Read Our Written Sermons
grounded in a mystical, interfaith-Christianity inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg
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.
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.