Prayerful Care Dispels the Babylon Within
June 9, 2019
Today's message can be found below.
There will be a live audio Reflection & Prayer Service with community chatroom conversation in connection with this Multimedia Service this Sunday evening at 9 pm ET. Catch it towards the end of this Multimedia Service or on our Worship page. Video of the broadcast is posted there later.
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OPENING SONGS
Try to dance, move, sing, hum or play along with this music – or enjoy a meditative listen with deep, mindful breaths
Titus Alone
Aldous Harding
Take Me to Church
Hozier
(Warning: Graphic Violence)
Opening READINGS
From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture
Genesis 11:1-9
Now the whole world had one lip and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a valley in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
From Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Prayerful Care Dispels the Babylon Within
By Pastor Cory Bradford-Watts
Prayer is an interesting thing, we often think about it as those few moments that we take to turn to God(dess), perhaps when we bow our heads and close our eyes and speak to the Divine Source within and around us. This is indeed a type of prayer and perhaps a good image of prayer, but I believe prayer can take on many other forms in our daily lives as well.
One form of prayer may be likened to meditation or centered-contemplation, particularly when we remember God and her qualities of love and wisdom and seek to convey and act out of those qualities ourselves. Prayer like this centers us on the Lord with the hope of us delivering the type of peace, care and compassion that he offers to us for others as well as to the parts of ourselves that may not always feel that way and that need healing. This is a type of prayer we can carry with us from our quiet moments to our most hectic, serving to uplift our spirits and connections with each other and Divinity. And our scripture today reminds us of why this type of prayerful care towards ourselves, the earth, and others is so important.
Our reading tells the story of Babel, people who are said to be unified together, and over the course of time they decide to build a tower into the heavens so that they may be known and not be scattered. Seems like something we all can relate to, the drive to build up our name, our own tower into the heavens. Sometimes this is purely for ourselves but can also be for a community: we can strive to establish our religion or group in bigger and bigger ways due to fear and egotism, in order for a community to avoid being scattered, avoid being lost. But as we see from this story, Babel’s fear of being scattered is exactly the consequence of its work to avoid being scattered.
What exactly is the crime in this story? What causes God(dess) to punish and disperse them as we’re told she does? To start, I’d point out that often the punishment that Divinity brings is what we would call the natural consequence of an action. And I think in lofty terms there’s something to be said for not working out of fear and the need to establish our name as high as heaven (communally or otherwise), instead perhaps centering ourselves on the prayerful care towards all things that we reflected on earlier. Establishing ourselves as high as heaven may not be something that we feel like we do, but how often are we reflective and truly discerning and critical of our own motives? How often do we work to establish our own name more than we do to establish the presence of “heavenliness” with others?
As we center ourselves on the peace and love of prayerful care, we may start to become more aware of the aspects of ourselves reaching up for dominance and domination, allowing a more peaceful, prayerful attitude to start to transform those Babylonian desires, habits, and fears.
But let’s also go a little deeper into the reading, and look at what our namesake mystical thinker, Emanuel Swedenborg, would call the inner-spiritual meaning of these verses. Let’s look at the type of deeper scriptural reflection that the self-professed Swedenborgian Helen Keller loved so much and that has deeply inspired poets and artists from Emerson to William Blake and Robert Frost.
Emanuel was a big believer in the importance of the deeper meaning within the details of many Biblical narratives (and others). He believed that these meanings were largely consistent throughout scripture and that these meanings were often illuminated in one way or another throughout the text. For example, in our verses from Genesis today, the people are said to have a shared language or “lip.” Having one lip is repeatedly used to group people of faith together, representing how we are one when we share a centeredness on loving care and kindness in our beliefs and in our lives. Swedenborg said that centering ourselves on love and care from Divinity, brings us together even when the details of our beliefs seem very different. He says that this is how Heaven is one queen/kingdom despite having peoples of many different faiths within it, which he believed he saw in his mystical visions.
