Meditate | The Lord is One

“To know and think as faith teaches cannot have any reality; doing what faith teaches---this alone exists. A spiritual church first becomes a church when it acts as bidden by charity, charity being the true teaching of faith. To put it another way, this is when a person in the church first becomes a church. Consider: what is a commandment? It does not order us to know a precept but to live by what it says. This is when we first have the Lord’s kingdom inside us, because the Lord’s kingdom consists solely in mutual love and the happiness it brings” (Secrets of Heaven 916 [2]).

We are approaching tax season, and I have been thinking about my accountant. She has been very generous with her time. She has tutored me in basic bookkeeping for our business, answered many questions and given me direction without putting me down or making me feel burdensome. I want to give her something to show my appreciation.  Somehow this experience of wanting to do her good for the goodness she has shown me brought the reality of the Lord’s kingdom existing as one person closer.  I am not sure if I can adequately put this into words. It felt as though what would hurt her would immediately hurt me. This feeling began edging out a flagging understanding of the golden rule (do good to others because you would like good done to you some day) and replacing it with something more akin to--do good to others because you really are one. I wear a wedding band with the quote, “THE LORD OUR GOD, THE LORD IS ONE” inscribed on the inside. This is slowly becoming more and more real to me. The Lord is the charity my accountant has shown me. The Lord is also the feeling of love and appreciation I have for my accountant. I want to spend more time in this oneness.

Meditate | The Context of our Human Nature

“He chose to be born and in fact to be born into a religion that had sunk all the way down into a hellish, diabolical kind of selfhood, through self-love and materialism. He was born in order to unite his divinely heavenlike selfhood to a human one, in the context of his human nature, by the use of his divine power, so that they could be one inside him. Had he not united them, the world would have ended in total destruction” (Secrets of Heaven 256).

This seems like the quintessential passage for my entire process up until now of learning about the dynamic of the inner and outer self, and how to live from the inner self versus the outer. This passage teaches what the Lord did and it is the task of our lives. This is the reason for being alive—to be sewn to heaven and the Lord the way the Lord did himself. We are that religion, that selfhood built of self-love and materialism, and the Lord uses his divine power to unite a heavenly selfhood to us, to make our human selfhood heavenly. He transforms it.

I love how it says that the Lord’s work occurred in the context of his human nature, which to me means that the Lord can bring about this transformation in me in the very context of my human nature—all of it, all of my evil tendencies, tendencies to be mean, to get frustrated, annoyed, impatient; the context of my everyday living is the stuff, the medium, through which I will and am undergoing transformation.

The Lord didn’t make an exception for himself. He didn’t remove his process, his experience, from the gritty stuff of the context of human nature. That would have made his work pointless and useless. The context is so essential. It is so essential to recognize that transformation happens in your very, current context—in your human nature.   

Meditate | Gaining a Keener Sense of Contrast

“A flying fire snake is the kind of desire felt by self-love” (Secrets of Heaven 251, in reference to Isaiah 14:29).

“The heavenly marriage is a relationship in which heaven (and so the church) is united to the Lord through its sense of self. In fact heaven and the church are to be found in the feeling of independent existence, because without it there could never be union. When the Lord in his mercy infuses our selfhood with innocence, peace, and goodness, it still seems to be our own, but it becomes heavenly and full of the greatest blessings” (Secrets of Heaven 252).

As you know if you have been reading these weekly meditations, I am reading my way through Secrets of Heaven. A major theme that has come to the fore through my reading is the dynamic between the outer and inner self, or in other words, a hellish sense of self and a heavenly one. Learning about this dynamic has fed my spiritual work in my day to day life. The practice for me has been to heighten my awareness of the contrast between what it feels like to have the outer or hellish self active versus the inner or heavenly one. These passages offer another way to contrast the two: the heavenly, inner self is full of innocence, peace, and goodness, while the desire felt when the hellish, outer self is active is likened to a flying fire snake. That’s a quite a contrast!

So, my daily spiritual work continues to include the practice of being mindful of whether what I am feeling inside, the desire that is fueling my thoughts and actions, is “intense desire” like that of a flying fire snake, or is peaceful. And my intent is to serve the Lord, serve the heart, and so choose to act only on those feelings coming from a sense of peace.  

Meditate | Am "I" Really Necessary?

“It is entirely true that the Lord governs us through spirits and angels. When evil spirits start to take control, angels put their effort into deflecting evils and falsities, and conflict results. This conflict is what we sense by means of perception, an inner dictate, or conscience” (Secrets of Heaven 227).

