A married couple was having a conversation, and the wife said “Honey, I have news. We’re going to have a house guest staying with us. But there’s good news and bad news.” So the husband asked, “What’s the good news?” The wife replied, “You’re going to love him; I’m quite sure of it. He will bring you endless joy.” That sounded good to the husband, but he cautiously continued, “What’s the bad news?”
The wife replied: “Well, he’s going to be quite demanding. He will need things day and night, so we’ll be at his beck and call. We’ll have to feed him, and bathe him, and respond whenever he calls.”
The husband asked, “He can’t take care of himself?”
The wife continued: “Oh no, he can’t do that at all. Totally helpless. He won’t be able to do any help around the house.”
The husband look worried.
The wife continued, “Also, he will never say a word of thanks or appreciation.”
As the husband’s expression grew more and more worried, the wife finally added, “Oh, did I mention that he will be a newborn baby? I’m pregnant!”
So they had their first child, and she was right: her husband did love his son with all his heart, and he couldn’t believe the joy that the baby brought into his life.
But that conversation does raise an interesting question: What did the baby do to make himself so lovable? So valuable? You could say, “Well, it’s because of the baby’s potential: eventually the boy will be able to take care of himself, and even contribute to the household chores. He may even eventually say thanks.” But I think if you talk to the parents of a newborn child and ask them why they love their baby, I don’t think they will say “Because eventually it will pay off.” They love the baby now, even though the baby is helpless and useless.
So why is it that if an adult guest comes to stay with you, you would only call them a “good” guest if they do a lot of helpful things around the house? If you know that a beloved relative or an old friend comes to stay with you, do you say “That will be nice…but only if they do the dishes and mow the lawn, and perhaps leave behind some money or a generous gift?”
This is another way of asking: what is their value to you? Or, to flip it around, what is your value to others?
Let’s explore that question in depth. And to help us think it through, I am going to look at one of the most fundamental aspects of languages. Have you ever learned another language? If you did, I bet one of the first things you learned was the fundamental verbs – let’s call them the “foundational” verbs. The first language I learned after English was French, and I learned “etre, faire, avoir” – to be, to do, and to have. They’ll tell you that in the first week, but as with all languages, it takes a while to learn what those words really mean and how they are used. “Je suis un homme” means “I am a man.” “J’ai un chien” means “I have a dog.” “Je fait des mots croises” means “I do puzzles.” But there are always quirks. To say “I am happy” in French, you say “Je suis content” (I am happy), but to say “I am afraid,” you say “J’ai peur” (I have fear) – so happiness is something you are, but fear is something you have. I just point that out to show you that the meaning of those words isn’t completely simple.
Still, they can be a way of looking at that question: what is your value in life? Does your value derive from what you have? Or what you do? Or what you are? Let’s look at them one at a time. We’ll begin with “have.”
Many people define their value in terms of what they have, even though that is the most external of the three. What are the kinds of things you can have? One, of course, is physical possessions: for example, money or property. In the Bible, Joseph was very proud of his coat of many colors. But that story also illustrates the problem with defining your value in terms of your possessions: his brothers took that coat away from him. The Book of Job begins with a description of all Job’s possessions: seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. And in Biblical terms, he had something that was even more valuable than all those animals: he had seven sons and three daughters. But by the end of chapter one, all of them were taken away from him. This is why the Lord warns against building up treasures on earth, where “moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in and steal.”
For some people, the “possession” that they treasure the most is a bodily feature: a beautiful face, a stunning pair of eyes, a trim figure. In many cases, that was just a gift from God, but the owners seem to think it defines their value. In other cases, they work very hard to achieve that desirable body, but weightlifting or exercise, or perhaps even plastic surgery. It seems as though television and movies and the internet have made people even more obsessed with physical appearances, and some people spend all their time on social media showing off their looks, and perhaps making a lot of money off that way. With air brushing and photo retouching, even their “perfect” good looks aren’t good enough, and the standards for beauty becomes ever more impossible to achieve. But even if you don’t have “movie star good looks,” still you may have someone in your life who fell in love with you, and they explain why: “I love you because you are so beautiful.” And you may think, “What will happen when that beauty fades?” (As the Beatles sang, “When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now, will you still be sending me a Valentine?”). The irony of the social media age is that it is obsessed with pictures, but whatever you can take a picture of isn’t “you.”
There are other things you can have as well: you can have power, and we of course think of people who have power as the most important people in our society. You can have knowledge. I could define my value as someone who is familiar with Swedenborg’s books – or as someone who has a PhD. Is that right, that I should have more value than someone else just because I happen to have some knowledge that others don’t? But again, if I got Alzheimer’s or a brain injury, all that could be lost. So, what is your value? If it has to do with something you have, whether it be money or objects or beauty or power or knowledge, that is not a very good answer.
That brings us to the second verb: “do.” Surely your value in life connects to what you contribute to society. If you meet someone at a party and they ask, “Who are you?,” you are most likely to begin by describing your job. For many people, their identify is closely tied to their job. Making yourself useful is perhaps the most fundamental obligation of any human being – and it doesn’t have to be tied to your job, but you need to find some aspect of your life when you can prove your value by doing what needs to be done, meeting other people’s needs.
