What is spiritual burial? How do symbols have power? What does it really mean to open ourselves to God? We explore our connection to God and the power of ritual right now in the NCE Spotlight - your home for fresh insights from the ongoing translation of the New Century Edition of Swedenborg’s Theological Works.
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.