Letters
Letters may be sent to the Editors of New Church Life at
Box 743, Bryn Athyn, PA 19009
or e-mailed to [email protected].
Insights Into China
To The Editors:
I was struck by an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on December 18,
2016, that revealed a touching parallel to something said in the Writings about
China.
The article was titled: “Struggling to understand the new U.S.; Chinese
worry about the direction of foreign policy under Trump.” It described the
efforts of scholars in China to grasp the meaning of the unexpected election of
Donald Trump. They worried about the American public’s loss of confidence
in its governing system, and the collapse of U.S. support for the global trading
system that had helped China rise. Then I read this:
One Fudan doctoral student told me: “The U.S. I knew was a very limited
blue part of the country. Young people in China should be encouraged to
travel in red parts of the country. Most of us didn’t understand that U.S. people
suffered from the trade deficit with China.”
This last statement immediately made me think of Swedenborg’s
encounter with Chinese in the spiritual world, recounted in Arcana Coelestia
2596, Heaven and Hell 325, and Spiritual Experiences 3067.
What they were like in general it was given me to conclude from the fact
that they are of a caring nature, or they are moved by charity. I was inspired
to see this from the fact that at once when I was burning with the desire for
them to approach, moved by that desire they joined me. Then also from the
fact that when they were thinking it was they alone who had inspired the
things I was writing just above about mental imagery [3064-5], when told that
there were also others, who were indignant that they said it was they alone,
whereas it was many. Then they fell so deeply into the thought whether they
had done wrong against their neighbor claiming things which belonged to
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