So we start with a people that share a common bond and focus on love and wisdom, despite their differences. But the rest of this story details how we can move away from this oneness in care and start to use the differences of our faiths to dominate, chastise, and hurt.
Let’s delve into that. The fact that this group started to travel away from the East represents for Swedenborg how they were moving away from being centered on love & care and how we can do the same. This is because the East is often used to represent the love of God in scripture and the East is also the place that the Sun rises, which is often related to Divinity in the Bible as well as in Swedenborg’s spiritual visions. The details that follow have a similar vein; the people finding a valley to settle in, corresponds to moving lower in our spiritual state versus finding a mountain-high; making brick instead of using stone represents getting away from the heart of truth (truth is often described as a stone in scripture), and their using tar (which is used for burning) instead of mortar or clay represents beginning to have the evil that we crave instead of the clay of life, goodness. The verses very directly point out what they used compared to what they should have used, although it’s often easy for us to overlook those details.
It’s funny, the more we look at how each of these details repeatedly appears throughout scripture, such as how tar or sulfur shows up when damnation is being described, the more we can easily see that there’s a deeper meaning being conveyed through the use of these objects.
This entire story explores the inverse of moving toward a prayerful, caring state - how we can turn away from Divine Love and Wisdom and start to follow the selfish cravings of our hearts. As we head down that path, it ends up leading us to fear and corruption, and indeed, this is a place that we find we’re starting out from in one way or another. And lastly, we’re told that the city and tower that the Babylonians eventually build represent how, from a selfish standpoint, we create selfish religious doctrine or doctrine of life (represented by a city). This is doctrine that allows us to further our subtle, dominating natures, even to the point of trying to control everyone and heaven with our distorted perspective and spirituality (represented by a tower into heaven). The scary thing about this is that often it doesn’t occur to us that we are not centered on the Higher Power of Love and Health, and that instead we are scattered by our cravings: scattered due to our distorted hearts.
And this is what happens to our Babylonian friends in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, and in the last book of the Bible, Revelation – they are scattered and their goodness, their heavenliness, is abused, fallen, and essentially destroyed because they come to love and embody their burning, egotistical spirit above all else. The kindness and love that brought them together as one was no longer a centering force in their spirit and community, and instead, they had many lips, many languages; their differing views and ideas drove them apart because they could no longer stand those who disagreed with them. We’re told that the Babylonians became a fractured people at odds with each other because of their selfish, scattered hearts. What a lesson for today’s world amidst so much dysfunction and structural selfishness, othering, evil, and pain.
Instead, may we strive to find the centering force of Divine Love that empowers us and gives us life and reverse this story in our own journey. In fact, let us take a moment to do so now - finding the centering peace in the midst of our spirit while taking a few deep breaths with our eyes closed. Allow yourself to enter a prayerful, caring state, at least in your deeper consciousness. Accepting that it may not change much else in your mind and situation, not immediately, but that it is the type of prayerful compassion that you hope to carry forward into your life and the world.
May we wind the story of Babylon backward; working to accept others instead of judging and trying to control them; shedding our tendencies to ignore our corruption; becoming aware of the Babylon within and around us, and letting it go piece by piece. Through the healing power of Divinity, the source of prayerfulness and care, may we eventually find that we are one yet again, even in our immense diversity.
The prayerful care that calls to us and helps us center our hearts and minds is the wellspring of gratitude, peace, and joy. May we allow a centered state of prayerful care and compassion transform our lives and how we relate to those around us. This doesn’t mean that everyone will approach us kindly. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be any division. There may always be some division and even some good reasons for friction and feedback, but as we center our hearts and actions on prayerful, meditative care, we may find that that peaceful, loving state slowly spreads through the rest of our minds. That it slowly, consistently spreads through the rest of our lives and to others, bringing us together as one with many languages but one lip: sometimes with wildly diverse perspectives and beliefs, and yet a shared, centered heart and mind on our source of love, care, peace, and goodness, or, in other words, God.
CLOSING SONGS
Bad Blood
Bastille
Meditative Background Music
Lifebreakthrough
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