Swedenborgian Community Interfaith Podcast

The story of the first communion with Jesus and his disciples celebrating their Jewish Passover is essentially the story of the Lord telling us to remember him when we eat. Eating is something we do daily, but we can also define communion more narrowly, saying that communion only happens in community or at a church, with only bread and wine, etc., but I think broadening our idea of communion can be worthwhile in our exploration of what it means to commune in remembrance of God and our loved ones. You see, Christ’s message wasn’t one of exclusion but of inclusion, and although I believe he was establishing a lovely ritual for his followers to enter into together, at the same time I believe he was doing what he always did: pointing all of us back to a mode of living that no longer forgets its roots and its inherent Divine life. Indeed, to remember Christ is to remember what he was all about, otherwise the ritual of communion may easily become exclusionary and hollow.

When we are close enough to someone that we feel a deep bond, we often call that love. When we feel a type of growing unity or a falling of barriers between ourselves and another, we often call that “falling in love.” We more fully appreciate someone’s beauty, and we find that we want to do more and more for them. The sages tell us that this love that we are feeling is in fact our fundamental nature, but it is sensed when we start to release our sense of division. Often, we do this (or this is done) for a select few in our lives, and when we find we can’t trust someone or they walk away from us that sense of division springs back and our sense of unity, of love, is diminished. However, our greatest spiritual teachers, like Christ, Rumi, and Krishna, invite us to release our general sense of division and our false idea of ourselves, uncovering our always fully present and natural love for others “as ourselves” in the process.

The thing that helps us the most in any given moment may surprise us. How are we to know what may help? And what does that even mean? Ultimately, we’re all fundamentally looking for happiness. Whatever our goals, whatever our desires, at the root level these things are what we believe will help us to find some kind of happiness, or whatever’s closest to it in our experience. Unfortunately, our idea of happiness tends to be connected to passing pleasures, and we tend to allow moments of discomfort destroy our sense of happiness. Our sages, however, tell us that happiness is our very being – we’ve just come to identify so much with the passing phenomena in our lives we miss it. Sometimes, to wake us to this truth prophets and sages, from Jesus to Krishna, have to shake us a bit, and many across the millennia have used methods that at first and at certain moments don’t seem too happiness-inducing.

We as individuals would have nothing if it weren’t for many others. Without animals, insects, other people, the universe, God(dess), we would not be here. The reality of this is presented in every moment, whether through the road we drive on or the salad (pollinated by insects) that we’re eating! Of course, even our very body is an endless expression of this. We have much to be thankful for. And yet, these things are often the easiest to overlook even when they are the most profound things about life. We take for granted what we are used to, often seeking to force a bit more compliance out of something that has served us, strongly wishing that things would be a tad bit more perfect (to us). Thankfully, this year for Canadian Thanksgiving we seek to upend this tendency for unthankfulness a bit! So, let us give thanks.

Pets ground us in a way that we often underappreciate. What we call a pet, an animal or insect living in our home, is often a living embodiment of nature – something we miss in ourselves. Through our inculturation and indoctrination, our thoughts tend to wear well-worn paths, and much of our living and thinking becomes somewhat mechanicalistic (even if we don’t think so). To our mechanized mind, this provides a sense of safety and a structure that we hope provides some peace. But what happens when our typical ways of living don’t serve us or our earth? When what we’ve been doing and are used to doing undermines the very foundations of life around us and within us? I think that we must return to nature and return to the wisdom teachings that are close to the ground if we are to have any hope to survive as a planet.

Up until the James Webb telescope came online recently, most of us science-oriented people were pretty sure that the universe started about 14 billion years ago with the “Big Bang.” Now that we can see further out and further back into the universe, not only is our idea of the age of the universe scrapped (it’s clearly much older!), but we have to go back to the drawing board about how the universe might have started. One thing we can learn from this monumental moment in science history is the importance of being flexible, and not investing too much in any one idea – even a popular one. All ideas and all concepts are beliefs and subject to the whims of time, revelation, and perspective, even the most seemingly obvious ones. Even our beliefs that we are mortal, finite, fallen, separate, individuals, right, wrong, false, or true may be subject to revisiting. And perhaps, the truth of the matter, about us and about the universe, is ultimately beyond words: as words at their best only approximately point to the r

Matthew 7:21-27“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”~Sages throughout cultures and religions often share wisdom that points to the heart of what it means to

Enjoy this meditation to open to peace and joy.

I entirely relate to worrying about money. With debt, current obligations, and future ambitions, it can seem inescapable. That’s what makes Christ’s open and interreligious teachings so poignant for us, in a way he’s striking at a source of a lot of our frustrations, personal and interpersonal. Like the teachings of the Buddha, Krishna, and others, many of Christ’s teachings do this: strike at the heart of what keeps us away from our heart and the peace inherent to it. If we follow his pointings, we find that our “burden is light,” but how might we follow something so at odds with the way our minds so often work?

