Let the Divine Child Within Flow
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
John 7:37-39
On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.
Responsive Reading - Psalm 46:1-5
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in times of trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Read the written message below with music videos
Sometimes we forget that all our gifts and blessings flow from the God known by many names - even occasionally called “the universe.” In a way, we can think of every event as being conspired by the entirety of the universe, as all the preconditions and elements in the universe are dependent on each other directly or indirectly. If the universe did start as a “big bang” we can also think of every aspect of it being “entangled.” Moreover, our sages tell us that Divine Providence is inherent in every little thing, otherwise, it couldn’t direct the larger things. Further, when we come to believe in the reality of God’s nature within us and everything, as Christ said, “rivers of living water will flow from within [us].” To do this we have to open ourselves to the light of our inner child.
As kids, we can often reflect on religious ideas much more deeply than our grown-up selves give children credit for. I grew up in evangelical churches in one way or another, and although not much of a believer back then (I found the teachings to often be contradictory) I remember pondering the Biblical idea that we will be made “white as snow.” As a mixed-race kid, I couldn’t help but laugh at the racial ramifications, but mostly the idea of getting rid of my “sins” stood most starkly in my mind. Am I really going to hell if I don’t believe in Jesus? And my dad’s talks about Swedenborgianism came into view as well, and I often imagined that there were angels watching my every thought! Further, his reading from various religious texts all served to inform how I thought about the world, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t believe in God.
What’s funny though is that as a kid I was probably the most tapped into the creative and creating powers of life. No one had told me that God was closer than my imagination and was in fact more me than all the things I thought about myself. But kids feel this almost naturally. You could say that it is the positive side of a child’s selfishness, this feeling that Life is within. Jesus said that we must believe in him because he knew himself to be “the Way, the Truth, the Life,” the same Heaven that is “within you.” He was talking about Life and God, not the separated idea of a person that we call “Jesus,” although that name can also denote much more to us and also mean Life, Truth, and Divinity.
You see, it all comes back to understanding and meaning. And, in a way, Christ was trying to break down our limited understanding of these things for something much more open and purer, like a child’s heart. This is often the way a child naturally understands God when we haven’t bogged them down with too much doctrine, and I’m sure is part of the reason that Jesus said that we must become like little children to enter Heaven. A child’s creativity is subject more to the whims of the Spirit and their natural loves than an adult’s whose has been boxed in by the needs of their job, social viewpoints, and limited thinking.
Thankfully, we’re told that we can return to this state in this life with renewed vigor. In fact, Emanuel Swedenborg calls it the “innocence of wisdom” and says that it isn’t bogged down by the aforementioned childish selfishness that most of us inherit and learn from our culture. In our reading today, it talks about how Jesus has not yet been glorified at this point in the story. Swedenborg writes about this and says that we all are to undergo a similar transformation, which he calls regeneration. In fact, to him, this is the essential path of a spiritual life, one that leads us to heaven and away from our more destructive attitudes and leanings (which create hell for ourselves).
It’s easy to fall into the trap of, “Well, I’m just like that.” As we know in our world, sometimes someone’s “just like that” is abusive and a horror. And often we each have aspects of life that we would rather change. However, isolating one issue doesn’t always do us much good on an inner personal level. There’s a time for that (Swedenborg was a fan of occasionally looking at our intentions and behaviours and turning to the Lord in repentance and prayer), but often we must go deeper, into the very way we look at the world and ourselves and pull out the roots of our selfishness and dysfunction. This is where Christ’s teachings and the words of other sages come in.
Christ told us to believe in him, saying that he is one with the Father and Life Itself. This wasn’t meant as a religious rite of passage or test, but a request to acknowledge that a fellow being is one with Life and God. He had awakened to this truth within himself, and thus he came to represent this Truth for all of us, we had now seen “the Father.” He also taught that we should see, acknowledge, and become this for ourselves, thus becoming another expression of Divinity for others (“just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us”). As Swedenborg wrote, God puts no barriers to God’s power flowing through us, we have but to awaken further to the truth of God’s presence within all being. Naturally, it is our mind’s very way of thinking and intending that serves as a barrier to God’s love and light shining through our minds, but it is already behind our minds, shining as much as it can through them.
As we awaken to the reality of God’s flow through us, we can learn again to just be and allow creativity to flow like a river – unlearning all that hides “this little light of mine.” This doesn’t necessarily mean becoming more creative and productive in the world’s eyes, as most of these eyes still have blinders on, but it does mean finding the peace and presence of the river of life that is already with us. It means finding every moment and everything afresh and anew, letting go of our need to follow our minds' hangups, gripes, trauma reactions, and judgments for deeper wisdom and love.
Children often know intuitively that they are one with what’s around them, which is why they imbue everything with life in their imagination. A baby knows nothing of what it means to be “a person,” they just know the soup of their experience, reactions, and desires. Every little thing in our lives is still dictated by the whims of the universe, what some call Divine Providence, and we can find childish joy, life like a river, and peace when we allow that Providence to awaken us to our unity with the universe and God. Awakening to this truth we can accept that yes, Jesus is the Way, and so are many others who have awakened to this reality within themselves, we don’t become exclusionary but as open as Christ. Perhaps Christ was different, but it isn’t God who holds the doors closed to us. We are all the Way at our core, one with the Tao of life, even when we fight against it, funny enough, we’re always a child at heart.
Blessings,
Cory