Meditate | Free Sunlight

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments, or better yet, your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

Our whole spirit is desire and its consequent thought; and since all desire is a matter of love and all thought a matter of discernment, our whole spirit is its love and its consequent discernment. This is why our thinking flows from the desires of our love when we are thinking solely from our own spirit, as we do when we are in reflective moods at home…We are drawn to what is evil (which amounts to a compulsion) if our love has been a love for what is evil, and we are drawn to what is good if our love has been a love for what is good. We are drawn to what is good to the extent that we have abstained from evils as sins; and we are drawn to what is evil to the extent that we have not abstained from evils.

Since all spirits and angels are desires, then, we can see that the whole angelic heaven is nothing but a love that embraces all desires for what is good and therefore a wisdom that embraces all perceptions of what is true. Further, since everything good and true comes from the Lord and the Lord is love itself and wisdom itself, it follows that the angelic heaven is an image of him. (Divine Providence 61)

No one can become an angel or get to heaven unless he or she arrives bringing along some angelic quality from the world. Inherent in that angelic quality is a knowing of the path from having walked it and a walking in the path from the knowing of it. (Divine Providence 60)

Meditating on these passages, I recognize clearly in my experience how evil is compulsive. In my interactions with my kids, I am powerless over my negative reactions to their behavior. “Knee-jerk,” like a reflex, is a good description for how this negative reaction feels compulsive. I see how my current “knee-jerk” reaction is a slave to negative habitual ways of thinking that come from the pain of various past experiences. The only thing I can do is surrender it to the Lord, ask for help, and pray for freedom. Freedom is heavenly love: when the chains of acting from the pain of old thought patterns are removed, what is left is an ability to fully be present to and love my children, give them my loving attention and respond in a way that engenders trust and empowerment, not fear.

The sky was cloudy while I was sitting in meditation thinking on these topics. Several minutes in, the sun broke through the clouds and began to shine into my room. Sitting with my eyes closed and feeling the sun on my forehead gave me an expansive feeling of myself. It widened my physical sense of myself so that I felt like I was as big as the room.

Now, I know my size. It would be foolish to think I was the sunlight, but nonetheless the sense I had was full and real. I recognized a correlation between this physical sense and its spiritual counterpart—the love I receive, as a vessel for the Lord’s love and wisdom. I know “my size” on my own—compulsively negative, but that is no impediment to the Lord’s ability to flow in and expand me with love.

I pray that I may recognize my compulsions, my compulsive actions, and pray for the courage and power to surrender them, to abstain from actions inspired by them, and soften to the sense of what love would have me do.

Chelsea Rose Odhner

Chelsea appreciates the time for reflection writing this column makes her carve out. In addition to mothering her three young children, she is an assistant editor for New Church Connection and an editor and writer for New Church Perspective.