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grounded in a mystical, interfaith-Christianity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg
The Joy of Uncovering the Divinity Within
Our spiritual teachers have a very important job to do and when they are fruitful in helping us awaken to Spirit and Love we can’t help but rejoice, this is because intrinsic to the Spirit of God (known by many names) is joy. We recently saw a joyful and historic teaching moment when one of the world’s foremost spiritual teachers, Pope Francis, along with various Catholic bishops met with indigenous people from Canada over the course of a few days. During this visit, the indigenous peoples shared their stories and the lasting impact that residential schools and other colonizing efforts have had on them and their friends and family. The trip ended in a heartfelt speech and apology from the Pope, affirming the indigenous peoples’ experiences and expressing how much he’s learned in those few days, vowing to be a partner in decolonization and with indigenous peoples. In this example, we see that even the Pope has a learning journey and that often our best teachers are the most overlooked, as the humble and oppressed have some of the most potent messages to learn. The very light of our own being is similarly too overlooked and disregarded, but hopefully, we can change that just as the Pope is seeking to continue to listen and learn.
Humanity’s Natural State? Children of God (Known by Many Names)
It says in the scriptures that God gives light to everyone and is the true light. This clearly metaphorical phrase, although perhaps also literal, seems to point to a number of things that we call light: truth, wisdom, understanding, spiritual insight, perception – which all come back to the most fundamental light of all, the light of consciousness itself, without which none of these could be perceived. Despite being so prominent in the Christian scriptures, delving into this line of thinking and further inquiry seems to often take a backburner to more surface understandings of Christ, which can keep God at a distance from us while also limiting our understanding of the shining unity at the core of most religions. Even more pluralistic approaches can miss this important point, that God is the pure light of consciousness itself – at no distance from our seat of perception – and that coming to better know this Alpha and Omega of our lives can awaken us to all to our birthrights as children of God, not stepchildren.
Swedenborg’s Secret to Awakening to the I Am
The 18th-century sage, Emanuel Swedenborg, has greatly influenced many impactful, peerless thinkers and influential progressive radicals (from Immanuel Kant and Helen Keller to Emerson, Blake, and William James), but he himself is little known to modern history. And although there are countless biographies of the ground-breaking scientist-turned-mystic, there is one important aspect of his history that I think could use a little more exploration and emulation, his spiritual awakening. His deep meditative approach to his quest for the seat of the soul resembles the types of inner inquiry that many ancient and modern sages invite in order to awaken from spiritual slumber, into what a Swedenborgian may coin “angelic flow,” or “Christ-consciousness,” or just plainly, Buddha.
War Springs from Ignorance
War is on our doorsteps more often than we admit, as it’s a small world and it is always at war. But a type of war often churns in our minds as well, springing from a similar cause: ignorance of our true nature and our oneness as the Self. Vladimir Putin’s atrocious war on Ukraine scrapes the barrel of degradation and even toys with catastrophic nuclear destruction, and yet shares in the root cause of a false idea of self – one that seeks to defend from, attack, control, relish in, judge, fear, and subjugate all things that touch its fancy, as this is the nature of this inverted wisdom itself. Yes, our minds jump from one ignorant type of modality to the next as there is a time for all these things when we stay centered in non-centeredness. Often these things feel out of our control – types of impulsive, habitual drives leading some of us even to murder – and many of these traits can be written off as normal as it is the common modality of our unawakened minds. But, in a way, this offers a solution in and of itself: all of our issues spring from our embodied ignorance of our shared Divinity, and can be tackled at their core with God’s sword of peace and truth (no matter our tradition), if we employ it.
The Purpose of Prayer
Today we pray for Ukraine, hopefully, no matter our tradition and country. We pray for peace, healing, safety, wholeness, sanity, an end to wars and needless violence (in Ukraine and otherwise). But prayer sometimes leaves us asking, what is it fundamentally? Is it an inner monologue toward God, an effort to manifest something? Of course, prayer is often what we make it. Scripturally, prayer tends to be described as an effort to unburden our issues before God and find connection with Divinity, as well as seeking reconciliation, healing, unity, resolution, and peace – even for our enemies. In many religions, there’s a shared approach to prayer that includes both personal beseeching as well as various other types of meditative approaches that may include mantras (like with the Lord’s Prayer or many Hindu prayers) or praise and thanksgiving. Whether it’s beseeching, praise, mantric, or more silent prayers, these are designed to help us let go of our issues and our mind’s wanderings and open toward the transcendent light of love, joy, and peace within, helping us turn into conduits of peace, especially when we allow all four meditative, prayerful modes transform our minds.
Come Into Harmony
Coming into harmony with the universe and our Higher Power sounds aspirational and nice, but I think many people believe it’s beyond human capability or, at least, their own. Sometimes when we assess our mental or spiritual situation it may seem disheartening due to our lingering issues, or we may feel that there’s too much chaos going on to ever tap into a true beingness at harmony with the play of the natural realm and God. The trick, though, seems to be realizing that the part of us that says it’s impossible and feels at odds with things isn’t us and really isn’t even a friend, it’s a voice that we feel is intimate but it’s also an illusory manifestation of us not understanding our true selves. Instead, we must turn to Beingness itself within to learn our true nature and give up our attachment to listening to that false teacher we’ve come to call “me.”
