directly. It carries nutrients and oxygen and passes them through the walls of the blood vessels to the cells, but the cells do not consume the blood itself. What that means is astonishing. If what cells need to thrive and do their work is oxygen, not blood, then it follows that what the church universal needs to thrive and do its work is the understanding we provide, not the Divine Truth of the Writings itself. That’s an important statement, the central point of this whole argument. And it’s somewhat revolutionary. The people of the world do not need us to give them the Writings. They need us to give them an understanding of truth. That flies in the face of many things we think we understand about our place in the world, and it’s not really a comfortable statement to make, but it follows the correspondences. Our job is not to get everyone reading the Writings. Our job is to give them truth they can understand and use.
That idea is reinforced if we look at the role oxygen plays once it gets to the cells. The cells get nutrients in the form of long, chain-like carbon-based molecules. There is potential energy locked away there, as well as amino acids that can be used to build the body, but the chains have to be broken to release the energy and free up the materials. That is accomplished by a chemical reaction with oxygen: oxygen atoms pull carbon atoms out of the nutrient chains, breaking them into smaller chunks and releasing energy while creating carbon dioxide. Given that the nutrients represent the desire to do good and the potential to do good, then the oxygen represents ideas that come from Divine Truth but are in a form that helps with the real-world problem of turning the desire for good into the performance of good.
That, then, is the kind of truth and understanding we’re supposed to provide: the kind that can help people understand what “good” is and how to do things that are good. I remember once hearing a minister (Amos Glenn, maybe?) describe “truth” as “a description of good,” something that made a lot of sense as I thought about it. It’s almost a how-to manual.
And that, honestly, is something the Writings really don’t offer. They give principles, fundamentals, patterns, ideals, goals. They tell us what it’s all ultimately about. But they don’t give us day-by-day, moment-by-moment, challenge-by-challenge advice on how to apply those fundamentals and reach those goals. That, apparently, is the job of the church specific.
To my way of thinking, this is also work we’ve been doing for two-plus centuries: Ministers have been writing sermons, looking at the Writings and the internal sense of the Word, and seeking to apply the truths there to life. Scholars have written an ongoing stream of books and articles analyzing doctrine in various ways. Doctrinal classes, religion lessons, courses in New Church schools, and even parents raising children; all those things in various ways involve seeking truth from doctrine that can be applied to life.
Have we done all this with the idea that it is part of our fundamental use as a church, the way we serve the entire human community? I don’t think so—but we should! That’s precisely what it is: it is what we pour forth as the “fountains of life.”
“But wait!” you might say. “You’re saying that this is a use of the church on par with nurturing the Writings. How can we, as mere humans, pretend to fill that? How can we add truth to the Divine Truth? It sounds like a frightening level of pride at best, and blasphemy at worst.” That’s a fair point, and I think we need to beware of hubris. But it’s a concern that can be addressed through two other points about the biology of blood and oxygen.
First, the heart and lungs may have special jobs where Divine Truth is concerned, but they’re not really special in their own operations; they need nutrients and oxygen from the blood through capillaries to do their work just like every other part of the body. This leads to the conclusion that while people in the church specific may have access to Divine Truth and may work with Divine Truth, their need for truths and goods for life is not really any different from anyone else’s. We have special jobs, but we’re not special.
Second, the key processes of absorption and disbursal are controlled by the blood, not by either the alveoli at the intake end or the capillaries at the offload end. The lungs draw in air, which is about four-fifths nitrogen and only one-fifth oxygen; the blood absorbs oxygen from that mixture, leaving the nitrogen behind. Spiritually, that describes a process of drawing in many ideas and seeming truths and putting them in proximity to Divine Truth. Those that fit will get absorbed and circulated, the rest discarded. At the other end of the system, enzymes in the blood open up chemical gateways in the capillary walls so oxygen can get through to the cells and carbon can come back. Spiritually, that shows that while we are to provide gateways, the transaction itself is up to the Divine Truth and the receptive cells.
So yes, the process of writing sermons and books and articles and giving talks and classes and the other things we do, that’s vital to the survival of the world—it’s how we get oxygen into the blood. But as we do it, we don’t actually know what is oxygen and what is nitrogen, what’s getting absorbed and what discarded. Our job is simply to bring the air and blood together so the blood can do its work. At the other end, we can’t really know what’s being disbursed and absorbed, where it’s happening or when it’s happening; all we can do is provide gateways that are at the disposal of Divine Truth.
Think about that! It means that for all our scholarship, all our thought, all our preaching, we actually have no idea what is getting through to the world, when it’s getting through, and how it’s getting through. That’s being handled by the Lord through the power of the Writings in ways that are beyond our comprehension.
Personally, I look at the rise of democracy and the ideals of human rights, human equality, human freedom, and spiritual and economic self-determination and see the influence of a whole lot of oxygen. On the other hand I know people who see lax moral standards, institutionalized greed, and bloody wars and conclude that the Grand Man is on the verge of suffocation.
Either way, it’s pretty clear what this means to us as the church specific. Our job is to gather ideas and bring them in contact with the truths from the Writings, to circulate the Writings and the ideas together out into the world, and to provide ways that the right ideas can pass over to the people doing all the work of the church universal.