There are many statements in the Bible that seem to support this view, such as when Jesus said “By their fruits ye shall know them.” It is your actions in life that count. In Matthew 21, Jesus told a parable about a man with two sons, and the father asked them both to work in his vineyard. The first son said, “No, I won’t,” but changed his mind and did it; the second son promised that he would go, but he didn’t. You can’t just “talk the talk,” you must “walk the walk.”
And many places in Swedenborg’s books, he emphasizes that heavenly happiness derives from usefulness. You may not like your job on earth, but in the next world, you will be given a job that suits you perfectly, and it will make you happy. No one sits around idle. The lesson from advertising is: buying things will make you happy. The lesson from Swedenborg is: doing useful things will make you happy.
Still, there are some issues with this, at least on earth. The first is the question: what if you lose your job? During the pandemic, a huge number of people were laid off or fired, and due to social isolation, didn’t have many opportunities to do much for family and friends either. For others, getting a job is not possible due to physical limitations, and it may be a struggle for them to figure out how to make any contributions to others. They may have been injured, or bed-bound due to a disease, or perhaps it’s just old age. In the words of an old song, their “mind makes a promise that their body can’t fill.”
And when I think of that phrase, “your mind makes a promise that your body can’t fill,” I think of a character in the Bible I have always identified with: the man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5), who had an infirmity for 38 years, but all he did all day was to sit near that pool and wait for the waters to stir, based on the belief that whoever made it into the water first would be healed. He had a hopeless plan—“Maybe this time I’ll be the first one to make it in”—although someone always beat him to it. Jesus came along and asked him “Do you want to be made well?” Note that he did not say to him, “What a worthless person! You’ve never done anything useful in your whole life.” Jesus never said anything like that to anyone – he just loved him and healed him. But it’s an unusual miracle, because in this one, Jesus did not touch the person or do anything directly to him: He just asked the man to pick up his bed and walk, so the man did have to take action.
There’s a confusing saying about this: “If you are what you do, then when you don’t, you aren’t.” It’s from Wayne Dwyer, and to help unpack it, it would help to also include the lead-in phrase before it. Dywer says, “Don’t equate your self-worth with how well you do things in life. You aren’t what you do. If you are what you do, then when you don’t, you aren’t” (in other words, if you lose your ability to do your job, then your identity would disappear).
The other problem with tying your value in life to what you do is, it raises the question: how much do you have to do? In modern society, we tend to admire the people who are extremely driven, who work hard and never rest. We might say about someone, “They are very valuable to society because of all they have accomplished!” Mozart composed over 600 pieces; Thomas Edison filed more a thousand patents; Steve Jobs revolutionized computers and music and phones. When I was in high school, I heard about Alexander the Great conquering the known world by the time he was 21 years old, and I thought, “I’d better get busy!” Obviously, that is a recipe for disappointment. Is it okay to not conquer the whole world?
What if you don’t accomplish enough? Here I think back to the house guest example – the adult version, where an old friend comes to visit. Yes, it would be nice if they mowed the lawn and did the dishes and bought you a new vacuum cleaner—but is it necessary? What if they didn’t do any of those things? Would you still be glad to see them? Perhaps if you saw them trying to do all those helpful things, you might even say, “Relax – it’s okay to just be.”
And that brings us to the third verb: to be. What is your true value in life? Do you still have value even if you don’t have splendid things, or don’t do remarkable things? Note what Jesus said in the New Testament reading: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” He is explicitly saying they are valuable, even though he does not connect it to anything they do. He talks about the lilies of the field who “neither toil nor spin” yet are beautiful just for what they are.
And this brings us all the way back to that newborn baby, perhaps the most lovable and precious thing on earth. Why is it lovable? Just because of who s/he is.
But that still leaves open the question: what does that mean, “who s/he is?” How do we define what we are? We are not our possessions, and we are not our actions. What we really are is love. But if we are all exactly the same, how can one of us be valuable?
The answer is that we are not exactly the same – not at all. We are love, but we are not all the same love. In AC 8858, RULING LOVE – which is different from anyone else’s. There is one core love, but many other specific loves that branch out from it. It is your unique combination of loves that make you who you are, that make you different from anyone else who has ever existed, and that make you of infinite value.
How did you come to have those loves? Part of it is what you were given; part is what you nurtured through your actions. What you do in life does matter, but the reason is because those actions shape what you love.
And love always wants to express itself, so your unique combination of loves wants to find ways to show itself, and that translates into actions. For me, I love beauty and symmetry, but I also love things that are a little unusual, a little off-kilter. So I make snowflakes (HOLD UP), but they are not like anyone else’s snowflakes. You’ve heard the expression “all snowflakes are different,” but you probably also know that they are all six-sided – except mine, which are sometimes 5-sided, or 7-sided, or 9-sided. I don’t know if anyone else on earth makes 7-sided snowflakes, but even if they did, they wouldn’t be like mine.
And if, God forbid, I lost the use of my hands, or my eyesight, or ended up somewhere where there is no paper or scissors, that love would still be inside me. We refer to babies as a “little bundle of joy.” Now you are grown up, and you can call yourselves a “bundle of loves.” If, for some reason, you are frustrated in being able to express those loves on earth, those frustrations will be removed after death, and you can fully express those loves in actions, and that will shape what your face and body look like, what your house looks like, and the possessions you have. Out of those three verbs, be do and have, the question is not which one counts: they all count. The question is, which is most important. If you prioritize them as “have” first, “do” second, and “be” last, you need to rethink. If you prioritize “be” first, “do” second, and “have” third, you will know your value to the universe.