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grounded in a mystical, interfaith-Christianity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg
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.
Celebrate the Moment
Celebrating the moment isn’t always easy, indeed, many of us have difficulty entering the moment, let alone celebrating it. And yet, this practice of intentionally celebrating all the gifts in our lives, especially as we receive them in this very moment, is a powerful tool to help us connect with joy, our intrinsic peace, and the abundance of the Spirit known by many names that empowers each of us. With our world in sometimes seeming disarray, it can be hard to find an excuse to celebrate, which is why coming together as family and friends can be such a wonderous, transformative thing because it helps us to find that inner jubilee. Indeed, if we are to surmount the issues facing us, we must learn to celebrate the natural wonders of humanity and the earth and allow that joy to bring us into presence and to the leading and healing of the Spirit.
Divinity is in All Art & Nature
For such a relatively unknown mystical sage, the 18th-century’s Emanuel Swedenborg sure has had a huge impact on the realm of Western art, partly due to his interfaith-Christian writings being some of the first known Western literature that took very seriously the deep integration and expression of the Divine in nature. He believed that all natural forms were symbolic of facets of God(dess), with all created things expressing aspects of the vast divine unity of love and wisdom, expressed in form and function. William Blake, George Inness, Helen Keller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hilma af Klint, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name a few, were artists deeply inspired by Swedenborg’s writings and some were the spearheads of new forms of art, among other monumental achievements. Through the inspiration of Swedenborg and especially from their lives walking with Divinity, these artists expressed in different ways how the God known-by-many-names is expressed throughout the world around us, and particularly, how each of us is deeply connected to all creation and the artistic Spirit of the Holy One herself in every moment.
Trust in God(dess)
Trust can be a tricky thing, especially when we’re talking about trusting Divinity itself, the God known by many names. Is God real and does God care? What are you entrusting her/him with? Ultimately, trusting Divinity amounts to trusting the present moment, while letting go of anxiety and yearnings for the future or anything outside the present moment itself. It amounts to letting go of our controlling natures, our judgmentalness and tendencies to hold others and ourselves against the grindstone – especially when we think we have a good reason. Trusting God is trusting life itself, which invites us to enter the present moment with fuller awareness of our unity with everything but with less rambling thought, noting the transient and almost dream-like quality of our own perception of the world, and coming into a sense of greater peace, wholeness, and compassion.
The Transformational Forge of Trial
The scriptures speak often of the process needed to find salvation, nirvana, transcendence or whatever word that specific tradition uses to speak of finding fullness in our Divinely-sourced intrinsic awareness. Buddhist scriptures sometimes refer to butter and the churning needed to make it as an analogy for what is required to reach Buddhahood, saying that we must do the work with the power of our connectedness to Intrinsic Awareness. And our reading today from Job speaks of being tested and coming forth as gold, implying that our trials are our forging in God’s fire. Despite scripture’s insistence, we sometimes get repelled at the idea of having to work to find the heaven that’s within us, or that we must undergo trials, saying that salvation is entirely in God’s hands and may have more to do with getting the God right than anything that we have to do to find it within ourselves. However, we have but to look within to see that yes, we haven’t entirely uncovered the heaven that Jesus says is within us, and to remember that all our strength in overcoming is from the Lord, known by many names, who has asked us to use it to forge heaven.
Dispel Evil, Love Love
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 is the Afterlife?
The eternity of life is something at the core of many traditions, although sometimes details are scarce. After having my own near-death experience, I was attracted to others’ accounts of the afterlife through similar near-death experiences, often abbreviated as “NDEs.” Surprisingly, I found thousands and thousands of these accounts online and catalogued in books (just Google them!), many with similar themes and details despite coming from people across the religious and non-religious spectrum. I was again amazed to find the writings of the 18th century mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who not only described the universe and God(dess) in a way that spoke to my developing compassionate spirituality, but also his vast accounts of the afterlife, which described similar core details as found in the NDEs that started to be catalogued in the 1950’s (thanks to the author Raymond Moody). The best part of that discovery was the corroborating and fleshed out account that God is a God(dess) of love, who resides at the centre of all beings, and that even hell can be understood to be one’s continuing preference for the hell of our own making.
