Meditate | Lost Sleep, Gained Hope

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

The Lord's divine providence works things out so that what is both evil and false promotes balance, comparison, and purification, which means that it promotes the union of what is good and true in others...

The Lord provides for the union of what is good and true in others by purification. This happens in two ways, by temptations and by fermenting. Spiritual temptations are simply battles against the evil and false things that breathe forth from hell and affect us. These battles purify us from things that are evil and false, so that goodness in us is united to truth and truth to goodness.

Spiritual fermenting happens in many ways both in the heavens and on earth, but people in our world do not know what these processes are or how they happen. There are things that are both evil and false that are injected into communities the way agents of fermentation are injected into flour or grape juice. These serve to separate things that do not belong together and unite things that do, so that the substance becomes pure and clear. (Divine Providence 21, 25)

When I was in high school, I remember staying up until four in the morning and somehow enjoying sort of falling through the day, functioning as I could on less than four hours of sleep for days and days on end. I think back to that now and wonder why I ever did. As a teenager, I think there was an attraction to the sort of drugged-stupor you live in when you haven’t gotten sleep—a form of escape, a way to dull the senses, without the need of actually taking drugs or drinking alcohol! It felt good—when I was a self-absorbed adolescent, not responsible for the care of any other human being.

Click to read more ...

Enlightenment: Ilustrado vs. Liviano

With an acknowledged "unpolished style," Heath Synnestvedt playfully considers a range of topics. Violence on television, the human propensity to distraction and understanding the concept of enlightenment are all explored through anecdote and irony. In keeping with his message and manner, Heath intends the use of the lower case "i" for the personal pronoun. -Editor

Reading in this publication, New Church Perspective, i am struck by the unpolished nature of the majority of my own written work. The article that follows received a few taps from a ball-peen hammer, but not much.

Under “Ilustrado” on Wikipedia there's a definition of the adjective “ilustrado”: “Spanish for ‘erudite,’ ‘learned,’ or ‘enlightened ones’.” (There's also an interesting historical anecdote which you may wish to read instead.)

For my part, i prefer to employ the word “enlightened” in the sense of the word “light” as it relates to mass, rather than rays or particles. (I first heard this use of the word in a seminar run by Landmark Education)

If you look up “liviano” in a Spanish-English dictionary the primary usage is “light” (weight) as contrasted with “heavy”. Similarly as in English, this adjective can describe things that are frivolous. It can go even further and be applied to the lewdness of a comedian. Upon discovering this usage as i sat here in a cybercafe i nearly removed the word “liviano” from the title of my article with the desire to morph the piece into something acceptably familiar to my imagined audience.

Click to read more ...