Christ’s words about never making oaths or promises can be a bit unsettling. We should never make a promise? What about promises already made? That’s why I think it’s no accident that he couches these statements between telling men of the time that they shouldn’t divorce their wives, and a missive on staying non-violent. He wasn’t trying to encourage us to “do whatever we want,” but instead, to let go of our calcified assumptions. To let go of the oaths and endorsements that only continue our blindness and suffering.

Anger can sometimes be a natural, healthy reaction to something, just as fear, happiness, and other feelings can be. But when the tie of anger binds our hearts (often, without us knowing it), by our returning to it again and again – stoking the flames and identifying with the feeling toward any one situation, we don’t allow ourselves the peace of our inner transcend-essence and the natural joy that can arise no matter the circumstances. Like with any feeling or thought, it is our identification with them that keeps us circling out of presence and peace into rumination and anxiety. Instead, using the ancient practice of Self-realization, may we let go of our hold on our mind’s unhelpful habits, and find the peace of our inner stability and the natural spaciousness of our loving hearts.

A meditation on your inner light, the light of consciousness shining from Divinity.

“You are the light of the world.” These empowering words were spoken by Christ, not as an elitist view of his “Christian” followers, but as a description of the very nature of each of our spirits – especially when we allow ourselves to shine. Like the Buddha, Krishna, and the voices of God across the ages, Christ seemed to have made it his mission to point to the Great I Am inherent within each of us, our rootedness in Divinity and its angelic light. He tasked us, as many sages do, to turn to this light within, noticing continuously that it is from this very light that we see our issues, attachments, conditioning, and both the good and the bad times. From there, we can let our light shine in all its cascading beauty, as it naturally should. Read more on this topic: https://swedenborgiancommunity.org/blog/light

On Father’s Day we celebrate our fathers and fatherly figures, celebrating how Divinity shines through the diverse expressions of masculinity and fatherhood, just as it shines through femininity and motherhood in infinite ways as the source of these qualities (as well as gender-neutral expressions). Indeed, the Christian Bible often describes how Christ used “Father” to denote God when speaking with his family and friends two millennia back, although it is hard to say if these ancient Jewish people used the term more broadly at the time. Christ seemed to be expressing how close we are to God by using this important familial distinction, emphasizing that we are all children of God, and expressing that God is the seed of all life – particularly, the source of “the light of the world” and love itself. And, like a good father, this day in particular rejoices in the empowerment of freedom and the light of love in many diverse ways, as we also celebrate Juneteenth and New Church Day today.

Often, we lose the thread of childhood bliss, as though the pressures of adulthood were more important than remaining in contact with the peace and childlike play and joy we had as a kid. But who could blame us for thinking this way, when it is often as a child that we are encouraged to iron out our natural, playful self – that is if it even survives the early traumas in our life – to better meet the demands of society? Funny thing though, the childlike state of awareness itself can never be ironed out or killed, just seemingly layered over with “personality,” “responsibility,” as well as other limited, defensive constructs that keep us circling in anxiety, fear, and appropriated id-entity. We are called to reawaken to our childlike state of being, of life, love, joy, and presence, by turning to something very simple and important, but beyond words or works, that we intuitively know the moment we’re born: “I am,” not “I am this and that, name, thought, and form.”

In this video we explore the inner meaning of Revelation 12. There’s a reason that the book of Revelation is often associated with a mushroom or hallucinogenic trip, because the images found throughout Revelation seem to come straight out of one. What’s further interesting about the book written by John when he was “in the spirit,” is that the images of the book of Revelation are all references to other moments of the Bible but blended into a psychedelic mixture. Our reading from Revelation 12 today is one of the most iconic images from that trippy book, describing a woman clothed in the sun who is set upon by a seven-headed red dragon. And like many images in Revelation, although it resembles a crazy dream, the parable that it expresses invites us to overcome our personal dominating, distracted, destructive demons to allow our creative, heavenly Self and God to shine through.

A meditation to empower our higher Self through letting go of our identification with the lower self.

It says that John was “in the spirit” when he had the visions described in the quite trippy book of Revelation, and the images described there (often about the future, as well as a new heaven and a new earth) bring to mind hallucinogens as well as the visions of my favourite mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg. For many, especially for many Christians, the book of Revelation has been a tough nut to crack, and many of its most famous elements are misconstrued due to things like Left Behind and other narratives that play up added stories about the antichrist. The book has been interpreted on many levels (even by my grandfather, who wrote a book on how it’s a hidden critique of the Romans!), but these interpretations often lack a good throughline or cohesiveness with the rest of scripture, seemingly missing the opportunity to tie the clearly metaphorical Revelation with the metaphors found throughout scripture. However, there’s one interpretation that does just that, in fact, this interpretation (written in 1766 by Emanu

Our mothers treasure our lives in their hearts, often there as a listening ear and a loving, wise presence. Even if we can’t relate to that statement, the motherly love and light of the universe is with us whether we know it or not, not part and parcel with our very own consciousness and inner light. The motherly ones in our lives often feel like a warm hug with their caring and spacious personalities, and often this is because they truly do treasure us – we have much to learn from that kind of life and that kind of love.