Divine Insight is Written on All Hearts

Jul 14

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 8 pm EDT. Catch it towards the end of this Multimedia Service or on our Worship page. Video of the broadcast is posted there later.

Find videos of past services on our Worship page or subscribe to our YouTube channel!

Let em Go Supaman

The Ocean - Meditation Harrison Ford

Opening READINGS

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

Deuteronomy 30:1-14

1 When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, 2 and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, 3 then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. 4 Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. 5 He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors. 6 The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. 7 The Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. 8 You will again obey the Lord and follow all his commands I am giving you today. 9 Then the Lord your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The Lord will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your ancestors, 10 if you obey the Lord your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. 11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

From Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings

Divine Insight is Written on All Hearts

By Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

Sometimes I wander at the idea of a universe that could contain such beauty as well as such injustice. It’s mind-blowing the seeming dichotomy between goodness and evil, and it makes you wonder how Divinity could allow for both, let alone condemn some of her creation to “damnation” for choosing one or the other. In fact, some Christian traditions even believe we are preordained for either heaven or hell, one a place of eternal pleasure, worship, and delight, the other, torment.

Of course, those are only narrow views of heaven or hell. Most of our ideas about these realms tend to be shallow, in fact. Often characterized by a very limited idea of who can get into the angelic paradise, so narrow that its much easier to list who can get into heaven than who can’t, and it typically has little to do with character and more to do with having the right label or faith-mantra.

But I don’t think that’s what Hebrew and Christian Biblical scripture means when it says narrow is the path to the heavenly kingdom, and I believe these scriptures (like many others) explains that. I think it means narrow in the sense that it’s the path of the deepest recesses of your heart, the path of a part of us that can be very small and get very little attention amidst our self-oriented desires, distractions, and egotism. Like our reading today uplifts, God wants to circumcise our hearts more than anything else, more than any other external form of worship, labels, or markers. If we allow him-her to, Divinity will empower us with the work of trimming away our excess desires for wideness and authority: glory and domination, making our path descriptively more narrow and yet more full, free, and alive. The path of righteousness is narrow like a loving community is spiritually close no matter how diverse, whereas a hateful group is relatively wide and disparately cut off from each other by their self-focus, no matter how similar they are or physically confined.

Ultimately, I believe God(dess) is not in the business of injustice but justice, and the only reason that hell exists is because we demand it and because God can use even that for good. Today’s scripture and many others’ emphasis on our ability to choose God’s path to spiritual abundance or the path of spiritual death (ie. The Lord’s insistence on free-willing individuals / life), necessitates the ability to lean into deconstructive tendencies as well as constructive ones: it requires that people can choose to turn toward goodness and love or spiritually turn away and misuse those things for their opposites.

But, we each have the opportunity to relinquish those destructive affections and habits. As our scripture today says, “Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back.” There’s hope for the each of us, if only because - as holy texts tell us - the Divine insight about how to live a life full of love and heaven is written on our hearts and God strives to get us to read it. We can’t get away from it, but we can try to bury it with debris. To find peace and joy everlasting, we have all but to turn toward the Divinity speaking through that narrow place in our life, inviting us closer to him and others in kindness, wisdom, and diversity.

But even if we buy that, how do we come to grips with hell, with hellishness? It takes only a moment to verify that hellishness is real – just reflect on the horrors of the heart from the past and present. Moreover, we’re told that God has emphasized again and again the reality of damnation: the gnashing of teeth, being dispersed and unable to connect, fire and brimstones.

I think that hell’s fire is one that we start to know all too well in our hellishness on earth, that it’s not a fire that God stokes for us. It’s the fire of lustful, hateful, egotistic desires. In the midst of these cold, fiery flames we hardly notice the fire, because it typically feels like us: it’s the personal hell we’ve crafted, who we’ve been and who we want to be. This, of course, is what our unintentional namesake Emanuel Swedenborg believed, as he relates through his books on religion and visions of the spiritual realm, visions reportedly gifted by God for all of our spiritual learning. Whether or not these visions are true, though, they paint a digestible metaphor for helping us shape our internal reality, the psychology and health of our minds.

So how do we become more attuned to the truth written on our hearts? Well, firstly we must want to find that wisdom of life, and become more and more attentive of how best to orient our desires and actions. This requires us to start accepting that we have hurtful, hellish places, as well as a call to transform them in our lives.

I think that with that base we have hope for heaven and salvation, we have hope for health, rationality, and sanity.

Another key way to start hearing that wisdom written on our hearts is to turn to our sources of healthy wisdom, while keeping a discerning eye toward its dark places and how we may be interpreting it selfishly. With this awareness of the reality of goodness and evil as we contemplate, we have the tools to look at things like scripture with a discerning, metaphorical eye that will help allow it to illuminate our hearts more and more. Swedenborg believed that scripture is a key crafted to turn the locks of our hearts and minds, helping to dispel the clouds of illusion and sleep around the glowing text writ large in our souls.

This is a spiritual process, a transformation of our understanding and affections, which is why scripture centers on parable and metaphor, not literalness: parable is the key way our minds learn morality and love. As the Bible says, Jesus only spoke in parable, and Swedenborg believed that to be largely true from the books of Genesis to Revelation, as well as with various other scriptures. That being said, literal interpretations of scripture have their place next to metaphorical ones, especially when it comes to moral ideas like the 10 Commandments: these teach us the natural, external ramifications of having a loving, heavenly heart and spirit, as well as the spiritual, internal mindsets that lead to that external fruit. Moreover, we all have our sources of wisdom, and if we allow God(dess) to speak to us through that narrow place in our hearts, any and all traditions are a path to heaven.

I think the best way to wrap up this exploration of how Divinity speaks to and inspires all of us is with part of our scripture from the Hebrew book of Deuteronomy. It says, “The Lord will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your ancestors, if you obey the Lord your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.”

Amen.