I keep telling myself I’m going to pay less attention to the news because it’s so upsetting hearing about what’s happening in the world . Let’s face it. This world we are living in can be very stressful. So we need a little recreation now and then to relieve tension and keep our blood pressure from going through the ceiling.
Recreation suggests play and play nowadays often means organized sports for the kids…. which are great for the kids, but their parents…and their grandparents… end up spending a lot of time standing on the sidelines or sitting in the bleachers to watch the grandchildren perform, or more often than not, fail to perform.
My wife and I have fifteen grandchildren between us…ours is a blended family, which has blended very well…so I’m Grandpa Gordon to all of them, which it can both cause and relieve stress. I love watching volleyball or basket ball, but cross country running for those watching it involves standing out in some field somewhere to watch for thirty seconds while the whole herd runs out of sight, then standing around for fifteen minutes or so, before watching the kid you’re there to see come running out of the woods in the final “dash” to the finish line. It’s fine when the weather is good, but they do this even if it’s raining, or on one memorable occasion, it was snowing. No such thing as a rain delay to these enthusiasts for self-inflicted torture. Their motto might be “The more punishing the weather, the more glorious the suffering!”
This just shows how different activities can affect different people. What is beneficial for one may be detrimental, even punishing to someone else. Recreation should feel like play, but sometimes it can involve a lot of what seems more like work.
The kind of recreation I want to talk about this morning isn’t just play. Recreation, pronounced a little differently, suggests its root meaning. If it serves its purpose, it is really RE-creation. Creating new energy. Renewing life. Physically, it can renew our bodies and rejuvenate our strength. On a more spiritual level, it can renew us more deeply, in our soul. This kind of recreation might not be physical activity at all. It can involve reading and contemplating. It can even, or rather, especially, involve prayer.
Creation is the very first thing dealt with in the Bible. In the beginning, God Created…We might ask, beginning of what? The way it’s presented in Genesis, the story about how God created the world isn’t really intended to tell us literally how the physical universe, or even just this earth, came into existence. Instead, the six days of creation refer to the way God regenerates us to make us ready to live in a heavenly community lending our efforts to God’s need to create a heaven from the human species. This is God’s purpose in creation in the first place. Put very simply, God is Divine Love and Love needs something to love. Not needing in some existential way, but in a sense of satisfaction. Hence it is God’s conjunctive design that appears at all levels of creation, since it is this conjunction of Love and Wisdom that appears and corresponds between what is spiritual and what is natural, resulting in creation of the natural world from what is spiritual. It is the joining of the spiritual to the created natural that these first verses in Genesis about creation refer to in their inner meaning.
That conjunction occurs through us human beings. And it requires that we cooperate with God in creating that conjunction by returning God’s love to God. Love unites, hatred separates. This idea as been passed down through the ages and we pay lip service to it in church, but when we go about our daily lives, we tend to forget the source of life that makes it possible for us to go about our daily lives. That source is the Creator, the one who loves because love is His being, and creating unity, or wholeness, is His goal.
One place that unity needs to take place is within us. We need to become whole. As Edward Sylvia puts it very clearly, “Love adopts information to its own disposition and complexity in the same way physical gravity turns the motion of stars and planets into complex organization. One force creates coherent structure of order in the mental universe, the other force in the physical universe. The process of spiritual evolution is a real ascent of organic structure and complexity into a higher sphere. It starts when new spiritual feelings are aroused in us from our remains.”
What are our ‘remains’? God who is Love Himself, according to Emanuel Swedenborg, comes forth to create out of love in the form of Divine Wisdom. The form love takes as information, so to speak, Swedenborg calls Divine Wisdom. Note that information does take a form, although not physical form, but a form of thought in our minds. Ideas have structure and become substantial even if we only think them. Their structure is spiritual substance, not physical. It exists like a physical sentence stating an idea exists. The big difference is that the meaning of the sentence is in its spiritual substance, not the physical marks on the page. Divine Wisdom is the spiritual substance that emerges into the physical realm to create the physical realm. What holds it all together and forms it into useful material forms in the physical world is what we call gravity, creating what we call the physical world.
