Keep the Puzzle Out

Reading the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg can be a daunting task. Detailed and specific with tiny yet powerful pieces, Bonnie relates her experience of reading the volumes of Arcana Coelestia or Secrets of Heaven with working on a puzzle. She enjoys doing large puzzles in collaboration with her family, and has had a similar experience reading through the Arcana with a reading group. Collectively they make the picture come clear more quickly than they would on their own. (Originally published in the 2008 Echo). -Editor

I love jigsaw puzzles. I don’t get much time to do them anymore but one of our family Christmas traditions was to have a new puzzle on a table to work on throughout the holiday. Colorful, complex, and challenging, putting together a puzzle is a lot like reading the Arcana. For me the excitement was no different. First of all, the volumes of the Arcana are books! Books in themselves hold the promise of intricate color and detail, and these particular books also represented a challenge and a promise of something even more.

So you bring the puzzle home and you dump it out and try to sort out this pile of disconnected pieces. The first time I cracked open Volume 1 and began to read was hard. It seemed like a pile of unsorted truths that looked all the same...Good and Truth...I wasn’t having much luck or fun. With a puzzle the first thing I do is find the edge and corner pieces; so the next time I tackled the Arcana I switched back and forth from the chapter material to the easier inter-chapter material. The truths there seemed to connect in a nice straight line. Though I couldn’t see how the inter-chapter material connected to the rest of the Arcana, it still felt good to be making some connections.

So I plugged away for years on the Arcana alone, yet every attempt I made ended either in me giving up or simply reading the inter-chapter material. I was collecting and building all of the edge pieces but no real picture was emerging. I needed help; so I formed an Arcana reading group.

Most of the fun in putting together our Christmas jigsaw puzzle was the group effort. Two or three of us would work on the puzzle together. Once in a while there would be many of us working at the same time. Since we couldn’t all sit on the same side of the puzzle, each of us had a different perspective of the picture. This seemed to work the best often going on late into the night, building large sections of the puzzle. Our Arcana group works a lot like that. We have a group of about eleven members. We can’t all come to every meeting, but whether it is two or all eleven of us we work together to take the truths we have learned and try to fit them together. With every additional person comes a different perspective and a higher chance that the group can form a truer picture from the readings.

At first, the truths in the Word look very similar. It takes time and patience to look at each truth and recognize how unique it is. It takes even more time and work to see where one truth connects to another in use. Once in a while, when working on a puzzle, we find a piece that has a picture on it...an eye or even a whole face. We hang on to these pieces and build on them. We are told in the Heavenly Doctrines (Sacred Scripture 55) that there are some truths in the literal sense of the Word that are like the hands and the face, uncovered, clear simple truths that we learn as children. We hold on to these, memorize them and use them as the basis for connecting other truths. Like the corners and edge pieces of the puzzle these little pieces give us hope that a real picture will emerge.

Our Arcana group has been together about six years. As a group we are beginning to develop a rather beautiful detailed picture of what the Lord is trying to tell us. We have begun to be able to sort the pieces. We have quite a bit of edge and a few growing patches of connected ideas. For a long time none of us felt as if we saw any connection between the main text of the Arcana and the inter-chapter material. Why was it there? I’ll never forget the evening when someone in the group picked up a piece of truth that connected the body of the chapter with an inter-chapter essay. Suddenly the chapter we had been reading was no longer an island of unconnected knowledge. It connected to the inter-chapter material which lent it some context and anchored it to a specific area of the bigger picture.

The Washington Society has just finished its participation in the Journey program. Some groups will continue together and begin the study of something new. These groups have found the joy of working with others in the pursuit of truth. However, we live in a very busy world. It can be hard to keep the pace of reading and meeting regularly. My advice to any new group is: keep it regular. Keep the puzzle up on a table in the corner of your schedule. Don’t put it away. Sometimes only two or three people are able to work together and meet. Yet each meeting adds new truths to the puzzle and each new connection refines the picture for the whole group. And one day, someone is going to find a piece that connects lots of pieces and sections together and there will be a collective “ah ha!” a sense of something that transcends the simple understanding of just one person.

Yvonne Cowley

My name is Yvonne Cowley (better known to most by Bonnie). I grew up in the New Church, went to New Church schools first in Pittsburgh then the Academy of the New Church Secondary Schools and College. My husband David and I have six grown children and fifteen grandchildren. I have been the secretary for the church and school in Mitchellville, MD for the past twenty years and love my job here.