Let me repeat that. It’s not quite as easily grasped as “pump truth out there into the world,” but it’s more precise. Our job is to gather ideas and bring them in contact with the truths of the Writings, to circulate the Writings and the ideas together out into the world, and to provide ways that the right ideas can pass over to the people doing all the work of the church universal. That’s it. That’s our function, our use, our place in the Grand Man. Everything we do should somehow support and promote that use. Our resources should be concentrated on that use. Our performance of that use should be our measuring stick for institutional success. If a doctor wants to know how the heart is doing, he looks at how much blood it pumps, and how efficiently. If he wants to know how the lungs are doing, he looks at how much air they are pumping and how much oxygen there is in the blood. We should look at ourselves the same way. How well are we pumping blood and air? That’s what matters.
In real-world terms, what does that mean?
I think it means we should regard writing sermons as a minister’s most important job. I think we should make sure those sermons are either written or recorded so they can be saved. I think they should be compiled somewhere, referenced so they can be used as an ongoing resource, and I think we should look for ways to link those sermons with the Word and the Writings and make them accessible to the world at large. I think the same things could be said of other forms of New Church thought and scholarship, both by ministers and by laypeople. And as we ponder both our human and financial resources and how to use them, we should keep the importance of these activities in mind.
I think we should encourage both sermons and scholarhip to be tied closely to the Word and the Writings—ideas have to conform to Divine Truth in order to be carried to the cells as oxygen, so it seems the less doctrinal we are the more likely it is that what we’re producing is actually nitrogen. And for me personally, most of my favorite sermons have been ones that primarily explored the internal sense of the Word anyway (though this is, of course, not all about me).
I think we should be tasking our best and brightest to look at the internet and brainstorm ways of putting oxygen (or potential oxygen, anyway) online. Last fall I spent some time looking at common Google keyword searches; the twenty-one most popular for things like “Bible explained” and “Revelation meaning” were searched 85,000 times a month—and turned up only one New Church site, a ten-year-old, one-man effort by British physicist Ian Thompson called biblemeanings.info. People are online looking for something we have—the meaning of the Word—and we’re not offering it there. Meanwhile, I recently read that one out of every eleven people on the planet is on Facebook, and we have no organized, effective presence there. I also recently got an iPad, and I sit there tapping words and icons to zip from place to place and think how cool it would be to have an app which would show me the text of the Word and let me tap on words or verses or chapters and get New Church commentary and quotes from the Writings.
And most of of all, I think we need to get people together and think; we need to focus on this as the use of the church—not a use, the use—and see how we can unify behind it and make it happen.
But what about other uses? I can already hear the steam building in some people here and there. What about education? What about ministering to the flock? What about building houses and running food pantries? And for heaven’s sake, what about evangelization? This doesn’t even talk about growing the church!
The answer goes back to the concept of the Grand Man. It tells us, as noted above, that the Lord’s kingdom on earth is in human form, and that the church has a role to play analogous to the heart and lungs. It also tells us, however, that each society within that human form is itself a human form. That means the church specific is in human form, with people or groups of people performing the functions of all the different parts of the body. So while the church is the heart and lungs of the Grand Man, I myself might be part of the nose of the church. That means I’m performing a nose function that helps the church perform its overall heart-and-lungs function. We could obviously get wildly carried away trying to draw parallels between church uses and body parts, but in general the church needs a variety of internal functions to stay healthy to perform its collective function.
So is education important? That needs to be judged in terms of its contribution to the health of the church and the church’s ability to perform as the heart and lungs—and it certainly seems we’re going to have a hard time pumping air if we don’t educate people about the Divine Truth. Ministry, counseling, spiritual growth, social interaction? Those certainly seem to have a place, keeping people fresh and focused on the job at hand.
Building houses, running food pantries, other direct charity? This is an interesting one. It’s awfully hard to say we shouldn’t be doing that, but the fact is that the church specific has very little to do with the desire for good or energy for good. Food is processed elsewhere and nutrients are absorbed by the blood elsewhere. Our role is limited to transportation. It’s also worth noting that the muscles—which actually do the work of the Grand Man—are also elsewhere. Taken to a literal extreme, this model might label such efforts a distraction, something best left to others while we pursue our true use. But the Lord is subtle far beyond my understanding, and given the positives surrounding such work I have to think that it plays a role even if it’s not logically obvious.
And what about evangelization and growth? The heart and lungs, like every other part of the body, are constantly producing new cells. They grow as the body grows, and even in a full-grown person they produce new cells to repair damage and replace old ones. So certainly there appears to be a need for new members, people with fresh energy to help the church in its use, but tissue in the body that is only concerned with growth, that has growth as its one function, is called cancer—and I don’t think we want to be the cancer of the Grand Man. Growth itself cannot be the use.
But consider an athlete in training. As he builds muscle and eliminates fat and gets stronger and faster and more capable, what happens to his heart and lungs? They grow, develop, get stronger as well. The same is true of a growing child: as the rest of the body grows, so do the heart and lungs.
And in those cases, how do the heart and lungs grow? Athletes and growing children tend to have immense appetites, taking in lots of energy and protein. That gets broken down and absorbed by the blood, and the blood—thanks to our blind pumping—delivers it where it needs to go. In that athlete or child, lots of that energy and protein will get delivered by the blood to the heart and lungs, where the cells will build them into more tissue.
So if we do our job, feed that growing child/athlete the oxygen he needs and deliver the food, then the rest of that child/athlete’s body will take of our growth as well.
We need to pump truth out there into the world. It’s what we do. It’s the answer to everything. We need to do our job and trust the system.