”On our own we cannot help doing evil and turning away from the Lord. Yet it is not we who act this way but the evil spirits present with us. And it is not the evil spirits but the wickedness itself adopted by them as their own. In spite of this, we do evil and turn away from the Lord, and we are to blame. Still, we cannot live except from the Lord.

On the other hand, we have no ability at all to do good or turn toward the Lord on our own; it is the angels who give us the power. Yet the angels themselves cannot do so. Only the Lord can. Still, we can do good and turn toward the Lord as if we were acting under our own power” (Secrets of Heaven 233).

“The heavenly marriage is something that exists in our selfhood. Moreover, it is because of the heavenly marriage that our selfhood, after being brought to life by the Lord, is called the Lord’s bride and wife…When the Lord brings it to life, our sense of self gives us the ability to perceive all the good desired by love and all the truth taught by faith” (Secrets of Heaven 155).

First, when I read how conflict is really the experience of angels fighting for the good in us and evil spirits trying to bend us toward false ideas and evil action, it makes me think that in some way I could just sit back and watch it all like a movie, confident the angels will win and good will prevail. But really, augmented by the second passage, the truth is that we must be engaged. We must choose good and give it action, as if under our own power.

The phrase “appearance versus reality” comes to mind. When I think of this phrase I want to ditch the appearance and only serve reality—because reality is better, right? Well, in relation to the ideas in Secrets of Heaven 233, appearance and reality don’t adequately capture the meaning. They might be better termed external and internal. The appearance part is our reality; it is our external experience, the “I” experience we all live in, and it is not to be ditched. As expressed in Secrets of Heaven 155, the sense of self enlivened by the Lord is the means of the heavenly marriage. So it is important to be engaged in choosing to live the “good love desires” even though we can, at the same time, recognize the true forces that are at play. 

Meditate | Intense Desire

“Good for eating means intense desire. Appealing to the eyes means delusion. Desirable for lending insight means sensual pleasure. These three are properties of our selfhood (or the woman). Her husband’s eating symbolizes the rational mind’s consent” (Secrets of Heaven 207).

“[Human selfhood] is the tendency not to believe in the Lord or his Word but in ourselves and to think that what we do not grasp on a sensory or factual basis is nothing” (Secrets of Heaven 210).

Intense desire, delusion, and sensual pleasure: these are three properties of our selfhood. My mind’s reaction immediately is, “What would get accomplished if I didn’t have intense desire?!” After sitting with it, the answer came: “peace.” My self’s intense desire for things and to know the future is the antithesis of peace—specifically how “peace has in it confidence in the Lord, that He directs all things, and provides all things, and that He leads to a good end” (Arcana Coelestia 8455).

A good end can and will be accomplished if I let go of my intense desire that so often rules, especially when “I’ve” had a good idea. The Lord gives me an idea and then my mind takes credit for it, which is clearly demonstrated by the way my mind generates intense desire for the result. So, instead, I’d like to focus on peace and confidence in the Lord. When I recognize the feeling of intense desire for something through the course of my day, I can use it as a red flag and choose to identify with something deeper than my experience of intense desire, with the truth that there is peace to be had in trusting in the Lord’s leading and provision for my life.   

Meditate | Belly to Belly

Over the course of these meditations, which are the meat of this column, the presence of the Lord in my heart has been a recurring idea. My awareness of the complexity of this idea has deepened over the course of my regular meditation practice reading Secrets of Heaven and writing these posts. This week’s passage and the meditation and insights that followed my reading of it have been a pivotal part in this process and are what you read below.  

“When the earliest people (whose nature was heavenly) spoke of a snake, they meant watchfulness. They also meant the sensory level of the mind, which enabled them to watch out for any evil that might otherwise hurt them… Something similar was meant by the bronze snake lifted up in the wilderness [Numbers 21:9]. It symbolized the sensory level in the Lord—the only heavenly person and the only being who watches over and provides for everything. That is why people who looked on the bronze snake were saved” (Secrets of Heaven 197).

 The Lord in my heart—as my heart, my will—is an entire person; a person with all the levels a person has—a complete human, the complete human. So I can let go of my “levels” and adopt His on all parts of myself—the sensory level included! I can look to the Lord for protection from evil and provision of all things!

The idea of the Lord as a human being has never felt so essential, so present, so purposeful and intimate as it does now.

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