Church of the Holy City

Confronting Love

Confronting Love
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
March 7, 2010

Deuteronomy 10:12-22 Matthew 13:44-45 Psalm 25

Today’s Bible readings were selected as texts about love. In Deuteronomy we read, “The LORD set His heart in love upon your fathers” (10:15). And although this passage specifically speaks about the children of Israel, it also applies to the whole human race. And we, in turn, are told,
What does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve the LORD with all your heart and with all your soul” (10:12).
A life filled with love for God, and a life that receives God’s love is God’s kingdom with us. In the New Testament, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a pearl that a merchant sold everything he had to possess. Selling everything he had to obtain the pearl is exactly what is meant by serving the LORD with all your soul. We give everything to and for God.
Love is our life. Whatever we are is a form of love. We don’t often think of love in those terms. We think of loving a certain person, or maybe loving to do a certain something, but we don’t usually think of love as our very life. Bu Swedenborg teaches us that love is our life itself:
Love is our life. For most people, the existence of love is a given, but the nature of love is a mystery. . . . Even though the word “love” is so commonly on our tongues, still hardly anyone knows what love is. . . . We are wholly unaware that it is our very life–not just the general life of our whole body and of all our thoughts, but the life of their every last detail (DLW 1).
We can grasp this somewhat, when we reflect on our lives. We feel so alive when we are doing something that we love. And we feel unhappy when we are compelled to do something that we don’t love. This is because the source of our very lives is a special form of love that is unique to each of us.
Thinking of love as our very lives, not just a part of our lives, but our very life itself brings up another point that follows. We say so often that God is love. And this is true, God is love. But if love is our very life, then God is our very life. We live because God is in us. The love that activates everything we do is God acting in us. We do not live by our own power. We live by God’s life in us. This is because only God is life itself. We are vessels of God’s life. We are receivers of the one and only Source of life and love.
God alone–the Lord–is love itself, because he is life itself. Both we on earth and angels are life-receivers. . . . The Lord, who is the God of the universe, is uncreated and infinite, while we and angels are created and finite. . . . No one can be created directly from the Uncreated, the Infinite, from Reality itself and Life itself, because what is divine is one and undivided. We must be created out of things created and finite, things so formed that something divine can dwell within. Since we and angels are of this nature, we are life-receivers (DLW 4).
All of heaven is God’s outflowing Spirit. The very atmosphere, the very light, the very heat are all God’s own Spirit emanating from His Being. Angels live in that atmosphere, that light, that heat when they have God’s love in them. It is true that everyone has God in them as their life. And it is true that everyone’s soul is near God. But when it comes to a person’s experience and life, only when God’s love is active in a person’s heart, thought, and behavior can we say that God is truly in them. Only then does a person feel God’s love and experience heavenly delight.
The Lord, being love in its very essence or divine love, is visible to angels as a sun; that warmth and light flow from that sun; that the outflowing warmth is essentially love and the outflowing light essentially wisdom; and to the extent that angels are receptive of spiritual warmth and spiritual light, they themselves are instances of love and wisdom–instances of love and wisdom not on their own, but from the Lord. Spiritual warmth and light flow into and affect not only angels but also us, precisely to the extent that we become receptive. Our receptivity develops in proportion to our love for the Lord and our love for the neighbor (DLW 5).
Swedenborg breaks down human psychology to three basic categories. First, there is our voluntary part. This part of our psychology is what feels. It is all the various emotions that we have for different things all taken together. Second, there is our thinking part. This is everything we believe to be true, everything we know, and everything we remember. It is also our decision-making aspect. Finally, there is our behavior. This is the action part of us. This is where the two other levels come into play. Whatever we do is the result of our voluntary part and our thinking part acting. So our actions are the sum total of everything we are. Our voluntary part and our thinking part act into our behavior. We don’t think about it, but everything we do is an instance of our voluntary and thinking part. We usually just pay attention to what we ar doing, and we don’t think about the love that is motivating our behavior, or the decision making that goes into our behavior. In this sense, our behavior is the grounding of our whole pershohood. It is sometimes called the container of our higher aspects.
Everything in the three levels of the earthly mind is enclosed in the works that are done by our physical actions. . . . Everything proper to our minds, to our volition and discernment, is enclosed in our actions or deeds . . . and the deeds of people whose earthly minds are moving up into heaven contain everything they have that is good and true, and also that angels perceive both simply from what we say and do. This is why it says in the Word that we are to be judged according to our works and that we will have to give an account of our words (DLW 277, 281).
So in a very real sense, our behavior is a measure of the way we are receiving God’s life and love.
We can get an idea of the quality of our love by looking at what we enjoy. We find expressions of our love to be delightful. Another way to see this is to pay attention to our delights. What we find delightful is a measure of our love. We feel greater joy as our love approaches God more closely. To the extent that our loves rise above selfishness and the materialism, we come into heavenly happiness. Maybe we have felt this in our own experience. If not, we are nevertheless told that the more elevated our loves are, the more happy we become. Swedenborg describes this in a most remarkable passage that I found in the Arcana Coelestia. Like Plato, Swedenborg describes loves ascending toward God as if a person were climbing up a ladder. But what really caught my attention is that people were described as being elevated up into higher heavens after they had entered the spiritual world. I had previously thought that a person could only enter the heaven he or she had come to in their life in this world. But this passage talks very plainly about God elevating spirits from one heaven up even into the third heaven. Swedenborg describes this while talking about how much happier we become as we are lifted upward from one heaven to another.
For it is the nature of every enjoyment to be more vile as it goes more to externals, and more happy as it goes more to internals. For this reason, . . . in proportion as externals are stripped off, or rolled away, enjoyments become more delightful and happy–as may be evident enough from a person’s enjoyment of pleasures being vile while he lives in the body, in comparison with his enjoyment after the life of the body, when he comes into the world of spirits; so vile indeed that good spirits utterly spurn the enjoyments of the body, nor would they return to them if all the world should be given them. The enjoyment of these spirits in like manner becomes vile when they are taken up by the Lord into the heaven of angelic spirits; for they then throw off these interior enjoyments and enter into those that are still more interior. So again to angelic spirits the enjoyment which they have had in their heaven becomes vile when they are taken up by the Lord into the angelic or third heaven, in which heaven, since internal things are there living, and there is nothing but mutual love, the happiness is unspeakable (AC 996).
There is another passage that reinforces this one. In this passage, Swedenborg talks about spirits being elevated into higher heavens according to the instruction they receive in the spiritual world.
But from the first or external heaven one cannot be taken up into the second or interior heaven before he is instructed in the good things of love and the truths of faith. So far as he is instructed he can be taken up, and come among angelic spirits. It is the same with angelic spirits, before they can be taken up, or come into the third heaven, or among angels (AC 1802).
We are elevated in heaven, and on this world, by our reception of God’s life and love. We are nothing but vessels that receive God’s love and life. And we are receivers of God by how we act. All the levels of our minds come into play through the way we act in this life. We feel more peaceful and happy as we grow in our love for our neighbors and for God. Some of these spiritual experiences lie buried beneath the demands we have for life in the material world. But there are times I think we all can point to when we are lifted up and when we feel keenly the joys of spiritual love. The process of elevation into the joys of heaven begins as we turn from selfishness and cravings for the rewards of this world and turn toward the Source of all life and love. We will increasingly come to believe and maybe even to feel, that all the life and all the love in us are actually God in us. We are but the lamp that God lights with His holy fire.