new church life: jan uary/february 2016
lungs to be purged and refreshed. And in some of this the heart sends blood
right back to the lungs through a separate channel to keep the lungs healthy
and living, just as it does for the rest of the body.
Ideally this reflects the way the will of the wife interacts with her husband’s
wisdom. Her love for him flows to him separately in order to keep him happy
and healthy, but also all the affections of her love are routed through his
understanding for purging and refreshment before being brought to birth as
uses.
In turn, the fresh affection that returns to her contains the wisdom that
she loves. She gives him the gift that he needs and loves, and he gives back to
her the gift she needs and loves.
Can we mess this up? Oh yes, of course we can. Our proprium is constantly
pulling us that way. The husband can turn away from wisdom. He may simply
not be interested in raising his mind above what is natural, or he can put truths
into his memory but leave them there without putting them into action in his
life, so preventing his knowledge of truth from becoming wisdom. In this way
the love his wife might want to give him becomes of indifference to him; he
doesn’t accept it. He can do worse; he can let his mind sink down into what is
only corporeal and sensual.
The wife can do the same kind of thing. His understanding may come to
seem to her a restriction on the actions she wants to do, so that she pays no
attention and may come to see it as inferior to her own. Or she may seek to
dominate him by imposing her will upon him regardless of his thoughts.
And maybe the most common problem is the fear each one has that “I
would be willing to give my gift, but maybe my spouse won’t respond.”
We all do start out unregenerate and need a lifetime to go as far as we can
down here. Often we marry when we are young and haven’t advanced very far.
Look at Conjugial Love as a guide book to find a way to a happy marriage, not
as a book to prove something else. Maybe, echoing the wives Swedenborg saw
in heaven, wives down here will say, “Perhaps in the early days of our marriages
we were married women, but now we are wives.” And their husbands could
say, “And we were married men, but we have become husbands.”
Rather than linking references to individual ideas above I am simply going
to list them numerically as I came to them while reading. All are from the first
half of Conjugial Love, or Marriage Love. (See numbers: 37,42-4, 47R, 52, 54-5,
61, 65, 66, 69-2, 74, 75, 76-7, 90, 91, 100, 115-5. 125, 137-6, 159, 161-3, 165,
166, 176, 180. 187, 188, 190, 196, 198, 199, 222, 223, 293-3, 296, 331-2, 332,
339-3 and 353)
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