Church of the Holy City

Choice and Rationality

Choice and Rationality
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
November 29, 2009

Malachi 3:1-18 Luke 12:13-34

There is an important aspect to our spiritual life that goes by the name “rationality.” Rationality is the ability to make good decisions. And very much of our adult life is making decisions. The Existentialist philosophers say that we are nothing but the sum total of the choices we make.
Our rational mind develops over time. Swedenborg tells us that children lack the ability to make decisions based on their own understanding of truth. He claims that their decisions are based on the authority of their leaders, be they parents, or teachers, or other valued authority figures. But upon reaching adulthood, we start to make decisions based on our own understanding of truth. And it is when we start making our own decisions, from our own understanding of truth that we truly become our own persons. Our identity is founded on the things that our rationality favors. We are individuals according to the choices we make—thus according to the rationality we have cultivated. Until we make our own decisions, we have no real personality, or identity. We are essentially children—even if in adult age.
Our rationality is founded upon truths that we acquire. We find truths everywhere. We learn truths from our parents, from teachers, from reading, from conversation, and from experience. Experience is perhaps the hardest, but the best teacher in many instances.
Some people think that rationality is only how much we know. And our society does value people who know a lot of things. But until these knowledges form a foundation upon which we can make wise choices, the knowledge is useless. Furthermore, the individual does not develop his or her own personality. Swedenborg describes such people. He writes,
I have spoken with some who believed . . . that a person is wise according to the extent of his memory, and who had enriched the memory with many things and spoke almost from it alone, and thus not from themselves but from others, and had gained no rationality by means of the things of their memory. Some of them were stupid, some blank, not at all comprehending any truth, whether it be true or not, and seizing upon falsities which are passed off for truths by those who call themselves educated; for from themselves they can see nothing rationally when listening to others (HH 464).
I can relate to that passage from my own experience. When I was in my Ph.D. program, I was learning a lot about different religions. I learned about Hinduism, and Buddhism, and the history of Christianity from the early Church Fathers through the Reformation. And I was studying contemporary philosophers. I had a lot of knowledge about religion in my memory from graduate school. But I was really lost in all that knowledge. I was reading so much, so fast that I didn’t have time to assimilate the knowledge I was learning. Then, on top of all that, there were certain ways of thinking that were popular then. There is a myth that universities encourage free thinking. But that is not true. Inquiry according to the systems of thinking that are in vogue is really what goes on there. We were taught to be open minded to all religious systems. And with that mindset, it was indeed fun to study different religious systems. But we weren’t supposed to believe any of it. In the university, studying religion is an objective, cultural study.
That point of view came from modern philosophy. There is no truth, according to contemporary philosophy. There is only wanting. There is only what I want to be, what I want to do. And I am completely free to choose what I want. I can’t be guided by any eternal truth because there is no eternal truth. I remember one of my professors in the university who had written a book about God. In that book, he claimed that God is a unique term that brings liberation to the texts in which it appears. That was all he could say about God. That’s where many in contemporary universities are now. And that’s where I was in graduate school, and when I graduated.
I was spiritually lost. Maybe spiritually dead. I was just like those learned people Swedenborg talks about. I had “enriched the memory with many things and spoke almost from it alone, and thus not from themselves but from others, and had gained no rationality by means of the things of their memory.” I thought that I wanted to stay in the university, so I applied to schools with the aim of teaching. But teaching didn’t come through for me. There was just too much competition. But what did happen ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me. I had to move down to Florida, to live with my parents until I could get back on my feet. I’m not saying that this was the best thing that could have happened to me because it landed me in Florida. No, there were other reasons. First of all, there were no universities in the small, retirement community I had landed in. There was no intellectual stimulation at all. I used to stare around me in disbelief when I looked at the scraggly beach and bar crowd I was stuck with. I had no one to sharpen my mind with, no one to debate philosophy with, no one to intellectualize with. At first, I really missed the intellectual stimulation of the university. Then, when I did find full-time work, it was in the mental health field. With many of the individuals I worked with, reasoning wasn’t their strong suit. I found that I was working with my heart and not my head. As mental health workers, we were mostly concerned with the mood of our individuals, and when we did talk about their mental activity we primarily assessed how lucid they were, not whether they understood Plato or Aristotle correctly. And, as I was working for a state institution, we were not allowed to talk about religion. I was about as far from the university as I could be.
And that’s just what I needed. God had a vision for me that I couldn’t see. Swedenborg tells us that,
The rational faculty from these truths is not formed and opened by a person’s knowing them, but by his living according to them; and by living according to them is meant loving them from spiritual affection. To love truths from spiritual affection is to love what is just and equitable, because it is just and equitable, what is right and sincere, because it is right and sincere, and what is good and true, because it is good and true (HH 468).
By cutting off my head, and emphasizing my heart, God was bringing me into a place where I could begin to be affected by all those religions I had studied. I was free from the intellectual trends that dominated the university. And I could sift through all that I had learned and from my heart find what truths agreed with my spiritual loves. In short, I was beginning to choose for myself which truths fit with my best understanding of spirituality. I was forming a rationality of my own. I was becoming a fully functioning spiritual person of my own.
But all that education was not thrown away. Swedenborg tells us that “faith is perfected according to the abundance and coherence of truths” (TCR 352). The more truths we have to work with, the more deeply we understand God and the things that belong to a heaven-bound life. Our beliefs have more to support them, and we understand the world better; we understand heaven better; and we understand God better. We understand what is good in life and we can aim for it. So Swedenborg also writes,
True faith, by abundance of truths coherent as it were into a bundle, also becomes more lustrous, perceptible, evident and clear; it also becomes more capable of conjunction with the goods of charity (TCR 352).
He uses several metaphors to illustrate what faith enriched by an abundance of truths is like. One that appeals to me is this one, “The exaltation of faith by an abundance of truths, may be illustrated by the uplifting of sound and likewise with the melody of many musical instruments played in concert” (TCR 353). Our world-view is formed by the truths we have learned. Our life is lived more wisely by the amount of truth we have to work with.
Without learning truths as we go on in life, we may remain stuck only with the knowledge we acquired in our childhood from our families or neighborhoods. This is particularly tragic when a person comes from a troubled background, and from a rough neighborhood. Without truth’s cleansing power, such an individual is almost destined for a troubled life. Then there are those who simply live by what they knew growing up. This can make for a limited world view, even a crippling one. Robert Frost wrote a poem about this. He talks about an annual ritual when he and his neighbor walk side by side to rebuild the wall between their properties. His neighbor keeps reciting a proverb from his father, “Good fences make good neighbors.” But in this case there is no need for a wall, there are no cattle wandering around to get into each other’s property. His neighbor has never thought about why good walls make good neighbors. He only recites what he remembers from his father. Frost writes,

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.

His neighbor has never thought about the reason for walls. As Frost writes,

He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Truth is liberating. It liberates us from limiting world-views. And it liberates us from unhealthy and destructive behaviors we may have learned growing up. There is no doubt, we need to continually learn truths to build up our rational mind. We need to make choices that further God’s kingdom and our own well-being. Without a well-formed rational mind, we are a victim to our environment. We are blown here and there according to society or our own whims. But with a strong rational mind, formed by an abundance and coherence of many truths, we find countless ways to live a good life that God wants for us. Our faith will lead us into heavenly love, and we will know the blessings promised in the Malachi reading from this morning, “Test me in this,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘and see if I will not open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it’” (3:10). With a well-developed rational mind, we will be truly an individual, and we will know how and when to be true to ourselves.