The Culture of Heaven: An Explication of the Wine-making Process as Corresponding to Spiritual Reformation and Rebirth

Johanan likes to think about the process of making wine. He shares ideas ranging from the factual process of fermenting grape juice to its spiritual implications and meanings. This article delightfully balances the tangible and the philosophical as it unpacks one of the key spiritual images in the Word.

Heaven is not as far away as we often think it is. Heaven on earth is a state of mind, available to those who are willing to live their lives in such a way as to be receptive of what God offers all people: the opportunity to find happiness through serving others. By believing in God, a person accepts that all of creation is designed to serve God’s ultimate purpose: establishing heaven from the human race (Divine Love and Wisdom 330; Divine Providence 323). Since everything serves this purpose, everything in the natural world must have relation to spiritual things. Knowing how the natural world relates to the spiritual world is the prerogative of a heavenly mind because having an understanding of this relationship is angelic knowledge itself, and is the means of communication with heaven (Heaven and Hell 87). Thinking in terms of correspondences between the natural and spiritual worlds requires a mindset that is practiced in recognizing and discerning how spiritual principles are reflected in natural events. A fully integrated mindset is the same as a way of life, and a collection of individuals (such as a family or community) with this heaven-oriented mindset can be said to be an example of heavenly society, or heavenly culture. In this paper we explore the idea of a heavenly culture and correspondence in the process of wine-making, which we relate to the process by which the Lord introduces us as individuals into heavenly culture.

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Meaning-making and the Power of Writing

This essay originally appeared as the first chapter of Chelsea Rose Odhner's undergraduate thesis entitled, “Write to Heal: An Analysis of Writing Therapy in the Treatment of Gynecological Cancer,”; completed in 2008. Chapter One, included here, dissects the elements in the process of writing and contrasts these with the process involved in other forms of communication. -editor.

Among all forms of language, the written word has particular power. With respect to the styles of writing in the Word, Emanuel Swedenborg (2007) explains that the people of the earliest church “expressed themselves in words representing higher things [and that] they also spun those words into a kind of narrative thread to lend them greater life” (§ 66). Spinning the words into a kind of narrative thread gave the people “the fullest pleasure possible.” It is unclear whether Swedenborg’s use of the term “earliest church” here refers to a time during the earliest church that had the written word or not. In either case, the key point is that the narratives involved a composing process whether written or otherwise. If it is true in general that some greater life can be imparted to language by being woven into a narrative thread, how could writing serve as an optimal medium for this process? By investigating qualities unique to writing as a form of language we may be able to develop an understanding of how language could acquire greater life by being woven through writing. Does language acquire greater life by being written because the process of writing serves as a medium for making meaning?

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