Church of the Holy City

Reach Out from the Inside

Reach Out from the Inside
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
September 27, 2009

Ezekiel 37:1-14 Matthew 23:25-28

Last Sunday I talked about church services and what’s in it for us. Among the things I mentioned was that church stimulates our internals. I didn’t say anything about the internals and what they are, though. And church will stimulate our internals only if we have them. Today I’m going to talk about what our how internals are and how they are formed.
We are not born with an internal level. We are first born with our earthly level, which communicates with this material world. Our earthly level takes care of all those earthly concerns we have such as food, clothing, housing, and income. But this does not serve our spiritual life. It is our internal levels that make us into spiritual beings.
In order for us to become raised above the earthly level and to become spiritual, our internal level needs to be opened. This is the same as saying that our internal level needs to be formed. Our Bible readings for this morning talk about this. The dry bones we heard about in Ezekiel come to life when God breathes into them the breath of life. We might also think about the creation of Adam, into whom God also breathes the breath of life. The in our reading from Matthew, we hear Jesus telling the Pharisees that they need to make clean the inside of the vessel. All of these passages refer to the formation of our internal person.
At first, when I approached this topic, I had the idea that our internals are formed by learning spiritual truths. This is indeed true to a certain extent. Swedenborg tells us that,
. . . in order to become intelligent and wise he must learn many things, not only those which are of heaven, but also those of the world—those which are of heaven, from the Word and from the Church, and those which are of the world, from systems of knowledge (HH 351).
This passage speaks to the cognitive, or mental aspects of our internal persons. We need to learn truths about heaven that the church and theology teach. In our quest to become wise, we also need to learn knowledges from this earthly world.
But learning knowledge alone isn’t enough to open our internals, or the spiritual level of our personality. What I found in my research for this talk is that opening the spiritual degree of our soul has a significant emotional aspect. It is love for the neighbor and love for God that are the driving forces behind the opening of our spiritual degree.
There are two levels to our internals: the spiritual and the heavenly. Swedenborg’s terminology gets a little confusing here, since he calls the first level of our internal person the spiritual level. The second level is called the heavenly level. Then he calls both these levels the spiritual degree. So he uses the same word for the internal person itself and also for the first level of the internal person. So the internal level, called spiritual, consists of spiritual and heavenly levels. The spiritual level is the first one that we open. It is opened by a love for performing useful services to our neighbor.
When we are born, we come first into the earthly level, which gradually develops within us in keeping with the things we learn and the intelligence we gain through this learning, all the way to the summit of intelligence called rationality. This, by itself, though, does not open the second level, the one called spiritual. This level is opened by a love for being useful that comes from our intelligence; but the love for being useful is a spiritual one, a love for our neighbor (DLW 237).
So it is love that primarily opens up the spiritual level in us. But it isn’t love alone. Notice that Swedenborg says that it is “love for being useful that comes from our intelligence” that opens up the spiritual level. So it is a combination of both love and also intelligence that opens this level. Again from Swedenborg’s book Divine Love and Wisdom: “Love alone, or spiritual warmth, will not do it, and neither will wisdom alone or spiritual light alone. It takes both together” (253).
We need that union of love and wisdom to advance spiritually. Our love for our neighbor gives us the impetus to act well with our brothers and sisters. But we need also to know how to live in a spiritual way. Wisdom teaches us how to live.
Our understanding does not lead our volition, or wisdom does not give rise to love. It merely teaches and shows the way. It teaches how we should live and shows us the way we should follow (244).
So it is both our head and our heart that lifts us up into heaven and opens our spiritual level. We need both. Have you ever found yourself wanting to help in some situation, but you didn’t know what to say or do? That would be an example of love without the wisdom to carry out love’s desires.
There is another internal level that is higher and more internal than the spiritual level. It is called the heavenly level. And again, the driving force in the opening of the heavenly level is love. In this case, we open the heavenly level by love for God. So we progress upward and inward in the progress of our spiritual level until we reach the highest level called heavenly.
In the same way, this level [the spiritual] can develop by incremental steps all the way to its summit; and it does so by our discovering what is true and good, or by spiritual truths. Even so, these do not open that third level that is called heavenly. This is opened by a heavenly love for being useful that is a love for the Lord; and love for the Lord is nothing but applying the precepts of the Word to our lives, these precepts being essentially to abstain from evil things because they are hellish and demonic and to do good things because they are heavenly and divine (237).
So living a good life, out of love for God, is what opens up the heavenly level.
We can see in this process the two great commandments that Jesus taught. Jesus told us that all the Old Testament is summed up in two great commands: love the Lord above all, and love the neighbor as your self. Loving the Lord is the highest form of love and loving the neighbor is just below it. Loving God opens the highest level called heavenly, and loving the neighbor opens the lower level called spiritual.
It is possible, however, that one can live out their life and not open up either of these levels. There are those “whose spiritual level has not been opened but is not yet closed.”
The spiritual level is not opened in us but is still not closed in the case of those who have led somewhat of a life of charity and yet do not know much real truth. . . . if we do not know the real truths that constitute wisdom or light, love cannot manage to open that level. All it can do is keep it able to be opened (DLW 253).
So we need to do all we can to learn about God and what is good. In another place, Swedenborg tells us that our faith is perfected by the abundance of truths that we know. And we saw just above that love needs teachings to tell it how to act.
I don’t want to judge, and the Bible, in fact, tells me that I can’t. But I wonder if society is more and more going in this direction. I see the people coming here for weddings, and many of them don’t have a church of their own, which is why they come here. But the church symbols don’t seem to affect them. There’s a feeling I observe that I can only call a lack of reverence. Reverence is a difficult word to define, but I don’t get the feeling that the people I’m talking about feel moved by the church structures. I’ve just come back from a National Council of Churches meeting in New York. One thing that they commented on for all the churches in the membership was how secular society is becoming. There was a shared feeling that even on Sundays, society is becoming more and more secular. At first I felt this as a problem for churches in terms of church numbers. But now, I feel it as a problem for the people who are not interested in spirituality. I think for their own welfare, they would do well to take church and religion more to heart. Finally, I see so many people who look to me to be perfectly good people, but have no use for spirituality or church. I’ve always wondered about them, and why they don’t feel the call for higher life.
For when a person has cultivated the spiritual level in their personality, there are many blessings and profound joy. We feel these blessings only dimly here on the earthly plane. But in the next life, we feel them manifestly.
Earthly people whose spiritual level has been opened do not realize that their spiritual minds are filled with thousands of love’s joys as gifts from the Lord. They do not realize that they will begin to participate in this wisdom and joy after they die (DLW 252).
We can feel some of these spiritual gifts when we are moved by the symbols of the church service. We also feel them in our work life, if we are doing what we love. But in order for us to be touched by the symbols of religion, we need to have begun the process of opening our spiritual level. Then we worship in spirit and in truth.