Welcome to today's worship service by the on-line Swedenborgian community.  



 Light a candle                                                                                                                                                 
Open the Word   

 

from the Bible  NLT
John 15
Jesus, the True Vine
“I am the true grapevine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more. 3 You have already been pruned and purified by the message I have given you. 4 Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.
5 “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Anyone who does not remain in me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. 7 But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want, and it will be granted! 8 When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father.

from Swedenborg

Introduction
Do you have a relationship with God? If so, how are you and God getting along?

Many people find that their relationship to God is a lot like the relationship they had with their caretakers in childhood. Many of us grow up projecting onto God the concept we had of our parents, and then relating to God the way we related to our parents as children. I remember the day I first grasped that concept.

Encountering pastoral counseling
I was in a classroom at the Boston University School of Theology listening to a very grandfatherly-like pastoral counselor and professor named Merle Jordan. I was stunned when he pointed out that if we adults are trying to please dysfunctional parents INSTEAD of relating to God, then our parents have become our God. And that, Jordan said is idolatry.

I sat up straight in my seat astounded. What an incredible insight.

I thought about my own childhood in an alcoholic family. I was often criticized, and it seemed to me that nothing I did was ever good enough to get my parents’ approval. Yet, as an adult, I had been thinking that I needed to get God’s approval; but that I’m never good enough for God’s standards.

That realization changed my concept of God and of me. I knew as a seminary student that I wanted to find a different way to relate to God. After this encounter with pastoral counseling, I had two more encounters that have been profound for me in changing that relationship.

Encountering Swedenborg
My next encounter was with Swedenborg. That happened when I was a seminary student and heard about the sudden and unexpected death of a respected pastoral counselor and professor, Cal Turley. I had friends who deeply grieved their pastoral counselor or field education supervisor. What I hadn’t realized was that Cal was a Swedenborgian minister and professor at the Swedenborg School of Religion. Actually, I had had no idea that any church existed that honored the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

I was sad that I never met Cal Turley, but through the circumstances of his death, came to learn about The Swedenborgian Church. I was not surprised to learn that Cal and Jordan were colleagues and that Jordan had quoted Turley in his book--
Calvin Turley has said that the underlying cause of pathology is ‘a case of mistaken identity.’ Essentially, persons are created in the image of God and only in being true to that inner self, linked with God, will emotional and spiritual well-being flow. When a person takes his or her identity from that which is less than the Ultimate Source of being, then the sense of self is distorted.’

Swedenborg’s ‘regeneration’ explained to me what happened as I came to have a real relationship with God. The first stage is preliminary, extending from infancy to just before regeneration, and is called ‘void, emptiness, and darkness.’ In the second stage a distinction is drawn between the things that are the Lord’s, and those that are own.’

It seemed to me that I was coming to see what really was God, and what was my own projection onto God .

I understood what Swedenborg meant when he wrote; …the second stage rarely comes into play without trouble, misfortune, and grief, which enable the bodily and worldly concerns – things that are our own – to fade away and in effect die out. The things that belong to the outer self, then, are separated from those that belong to the inner self, the inner self containing the remnant that the Lord has put aside to await this time and this purpose.

I realized that even though my self-concept had come from the ‘dysfunction’ of my upbringing, that there was a ‘remnant’ of God right inside. I wanted to relate to that God.

Encountering spiritual direction
My next major encounter was with the Shalem Institute where I studied spiritual direction. Although our training involved a lot of reading and doing of spiritual direction, it also involved residencies at the institute, where we were constantly challenged to look at own relationship with God – essential to helping others with theirs.

Tilden Edwards, an Episcopal priest who was one of the Shalem founders, says there are three assumptions necessary for spiritual direction; God exists, loves us unconditionally, and is active in our lives.

Don McDougall, a spiritual director trained at Shalem, says that in his experience of offering group spiritual direction, the participants do not have much difficulty with the first two assumptions.
They do have trouble with the third assumption, however- that God is active in our lives-both in understanding it and accepting it.
He found it helpful to add a fourth assumption;

That God is not only active in our lives but also invites us into partnership in creation, in loving the world into being. Perhaps that is only another way of saying that third assumption: that God is active in our lives, calling us into partnership in creation with God, ourselves, each other, and together loving the world into being.

That is what has become central for me in having a relationship with God; seeing us in partnership, together creating my life.

Shalem founder and psychiatrist Jerry May says that it’s often difficult for us to develop a relationship with God since so much of the contemplative literature talks says we have to surrender to God. This statement is typical-
Submit yourself to God. Learn to live in the passive voice - a hard saying for Americans - and let life be willed through you. -Thomas Kelly

May wrote -
The apparent harshness of this dichotomy is eased somewhat by the contemplatives' sense of the immanence of God in persons. For them, God is never wholly "out there" or "up there" somewhere, but is also within us, closer than our breath. In a phrase echoed by many Christian mystics, St. Augustine said God is closer to us than we are to our very selves. And John of the Cross declared without equivocation that the center of the soul is God.

Within this sense of immanence we may glimpse a reality far more punitive than words can describe. We may begin to understand that it is only our senses and images of self and God that seem so separate.

God and I are one. I and God are one. It’s me and God. God in me. Me in God. Yet as soon as I put an ‘and’ between ‘God’ and ‘me’, I’m separating us. I remember in a residency, May asking a student; ‘what part of union don’t you understand’?

My answer today; none of it, really.

It’s incredibly confusing to think about having a relationship with God. ‘Relationship’ implies two beings. If God and I are in union, then who is that does the relating? and to whom do we relate?
There are no answers, of course. In some religious traditions, the Divine is understood as impersonal energy that one doesn’t have a relationship with. In the Christian tradition, one often has a relationship with ‘Jesus.’ For many Sufi’s, God is the ‘Beloved.’

I find that God and I relate in whatever way I need in a given day. Some days, God is a sparkling rainbow with which I feel at one with. Other days, God is my Beloved, from whom I feel separate and for whom I long.

Other days, God is like a companion after many years of marriage, with whom I share my morning breakfast and chat with before bed. Other times, God is my scapegoat for everything I don’t like in my life or my world. On those days, my prayers are more like tirades of anger.

I don’t think it matters, really, how I see the relationship I have – or don’t have – with God. What does matter is that my heart is always open to the Divine flowing into me … and then we blend together in some mystical, magical way that is beyond comprehension.

What is your relationship with God like today?
 

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