Why the Church of Truth?

The Writings hold many beautiful teachings about what it is to live a happy, useful, heavenly life. But we have to live those teachings in order to feel their impact. Mary shares about a church and a pastor who have helped her to see the Writings in a new light. -Editor.

So why do you keep visiting Kentucky? An experience with a new kind of New Church.

In the past year I have traveled to Louisville, Kentucky seven times and I am heading there again for a month this summer. No I have not found a new passion for fried chicken or horse racing. I keep going back because of the Church of Truth. If you have not heard about the Church of Truth, it is located in the inner city of Louisville and lead by Brother Edward Miller. It is New Church (i.e. following the Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg) but it is not under any other New Church organization (i.e. it is not part of the General Church or the Convention etc. and no other organization is funding what they are doing).

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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.

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