To Be or Not to Be: Being Faithful to Life or to Worldly Success

Sep 1

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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.

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The Climb Miley Cirus

Om Namah SHivay Meditation

Opening READINGS

From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture

Micah 6:6-8

With what shall I come before the Lord
    and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
    with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

Matthew 23:1-12

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

“Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.

“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

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

To Be or Not to Be:

Being Faithful to Life or To Worldly Success

By Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts

I’m sure you know the famous line, “I think therefore I am,” by Descartes. Do you agree? For me, it begs the question: do trees exist? The earth? Although I believe these things are infused with God(dess) and wisdom, I doubt we’d find them having thoughts in a way that fits with our current scientific definition of thinking.

No, I think a better definition of being is more affirming: all that has form, is. Not only that, but keeping in mind that God is present in all things, we should respect them as such, as sacred.

Moreover, even the spiritual realm has form, according to the 18^th century mystical theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. But, in opposition to my definition in a way (how dare he!) he says that there are two generally opposing forces in the spiritual realm: spiritual existence and nothingness, which are similar to God and “Satan,” spiritual Life and spiritual death, or Heaven and Hell, even though Hell seems to have form.

Now, Swedenborg didn’t believe there was a specific personhood of Satan, but he did believe that we can often be drawn by our affection for spiritual nothingness or hell – which is selfish pride and egotism. We actually continue to choose these things in the next life because we become deeply entrenched in them. However, even those of us who really love the hell of our selfish domination never actually become nothing, since the Lord continues to uplift our lives and works to keep us from digging infinitely toward that black hole.

But what is this “hellishness” in practice and how does it equate to “not being?” Well, to Descartes point, being has it’s root in the quality of our affections and thoughts, according to Swedenborg. The only being that truly is, is the great I Am: God. We receive our relatively small beings from Divinity and we can either lean into that life or away from it. As we focus more and more on ourselves and our love to dominate and destroy, our humanity wanes because we accept less beingness from God. As we turn toward hellishness, we become relatively smaller in a spiritual sense even as we may seem to gain more and more prestige or success in the world. Further, this type of fleeting or “nothing” orientation calls on us toward fleeting joys, like that of external triumph no matter how we got it, selfish glory, lust, anger, and viciousness. Although we feel large in these moments and powerful, we are actually courting spiritual death.

Wow, kind of trippy, right? So, Hamlet had it right, the question seems to be: “to be or not to be?”

What I like about Swedenborg’s view of Heaven and Hell, or being and not being, is that his framework applies to all of us, no matter our traditions or current place in life. His explorations of these spiritual realities call on us to explore how we might be being and how we might be not being. Word play aside, if we take Hamlet’s question seriously in this light, we might find that to start to be truly something we must begin to be faithful to life within and without ourselves, instead of being so deeply caught up in ourselves and our worldly success. If we let selfish things lead us, not only do we not care who dies, we start to die on the worse level possible: on the level of our souls.

In our lives we have the option of being faithful to the life in ourselves and in all things around us, or of trying to ride the temporary and destructive high of external success and selfish vanity. Scriptures across the world emphasize the importance of humility and a peaceful heart, and yet we often get caught up in the worldly rat race of seeming to be successful on an external level as we promote our egotistic and destructive longings.

I know this high quite well! I can often feel the draw of temporary and transient preening, the pull of momentary, distorted success and other trappings of selfishness. For each of us, these sometimes encroach every day if not every moment: the drive toward vanity and defensiveness, the feelings of personal pride and glory, as well as judgment toward others. Each of these states come with either a clawing for or defense of a type of domination that we often see uplifted in our world as prowess or successfulness.

However, I feel called to faithfulness. Faithful to my fiancé Alyssa, to the people around me and myself, to nature, and ultimately to Krishna, Sophia, Christ, or whatever you call our living and aware Higher Power. She is embodied in all the good aspects of this universe, and I think we are each called to appreciate that universe and uplift it with our God-given strength as much as we can. As I start to experience this state of faithfulness more and more, I find that it is a state of being present, of being centered in peace and compassion towards myself and others.

I ask you, what do you think are the differences between being centered on faithfulness and fleeting success? A mentor of mine, Rev. Anna Woofenden, recently asked this question. What do these taste like, sound like, and what do they look and feel like? And finally, ask yourself, how does the world generally view one or the other?

The reason the part of us obsessed with success and domination is called nothing is because it’s temporary, it can’t last in the scheme of eternity, it has no true spiritual substance because that only comes from God, who is love and goodness itself.

For being nothing, it’s quite hard to let go of, isn’t it? We hear of stories or parables like that of Noah and we can’t help but remark on how faithful he was, how faithful his family must have been to build an arc and collect so many animals based on the voice of God speaking to just one man! But the characters of Noah and his family were being present, in tune with reality, and they saw the calamity coming, they heard the voice of God warning them, and so they worked diligently to avoid catastrophe no matter what the world around them thought.

They may or may not seem to be the voice of God, but we’re warned in a thousand ways of upcoming calamities, both in nature, in society, and in ourselves. We can hear and see the nothingness present in our hurtful systems, in our hurtful actions, as we become present, alive, and connected with reality in a faithful way. We’re also encouraged in a thousand ways toward greater health, and through this we are confronted with a question that should impact our behavior in every moment, to be or not to be? May we be present enough to hear it.

Do we start to build that monumental arc within and around ourselves that might save our soul from its own hellishness? Do we acknowledge the warnings in nature and in the injustices of our communities and world, or do we close off our ears to anything that distracts us from our success? It’s funny, there are also many versions of a story similar to the Noah story throughout Native American, aboriginal and First Nations’ spiritual stories. But sometimes in those stories the shaman who is called on to save their people ignores the message and their whole community is washed away. Do we allow ourselves to also be washed away by the flood of our non-being?

Thankfully, faithfulness toward life can start to feel even better than it sounds when we become more present in it. It might not have the rush of external vanity and success that once dimmed our eyes and our spirits from the calamities around us, but it has consistency of being, it has the peace of the Prince(ss) of Peace within it, which over time leads to more joy and health beyond imagination. Let’s receive the great I Am deeper into our living and intending by being loving, by being faithful, by being wise, present, and just be who we are meant to be.