Reading the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg can be a daunting task. Detailed and specific with tiny yet powerful pieces, Yvonne 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.