Find Trust in the Light of Awareness
When you tell someone you trust them it usually means that you don’t believe they are lying to you or hiding anything of importance to you. However, people can change or surprise us, and so we can’t know that the person we trust will always be trustworthy to us, and so the statement “I trust you” comes with a natural caveat: “for now.” Even those whom we trust implicitly may drop off the face of the earth or can’t always be there when we need them available. But there’s a force in the universe that can always be trusted, even trusted with our full attention as well as our betrayals, and which when trusted will enable a life of peace and natural flow beyond our current understanding, at least, according to Christ, the Buddhas, Krishna, and others.
Turn Inward & Find Your True Self
Cause and effect often seems like an easy concept, aim the bat and hit the ball, the ball flies away – however, this is only because we summarize. If we were to truly start to describe the causes of that effect the explanation may never end: you would have to describe the history of the bat, where does the wood come from, how was it formed and sanded? What about the ball - why didn’t the ball fly into space and how does gravity work? What about the person hitting the bat, what are all the histories and causes that allowed a being made of star-stuff to stand there, breathing air, hitting a ball with a bat using hands and arms? Indeed, a true account of the causes of any one simple thing we do would have to be an account of much of the history of the universe itself, and if it needed to include a description of human motives, we’d have to further acknowledge that we hardly know the roots of our own motives at times, let alone someone else’s. That said, awakened beings throughout history (and some not so awakened) have attributed their actions to God, saying that the Divine is the root and cause of everything they do and say. How are we to understand this in such an infinitely complex world of cause and effect, and could it inform our own living?
Be Baptized in the Spirit Known by Many Names
As we start to awaken to the Divinity at our core, it’s typical that we begin by realizing there are greater truths out there than we may have thought, and come to centre on a specific set of spiritual truths that are helping to wake us up, deepen our walk, and that have spoken to us in a way that may make more sense to us than others we’ve heard about. According to the 18th-century scientist-turned-sage, Emanuel Swedenborg, these spiritual-natural truths are represented by John the Baptist in the well-known biblical story – calling us to let go of our sins and be baptized, promising that there are greater truths, a greater connection to Jesus, to come. Indeed, Swedenborg believed that all the Biblical stories (or any truly scriptural story, for that matter) represent more universal things than we often give them credit for and are not limited to describing one religious walk, he supported these claims by exploring all the ways our scriptures keep saying just that!
You Are the Peaceful Perceiver of Your Mind
We all have so many preconceived notions about what religion or spirituality is, that at times our heads get in the way of us realizing the core of these teachings – which ultimately aren’t meant for heady pondering, but for a felt realization in our hearts as we open ourselves to the inexpressible light of peace, love, and wisdom already at the root of our consciousness. God, known by many names, seems to repeatedly focus on the importance of us centering on the open, loving heart at the core of our being, as well as on our letting go of the ruminating attachments that keep us distracted from that. God(dess) also warns us not to take these peaceful teachings and, in turn, use them to badger or dominate ourselves or others – saying as Christ, “The Sabbath was made for the good of human beings; they were not made for the Sabbath.”
Give Up Glory and Worry
The key reason we treat these feelings and thoughts as vastly important is because we have (and are often encouraged to have) a false idea of ourselves and what’s important. Worry and fear arise when we feel a threat to our existence, something we inevitably feel all the time when we identify with our idea of our reputation, our fleeting sense of glory, our inevitably passing bodies, our thoughts and intellect, as well as all the other false derivations and morphing images we have about ourselves and what’s important. The sages tell us that these false ideas of self and our yearning for the things that feed them, disconnect us with our true selves, fogging up our inner life because we centre on the passing mist instead of the sun of consciousness within.
Uncover the Wellspring of Joy Within
The angel in our reading said, “Do not be afraid, I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people,” but who exactly is this reading referring to when it says “all”? Often, the Christmas story’s impact is understood to be limited to “Christians.” But perhaps this understanding is missing the point entirely – that God’s Advent in history and continuing Advent in each of our lives is meant to uplift everyone, a phenomenon that’s always present, working to empower hope, peace, love, and ultimately, our joy. Moreover, this statement starts by enjoining us to release fear, pointing to God’s call to let go of our false ideas of self and turn to the reality of God’s Advent within us, no matter our tradition.
Abide in the Diverse Light of Love
I find it interesting, or perhaps devastating, that so many groups within traditions that espouse a loving God turn toward an interpretation of it that damns or condemns all others. Whether it be large veins of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or others, we all have a tendency to identify with our judgmental, dismissive, and controlling mind and let that guide our religiosity (or atheism) and life at times. When we start to let this go the shared centre between many of our traditions, the importance of being oriented toward loving compassion, is easily revealed. This week’s Christian Advent theme is exactly this topic, and today we explore how love is intrinsic to our very consciousness and how God is love and the light of consciousness itself, repeatedly asking us to come into our similarly loving and non-divisive nature.
