Spiritual Burial, Symbols, and Opening Ourselves to God | NCE Spotlight

Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:


3318:2  


A few words are needed to show how matters stand here,
specifically how they stand with human beings. A human being is
nothing else but an organ or vessel that receives life from the
Lord; we do not live on our own. . . . The life that flows into
us from the Lord comes from his divine love. This love, or the
life that radiates from it, flows in and bestows itself on the
vessels in our rational and earthly minds. Such vessels in us
face away from the life force because of the evil we inherit by
birth and the evil we ourselves acquire by committing it.
However, so far as it can do so, the inflowing life repositions
the vessels to receive itself.


3316:3 


When we read the story and take it literally, the angels then
present with us form no picture whatever of soup, of Jacob, of
Esau, of a red dish, or of swallowing some of it. Instead they
form a spiritual image, which is entirely different, and distant
from the earthly one. The earthly image turns into a spiritual
one instantly. The same is true with all other images in the
Word. For example, when we read about bread there, angels do not
picture bread but instantly think of heavenly love (love for the
Lord) and its ramifications instead. When we read in the Word
about wine, they do not picture wine but rather spiritual love
(love for one’s neighbor) and its ramifications. So when we read
about soup, they do not picture soup but doctrines that have not
yet been united to goodness and therefore the disorder of their
arrangement.


This reveals the nature and quality of angels’ thought and
perception and the width of the gap between theirs and ours. If
we thought this way when doing something reverent like taking
Holy Supper—if we perceived love for the Lord in place of bread,
and love for our neighbor in place of wine—we would be thinking
and perceiving as angels do. They would then come closer and
closer to us until eventually we could share thoughts with each
other—but only so far as we humans also dedicated ourselves to
goodness.


2955 


Another reason I will bury my dead one means emerging from . . .
spiritual nighttime and coming alive is that when an earlier
religion dies, the Lord raises up a new one to replace it. So
instead of death there is life, and instead of night there is
morning. Yet another reason is that in anyone who is reforming
and becoming spiritual the dead part is buried, so to speak, and
a new, living part rises again. So in place of the night in such
a person, or in place of the dark and cold, morning dawns with
its life and warmth.