Dispel Evil, Love Love
by Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts
Readings
Matthew 4:17
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
Mark 12:29-31
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Read the written message below with music videos
Emanuel Swedenborg’s key message from his spiritual visions and his mystical interpretation of scripture boil down to two key ideas, dispel evil and love Love. He believed that these concepts naturally increase our connection with Heaven and God, no matter our tradition, because they describe what God and the universe is and is all about. Further, he pointed to scripture as being a key source of information as to what evil is and what love is, coming to the conclusion that evil has many guises but comes from a selfish, divisive mindset and a need to control, and that love seeks to uplift others as itself in wisdom, peace, and health. The trick, sometimes, is finding out just how to personally “shun our evils” and what it means in our daily practice to truly love the Divine Love embodied diversely in everything around us.
What I love about Swedenborg is that no matter how complicated his visions and books seem, they always boil back down to a focus on the supremacy of love. In his mind, faith is ultimately just an acknowledgment of love in intention and action, as well as in the way we understand the universe. Although he believed that Jesus Christ was the incarnate God, his visions of heaven informed him that getting the exact name or wording of “God’s Name” right pales in comparison to having faith in the power of love around and within us – and leaning into it! What’s the point of getting a historical story about God right if we ignore God’s lessons in that story – to love others as ourselves, to help the downtrodden, and to let go of hurtful, “evil” tendencies?
And so, in the mode of Christ, Swedenborg emphasized expanding our understanding of ourselves so that we can stop grasping onto hurtful ideas, motivations, and actions, and come to love all things as part of ourselves. Like unwitting drug addicts, we can become attached to hurtful modes of being without even knowing how destructive they are for ourselves and others – be that our dismissive and judgmental attitudes, our “reasonable” fear and need to control, or our all-encompassing focus on fulfilling our sense desires.
What can be tough is understanding just how to let go of our hurtful and deluded mindsets, especially when our brains tell us we have the very best reasons for them! It can be tough to internalize the healing salve of God’s message of our oneness in love, the truth that we are unified in the Spirit and from the Spirit, no matter the extent of our diversity. One key and somewhat easy step to do this is employing present moment awareness, as Christ encouraged. We do this by entering prayerful or meditative mindsets, using our senses to increase our presence in the here and now, while letting go of our ruminating and habitual analyzing.
A key motivation as to why we always jump into the future (in our thinking) or ruminate about the past is our false idea of self: identifying with our bodies, histories, reputations, or social groups, instead of discovering our unity as expressions of God’s love. When we limit who we are (which we typically do at all times) we have concepts to defend, usually at the expense of love-itself. How often do love and kindness get thrown out the window due to the “greater good” of defending some earthly institution? We say that this is due to the love we have for something bigger, and yet we’re told that love must start in the present moment – as that’s the only place it can exist. We must come to love love-itself, first and foremost, and stop using it as an excuse to empower our more destructive tendencies “to get the job done.”
When we come into the moment and actively start to identify more with the fullness of Spirit at our core, we find that the bad habits we identify start to fall away. Our lustful, angry, judgmental, and attached mindsets can only exist in our habitual mind without the light of awareness. And so be present with these feelings as they arise, instead of sweeping them under a rug, carrying them around, or jumping into action to fulfill them. They can often speak toward natural needs and unhealed traumas, as well as other impactful histories we haven’t addressed, and so turn your light of awareness toward them to learn more about what these things might be and their effects while holding off on empowering the thoughtless reactions of the past. If nothing else, acknowledging that they are there in a state of meditative peace helps to create distance between who we are and how we sometimes feel, empowering healing through the natural compassion of our God-gifted awareness.
If the scriptures and Swedenborg are right, we are all made in the image of love itself. Indeed, we can think about all the stories of the universe as expressions of love’s journey to empower itself in greater and greater ways, as well as in more diverse ways. From the universe, as well as from scripture, we can see that love is about healthy loving, healthy community-making – we see semblances of this in the communities that make up the smallest particles to the ecosystems that allow for the greatest forms of communal empowerment, be that the human body or human civilization. These communities teach us about what love is, and thus help us fulfill and understand the purpose of the universe: love loving itself, empowering itself in infinite ways to find peace and wholeness and joy, without the divisions and yearnings of a false sense of limitation.
Swedenborg believed that when we adopt this universal mindset, we start to enter heaven in the spirit and find it in the present moment. When we start to love love-itself as ourselves, around, within, and through our minds and bodies, we dispel our ignorant “evil” habits and empower the Divinity always present as the root of our consciousness. He wrote that to love God is to love God’s loving qualities and empowering them, otherwise “God” is just a word to us. And since God is expressed in all the useful and vital forms of the universe, we are called to enter into the compassion we find in present moment awareness, dropping our deluded depictions of others and ourselves from our minds, seeing all of us for what we truly are.
Peace and love to you,
Cory