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.

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Thunder and Lightning

Judah invokes images of thunder and lightening to vivify the Lord's power to enlighten our minds when dark clouds surround us. Spiritual storms are inevitable. Can we use them to our advantage? -Editor.

How do you survive when you're in the grip of resentment or mired in gloomy doubts that your life will ever be worthwhile? What if you could experience a new reality crashing over you—not a cold, dark reality of things falling apart, but a vibrant realization of goodness, hope and love? I'd like to offer a metaphor for those sudden, profound insights that wake us up mentally and keep us going even in the darkest times: lightning and thunder. Experienced by everyone, these startling phenomena of nature also show up as stirring symbols in the Word, where they embody the dramatic entry of the Lord's influence into our daily thoughts. In explaining thunder and lightning as they appear in Revelation, Swedenborg writes,

Because of the flash of light that strikes the eyes, lightnings symbolize enlightenment, and because of the crash that strikes the ears, thunderings symbolize perception. And since these two together symbolize enlightenment and perception, voices then symbolize instruction. (Apocalypse Revealed §236)

Enlightenment—that glimpse of heavenly life that goes far beyond mere factoids about religion. Perception—that almost tangible grasp of spiritual things, a mental imprint of an objective reality out there beyond your own four walls of your mind.

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Father and Son

Joel takes a quote from Apocalypse Revealed and uses it to bring together the image of the Old Testament God with that of Jesus. He writes of how easily the two have been pigeon holed into separate roles, while in truth they embody each other seamlessly.-Editor

Growing up, I would occasionally encounter some variation of the phrase “the angry God of the Old Testament.” This was often contrasted with the loving image of the Lord found in the New Testament. Sometimes it would come up when someone compared the New Church to other Christians, in that they often portray God as the angry God of the Old Testament alongside Jesus, while the New Church claims that Jesus is God Himself. It would be easy, I think, to start seeing the distinction between angry Father and loving Son as the same distinction between truth and goodness. Truth by itself is harsh, so that would be the Father. Goodness is loving and merciful, and so the Son.

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Secrets of the Chinese Language Part 2

Looking into the connection between the Genesis story and the origin of Chinese characters, Todd has been reconsidering his less than literal reading of the Bible. He cites a number of factors that leave him asking if God said it that way because that is how it actually happened. -Editor

Last week we took a quick look at some Chinese characters and made connections to the book of Genesis. I left you with the task of drawing your own conclusions as to the value of this information, and agreed to share my perspective. Here goes...

One of the challenges I wrestle with is when to take the Bible literally. There are some places where I am glad to not, for example, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:9). There are other places where it is clear and sensible to take it literally, like the Ten Commandments, Golden Rule, etc. The Genesis story though is a place where I've never really considered taking it literally. I've been quite happy with the belief that those first eleven chapters were “made up histories,”(Arcana Coelestia 2897) thus dismissing any and all attempts at using them at face value. Yet I'm finding that there are a lot more people in the world who are Biblical literalists than I thought. One of the co-authors of “The Discover of Genesis” uses the Chinese character connection to Genesis to assert that God literally did create the world in six, twenty-four hour days, then took the seventh day off.

Personally, I don't think that the two are really related, but what caught my eye was the author's making the case for a literal tower of Babel and God's subsequent confusing of the common language.

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Secrets of the Chinese Language Part 1

Todd introduces the basic tenets of a book he just read that postulates that the story of Genesis is richly entwined with the early evolution of Chinese characters. Is this nonsense? Read it for yourselves. -Editor

I've spent the better part of a year in the southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and one of the surprises has been the sheer number of Chinese people living just up the road. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that Chinatown is the suburb next door. To help with my assimilation process I've been learning some Chinese, but just how to hear and speak it. Reading Chinese and learning all those thousands of characters was a hopeless task...I thought.

A few months later my brother points me to this book titled, “The Discovery of Genesis” by C H Kang and Ethel R Nelson that promises to show how the truths of Genesis were found hidden in the Chinese language. Not really sure what I was going to get, I ordered the book. Today, I am happy with my purchase.

Let's see if I can summarize the premise for you: Chinese writing started off as pictograms, which is a fancy way of saying that they wrote with pictures. What the book demonstrates is that some of these pictures, or characters, were made to reflect the content of Genesis. To fully understand this, we're going to have to have a very quick lesson in Chinese character construction.

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Meditate | The Essential Ingredient

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

Outward worship is described as corresponding to inward when it contains the essential ingredient, which is heartfelt reverence for the Lord. Such reverence is not possible in the least except where charity, or love for one’s neighbor, exists. Charity, or love for our neighbor, contains the Lord’s presence. With it, we can adore the Lord from the heart. When we have charity, our reverence comes from the Lord, since the Lord gives us all the ability to revere him and all the vital essence of our veneration. It follows, then, that the kind of charity we have determines the quality of our adoration, that is, the quality of our worship. (Secrets of Heaven 1150)

How do I live worshipfully? This passage seems like the most basic teaching, pointing to the essentialness of love for our neighbor to life, for opening ourselves to the Lord’s presence. It is very useful for me to get reminded, to revisit the idea again and again. It is so simple and yet so easily navigated away from.

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