Please check out the sermon above, (press “CC” on your YouTube video for subtitles) above, and more extensive writing, by Rev. Coberforward, below.
The heart of usefulness is the heart of love that beats within each of our spirits: the heart of the universe, the infinite Heart of God that we all share. Within this heart all things rise, and so it is also called the light and warmth of consciousness. We’re told by sages that all things that arise must be used eventually for good, a truth often hard to fathom. That being said, the Lord has told us throughout the world religions that God desires good things for us, God points us within to the peace, love, and joy that God is (whatever we call God), and promises that Divinity will eventually bring all beings into knowing itself. Finding this core of Life within is the ultimate purpose of life, according to the sage Emanuel Swedenborg, as well as many others. This means that all things in life are ultimately useful to the extent that they support people’s awakening to the Great Spirit within themselves and all things; as it’s said Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” or, in other words, “I AM is the way, the truth, and the life.” In that way, for us our supreme usefulness is initially just coming to know our own true heart.
You could say that the coin we offer for finding the salvation that is God within, is our very being, although already in God’s hands in fullness. Christ told us that we have to give up our lives to find it, to lose ourselves to gain God. In fact, true wisdom is found when we just allow God to flow through us, “Your will be done,” knowing that what we thought was ourselves doing good is ultimately Divine. This will is not dependent on someone else’s opinions but is seen clearly as the will of God through our greater awakening to God. However, this is often a process.
The trouble is that we think that we do. Try not to do anything in a day – now that’s true labor! The less you strive to do, the harder it becomes (for reference, try not breathing). Life flows through us and is one with us, but we have such a sense of “workfulness” that we suffer our natural experiencing, the natural actions and thoughts that arise through us due to our socializing and our spirit. These become further transformed and flow when we let go of our overinvestment in them to instead embrace the heart of the moment, the openness of what we are, the unity of God present to us in the only moment there ever is: now. When we truly become aware that it is God that ultimately does all good, that God is the only true power in the universe, then we become like the angels in Swedenborg’s visions: still living our lives but with a renewed sense of peace, joy, originality, fearlessness, love, mercy, humor. and connectedness with all things.
The beauty of Dr. Wilson Van Dusen’s approach to the idea of usefulness is its devotional aspect, this is where we contemplate in feeling and thought the God that is life and our shared being while we do anything throughout the day. He wrote that this makes all activity devotional and of service. Wilson Van Dusen is an inspirational Swedenborgian figure, especially well-known in the 20th century, who took Swedenborg’s idea of usefulness and empowered it to be of better service to Swedenborgians and many others. But of course, it was God who did this! Like anything that has at its core our Divine Parent, the power within the idea of use was always there, but in Wilson’s reflective approach we can more easily find the true blessing that this concept offers us. The core of his approach to usefulness is the practice of returning to our orientation towards the core of life, beyond the trivialities of our selfish judgments and analysis. This orients us naturally to the well-being of all being, brings us further into Being itself, and in that way naturally guides us into other useful modes of feeling, thinking, and doing.
The trick is really understanding that the word “use” in this light isn’t defined in the same way that the world might define it. Use, from Swedenborg and Van Dusen’s perspective, is more dependent on where our hearts and minds are oriented, less on the specific act that we are doing. In the same way, Christ taught us to pray that the Lord’s will be done, and he himself said “Not my will but Your will be done.” This highlights Christ’s teachings that we should primarily be orienting ourselves towards God and God’s will, which is of the greatest usefulness. Centered on this core of use, we are then led to activities and expressions that are externally useful either from habit or from a more clearly Divine impetus, but that are now grounded in the ground of being: the type of awareness of our shared life in Divinity that God is always seeking from us.
This brings us into the naturalness of life that we were always meant to have, and indeed, that we never truly lost although missed. God has always been with us as our life itself, the light of awareness and love, but we’ve allowed our concepts of being separate and our ignorance of how true this is to blind us from God, from the Prince of Peace already at the seat of being. It’s said that Adam and Eve left the garden due to their eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we ourselves continue to miss the garden within due to our identification with our own Tree of Knowledge. We have to start to let go of all of our personal judgments and turn to the Divine wisdom of our shared being.
Our minds as they currently stand cannot really understand why there is evil, although Swedenborg’s explanations about free will and being used for good through comparison and learning can go a long way. It is only the mind of God, the heart of God within, that can see through all occurrences and just see God at work, feel God at work, even through the evil that God could never will directly. Accepting the inherent wisdom and truth of God’s infinity within is what Christ meant when he told us to follow him and become one with the Father and perfect like the Father. It is in this transpersonal light that Jesus said, “I am the way,” as opposed to his seemingly more personal moments, like when he prayed, “Not my will but Your will be done.”
In this light, all things are useful. But a true embodiment of use is found when we centre on God and the light of love that we all are and do the good things that spring from there. This sort of usefulness carries with it the peace that we find centering on Divinity and on the reality that God is here, God is whole, and God needs nothing and is one with us. This releases us from striving to do useful things and instead, centers us on the supreme usefulness of life and being itself. From there our uses flow, not to be compared and contrasted with our neighbours’, but enjoyed in the fullness of the light and love that we have started to uncover as our very heart.
Rev. Cory Coberforward
New Church of Montgomery, in Glendale 