We Are Love Itself
We are love itself. This truth is spoken by many sages and mystics alike, and yet I feel that we often miss the practical import of these words. This idea calls on us to let go of our false ideas of self – limiting ourselves to this body and mind. Instead, knowing that we are one with everything, as well as one with the essence and substance of all energy and life itself: the heat of love and its light and form, awareness. And what may seem a heady concept at first, eventually boils down to the importance of meditative consciousness, to being there for each other and ourselves in compassionate care without the falsely learned concepts of separateness and limitations of self. This is why Christ says to love others as ourselves and to find “complete unity” in God(dess). Why Buddhist sages say that we must center on compassionate awareness, seeing beyond the transient nature of duality and form as we let go of our false selves. And why the 18th-century mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, called on us to centre on Love and Wisdom as the shared core of all being.
Slaying Genocide
Today we continue to be called to face the West’s and others’ tragic past of genocide, mass abuse, and horror – particularly as many of our Western cultures forced these tragedies onto Indigenous Peoples and minorities, including in Canada and the United States. The hundreds of Indigenous children found buried at residential schools in Canada recently are a stark reminder of this and a sharp blow to the heart of many Indigenous Peoples and Canadians. We often fail to realize how our current attitudes of apathy and dismissal continue the legacy of oppressive control, distorted socioeconomic structures, and destructive hate if only because we refuse to shine light from within ourselves onto these real, lasting issues – and so may we find compassion for others as ourselves today. Scriptures themselves can also have a tragic history rooted in genocide, as we read in the Jewish and Christian Bibles, and so, during these few days when we typically celebrate both Canada Day and the U.S. Independence Day, let’s not shy away from facing these deeply ingrained veins of hurt in order for us all to finally find reconciliation, freedom, and healing.
Divine Fatherhood
The use of “Father” as a synonym for God by Christ has often been used as an excuse for the misogyny that many dogmatic Christian groups have gravitated towards, ignoring the many allusions to Divinity as feminine or transcending gender throughout the Bible and the rest of the world’s traditions. This sad legacy sometimes makes it hard for some to celebrate the beauty and wonder of the idea of a Father God, who is at once also Mother God, and the root of each of our own spirits. Our attachment to hierarchical dogmas of our own making, ignoring, and shutting down the heartfelt opinions of others because we deem our own opinion paramount especially with important matters, is quite the opposite of what it means to be a patient, heartfelt father (or mother), as our need for control (or else) has within it a tendency to destroy the life around and within us.
Your Only Need: The Light of Love & Truth in Your Heart
Despite some’s belief in the all-pervasiveness of original sin, scriptures throughout the world point to the fundamental health, love, and truth at the core of the human spirit and at the root of our minds – albeit, sometimes covered over with hurtful tendencies from ignorance and fear often rooted in generations past. The Christian and Hebrew Bibles themselves indicate that we are fundamentally connected to God’s loving truth within, that it forms us, and that she can transform our minds if we but actively reconnect with the inherent nature of our internal light from her (no matter our tradition). This Divine light of love and truth within is the only thing we every need, although we seek for it outside of us. It invites us to identify with and experience the light of loving truth at the core of everything as part of ourselves, opening our hearts to our collective unity in diversity and what we always truly are.
Find Everlasting Peace in the River of Life Within
Thoughts are like the ripples on the surface of a river, just transient glimmers of awareness – hinting at the depths below. For whatever reasons, we have come to identify so much with our habitual ripples we miss the enormity of the river of life within – taking its vast depth, clarity, and peace to be a pit of emptiness as we fearfully try to color over it. When we turn more toward that river of life at our core by letting the ripples pass us by, dipping into the vastness of awareness with meditative and prayerful practice, we find that we become cleansed and renewed in its flowing holy water. In the book of Revelation, “the river of the water of life” is described as flowing from God into the centre of the heavenly city – I think inviting us as we read it to turn toward that river of the water of life flowing at our own heavenly centre, amidst the garden of all our gifts and expressions of life in their diversity.
