new church life: march/april 2016
shape, he is told: “You still possess a light to winnow good from evil, and you
have free will. Therefore, if the world around you goes astray, in you is the
cause and in you let it be sought.”
Paradise, Dante discovers, is all about love – living the life of love. It is our
loves, he says, that lead us to heaven or hell . He writes rapturously about being
filled with the light and love of God. A nun tells him simply: “In His will is our
peace.”
This is the power of great literature – to connect with our own lives and
help us see our own struggles and a pathway to deliverance. That its message
resonates so beautifully with the revelation of the Writings – even though it
is cast in medieval Catholicism – testifies to the ultimate discovery: that all
truth comes from God, only through people like Dante Alighieri – or Emanuel
Swedenborg.
(BMH)
stories
As long as there have been human beings there have been stories, and
story-tellers. The essential use of stories is to depict aspects of the eternal
conflict between good and evil, and thus present those abstract categories
in ways that appeal to the imagination. We need particular examples from
human experience in order to grasp spiritual and moral truths; and we need
knowledge of universal spiritual and moral truths in order to make sense of
human experience.
All good stories are “echoes” of revelation, or moral reverberations of
the spiritual truths set forth in the Word of God. The myths and allegories
of ancient times are full of correspondences and are offshoots, more or less
faithful, of revelation.
The “greatest story ever told” – the story of the Lord’s life and inner
struggles – is told over and over again in countless ways forever. If we could
somehow extract the nuggets of truth from every tale ever told throughout
human history and condense them into one simple story it would be the story
of the Lord’s life. And the real story of each of our own lives is the replaying
in us of the Lord’s life. His glorification is the pattern of our regeneration;
elements of the plot differ, the themes are the same.
(WEO)
downton abbey
Every age has its own particular blind spots, and its own special virtues and
clearly seen truths. Reading books or watching plays from a previous era, or
that accurately portray life in a bygone society, is useful in that it enables us not
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