Follow Hope to Spiritual Health
We all hope. We hope for this desire or that, for this justice or that award. And we hope we are safe in any situation. The hopes that we have can paint a picture of what we are about in our lives, what our gods are. Unfortunately, most hopes undermine our sense of peace and compassion as they are centered on fleeting things: our bodies, our reputations, our lust, our memory, and on. Indeed, the scriptures of many traditions share in the idea that our shared hope should be on the increase of love, peace, and wisdom itself, since, as we come to hope for these things, they naturally become more apparent within us and then, our hope transforms into the confidence and trust inherent in these eternal attributes.
Your Mission: True Remembrance
Both the U.S.’s Veterans’ Day and Canada’s Remembrance Day celebrate and/or mourn the veterans in our midst and those that have passed. What it means to be a soldier is different for many people, and I’m honoured to have had a number of veterans in my family share their various experiences and wisdom over the years. Both my grandfathers, my aunt, two of my uncles, and my brother, all have had both inspiring and critical things to say about the armed forces, and all have seemed to believe that serving their country helped to craft them into who they are. No matter our politics, this week we ought to honour the sacrifices and efforts made by our soldiers of all stripes, as well as honour the peace that most of these strive and yearn for as we seek to dispel the violence that so often takes their lives.
Relax Within Whatever Arises
I think that relaxing into the flow of things is another way of saying, “Trust in the Lord / Universe.” The consciousness that underlies all things, the beingness of God, is present in every detail of life – we don’t need to beat ourselves up to find it, nor to find meaning or success in our lives. Indeed, when we strive as if the God known-by-many-names doesn’t have our backs, it’s said that we strive “without God,” as described in our reading from Psalm 127, which says that such efforts and fruits are in vain. Many of the most powerful spiritual teachers throughout history, Christ eminent among them, tell us to relax in our striving, to soften around the edges and let go of the anxiety, anger, and harshness that accompany our need to reinforce our false egos and our identification with our rambling minds. Indeed, relaxing into whatever arises (even the fear or anger) and trusting in the flow of providence is said to be the ticket to enlightenment, and to me it sounds like a returning to the childlikeness that Christ said was required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven within.
The Holiness of Halloween
With roots in both paganism and early Christianity, Halloween (meaning “Saints’ Evening”) is a fascinating holiday that I think we shouldn’t be shy about celebrating. Many of the various, seemingly random elements of our Halloween rituals seem to have roots in the past, from bobbing for apples to going door to door asking for treats. Even its more disparaged aspects have roots in ancient ceremonial practices, such as dressing up like the dead (“saints”) and even putting on skimpy outfits (many ancient ceremonies were in the nude or semi-nude, albeit not necessarily Christian ones for All Hallows’ Eve). Further, the roots of the tradition tie into a celebration and mourning for our lost loved ones - our personal saints - and into an awareness of our own mortality, with a hope for personal transformation: transcending, avoiding, and escaping evil spirits and deathly habits.
Become Present with Thankfulness
Being thankful is an underestimated way to improve our own day, and often everyone else’s day around us! What makes it difficult is a two-parter: just remembering to be thankful for our untold gifts, and being present enough to remain that way - instead of getting pulled back down by our negative, often called “realistic,” thinking. But, I have to ask, what is realistic about worrying about the future all the time? What’s realistic about sinking back into the past, our constant fears, or our self-image? Instead, let’s give thanks while letting the qualms pass as they come, accepting the moment for what it is, and celebrate all the diverse people and other expressions of God’s Divinity in our lives, today, right now.
The Blessing of Pets
Our pets bring blessings beyond description through their loving connection and by just being an example of being, enough so that perhaps we should all start calling them our companions, compatriots, or family, as many already do! Whether we recognize it or not, the beingness of pets is a key way that pets bring greater health into our lives, helping to settle our minds, comfort us, and ground us more in the moment. Of course, all their loving cuteness, connection, and fun, as well as the other blessings they bring, help with that too! This is also why it can be so harrowing to lose a pet, missing that comforting, individual presence, and love.
Post-Traumatic Growth
Most of us carry some amount of trauma and trauma response with us, even if we don’t realize it. Traumas aren’t always as easily diagnosed as X, Y, or Z, and can even be sourced from general social structures, such as the negative impacts of capitalism or of certain social norms that haven’t held space for us. Lesser known or appreciated, however, is the growth that can be found through healing from trauma and using the challenges in our lives as a springboard for positive transformation. Unlike the negative effects of trauma, these positive responses aren’t typically immediate, and often take years or lifetimes to grow and fruit, although they can be helped along through mindfulness work and the power of our God-given presence. Similarly, our earth is now poised to continue its plunge into humanmade disaster through global warming and our negative transformation of ecosystems, or we can accept this earthly trauma as an opportunity to wake up and engage with our natural selves and world to create a time of growth and positive transformation we can hardly imagine.