Know ThySELF
The notion that we must die to ourselves “in order to live” is a striking one, uplifted by many Buddhist and Hindu Jnanis, as well as Christ. The idea might seem a bit negatively self-destructive at first, and yet many of us have probably noted that living primarily for our lower self is the truly destructive force in the world! The practical element of this wise request seems to be for us to watch our minds, letting go of desires and selfish thoughts as they come up, allowing our unity with God to shine through in the peace and intrinsic love within. This “brings us alive” and “wakes us up,” keeping us vigilant to the will of God(dess) and letting us finally know our true eternal selves – without the shackles and blinders of yearning, fear, false identities, and aversion.
We Are the I Am
It may seem a little self-indulgent to assume that we are one with the great “I AM” (as God calls herself in the Hebrew Bible), but in practice, I think the realization that we are one with the One can be quite the opposite – opening us up to compassion, clarity of awareness, and our deep connection with others. From a mystical viewpoint we are all one in God, all one in awareness and life itself, no matter our differences of tradition and culture. We can lean into this understanding of reality by taking the time to meditate or pray on this fundamental truth between all of us – that we are, that “I AM,” for a few moments letting go of all else. In this state, we can find renewal and uncover a peace that some might call, the Prince of Peace.
Our Mothers’ Divine Love & Wisdom
In general, our mothers envelop us in their love and wisdom as we grow, just as we’re sustained and developed within them as embryos. Similarly, we are said to be growing within God as we receive more of her Divine Love and Wisdom! This same Divinity is the source of all the greatness and care in our mothers. Indeed, the case can easily be made that our mothers tend to be the most potent and obvious image and likeness of God that we encounter in our earthly lives – except perhaps for the Divine Mother known by many names that we find within. Like a child in the womb, we are enveloped within God’s Divine light of awareness and we receive our own light from it, what the mystic Swedenborg describes as the spiritual sunshine of Divine Love and Wisdom and the source of our very being. Today let’s celebrate the reality of being held and developed in the wise and caring arms of God, known by many names, and rejoice in all the ways she shines – especially through our mothers and within ourselves.
We’re All One in God, Especially in Our Diversity
The oneness of humanity is a theme hinted at or exclaimed by many traditions and ancient scriptures, and I think leaning into this awareness can serve as a healing salve for our minds and our world. However, why do so many traditions use different terms or explanations for how we are one, or ignore this often-scriptural concept entirely? What’s the fundamental similarity and is it similar enough to be called the same thing? And finally, is there something fundamental at the core of our beings that unites us even in, especially in, our diversity?
The Radical Social Justice of God(dess)
The image of the bloody, fiery God from Revelation 19 can be a bit shocking at first. Why is the social justice and love wielding Christ so horrific in this vision, and why does it say, “He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself?” We find that although the Lord focuses on compassionate awareness and care, he doesn’t shy away from emphasizing the bloody and hurtful injustices in the world. And although the Biblical scriptures highlight that this is the glorified Jesus, it also doesn’t shy away from emphasizing that the Lord radically transcends any one tradition, name, gender, or creed – but can yield her spiritual-political sword in each of our hearts, no matter our spirituality.
Find Blessings in Intrinsic Awareness
Blessings in life abound, but it can be difficult to perceive them when we’re too caught up in self-awareness instead of selfless awareness. Selfless awareness is less “humbling one’s self” than it is realizing that our identifications with our perceived intelligence, our bodies, and our circumstances are a lie we’ve been telling ourselves. Instead, as some Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians believe, we should identify more with the eternally peaceful awareness that shines light into our minds as it observes our thoughts, pervades all sentient life, and underlies the energy within all matter. As we find that we are not our rambling minds, selfish ideas, and worries, we can start to truly see the blessing of every moment and settle into the blessedness of Goddess-given awareness.
Carry Your Cross to Find Resurrection
The cross is an interesting branding symbol for most of Christianity – as it’s the instrument of the murder of God, according to the Christian scriptures. But whatever our faith and despite our feelings about the cross, the image of it can serve as a heavy metaphor for the weight that we each carry, with compassionate strength and patience enabled by God(dess). Christ himself asked us to continue to carry our crosses and follow him, pointing toward the spiritual health that can be found as we accept our histories and move steadily forward with our eyes on that warmth and the light of consciousness at the root of our souls, inviting us to loving care and the peaceful dawn of a new day.