But we also experience that information as the thoughts and feelings of our consciousness. These are coupled with the mental activity we don’t directly experience that we know as our unconscious mind, that part of our levels of mental activity that we are not normally aware of. Put very simply, it is consciousness working with gravity, that creates the organized physical universe and all there is in it.
In a way, it seems, gravity and consciousness may be the same thing. Two things physicists have struggled to explain are consciousness and gravity. The reason they can’t explain what either of these is, is that the answer lies in the spiritual world, and physicists who insist there is no spiritual world never study it.
They are like the drunk in the old joke who lost his keys late at night and was searching for them under a street light. A police officer came up and asked him what he was doing. “I’m looking for my car keys. I dropped ‘em.” Not seeing a car nearby, the officer asked, “Exactly where were you when you dropped them?”. “Over there, by my car,” he responded pointing at a car almost invisible in the dark halfway down the block. Puzzled, the officer asked, “Then why are you looking here?” The drunk replied, “Cuz the light is better.”
People who scoff at the idea of spiritual things being real are looking in the wrong place. They are ignoring the brighter light that shines beneath the darkness of our physical minds. Swedenborg calls this brighter light our remains. By that, I don’t mean our dead bodies, although without the spirit within them, our bodies are literally dead. In this case, remains refer to what Swedenborg says are the early experiences of love we have as infants and young children, experiences of love and the tender caring and comfort parents and others provide to a young, helpless child. Swedenborg calls these “all the states of good and truth,” his definition of remains. He says that the smaller our remnants are the less human we are, and the larger they are the more human we are. (Secrets of Heaven 530)
Remains also refer to remnants of heavenly understanding from past churches on the earth, that are carried forward in new churches that replace them. He compares them to stars. The larger our remains of heavenly things within us from our infancy, the brighter they are in our older self. To this is what the phrase, “Let there be light” refers. The first chapter of Genesis is not only about the formation of the universe.
Here’s the main point I’m trying to make: the true significance of the creation story for us human beings is the way its correspondential meaning describes how a human being is formed, but not in our bodies. We are talking about our minds.
Edward Sylvia writes, “The phrase "let there be light," refers to a new state of cognition, enlightenment, and understanding within the cerebrum as a response to new influences from the limbic system and cerebellum. Men and women begin to perceive that goodness and truth actually come from a higher, transcendental source. And, then they seek this goodness in their lives.”
When He creates us, The Lord gives us two gifts as human beings. We have the gift of rationality which allows us, unlike any other animals on this earth, to understand complex ideas and remember them and apply them to our actions. We do this using the other gift God gives us, the gift of the freedom to choose. God could make us behave perfectly by programming us to do only what God wants us to do, but then we would have no real personhood. We would be robots, just machines doing programmed actions that meant nothing to us.
There would be no meaning in our choices and it is meaning that makes us human. Meaning is what we can understand and understanding is what saves us, if we respond positively to it. Love gives life meaning. Hatred destroys life, both in the physical world and in the spiritual world. To be an individual, we must be able to understand what there is to choose from and have the authority to choose one thing over another.
Here is where recreation comes in, not in the form of a vacation, or a game we can play, or time chatting with friends, but in the form of forming us. We choose what we want to become, what we want to make out of what God has given and continues to give us, that commodity we call life, the presence of love within us. God’s love is the gravity that makes us whole.
We live on a very small part of the scale of what God creates, but nevertheless, we each contribute to what God’s creation is evolving into. The purpose God has in creating is to create a heaven from the spirits of people like you and me. Philip Hefner writes in his book entitled The Human Factor, “We must act as co-creators within God’s purposeful scheme.”
When we take this seriously, our lives change. When we act as co-creators with God we begin to be re-created by the Lord according to the choices we are making and acting upon. The idea of recreation takes on new meaning as re- creation. It ain’t just play. It becomes the goal and the work of our life. We begin to try to become a tiny piece of heaven. We become co-creators with God in God’s effort to create heaven. No one, including God, will make the decision for us to do this. We must decide. We must choose.
Our real destiny exists only in the Reality that actually exists, not one we imagine. It depends entirely on the choices we make. We are free to choose. God has created each one of us, but God has left it up to us to decide what we want to be. It is important to think about it and decide if you want to live in Reality, or the world as you imagine it to be.