Favourite Swedenborg Passages

If you read the Editorial, introducing this idea, this is the article about that.

Many people with a connection with Swedenborg’s writings and some reading of them, find that a particular passage is striking in what it says, or is helpful at this particular moment in life.

We invite you to submit a passage from the writings that has particular appeal and meaning to you. The ways in which you can do this are given in the editorial.

Here is one of my favourites. It is about the kind of life that receives heaven.

It is from the Arcana, part of paragraph 7197

“Heaven is given to each person in the next life to the extent that things about faith and charity are present with him. Charity and faith compose heaven with everyone, although when it says charity and faith it means living the life of charity and faith. Yet it needs to be fully recognised that such a life which holds heaven within it is one that is being led in conformity with truths and forms of good that one has been taught about.

“Unless these are the rules and standards of his life his expectation of heaven is in vain, no matter how he has lived. Without them a person is like a reed which sways with every wind, because he is equally moved by those who are evil as well as those who are good. It’s like this because he has no firmly established good or truth within himself at all which the angels use to keep him in what is true and good and steer him away from those opposites which get introduced by those in hell.

In short, a life of Christian goodness is what composes heaven, not a life of natural goodness.”

I get a lot from this, but most of all, I get the point that it’s up to me to make sure that what I let myself think about and feel, or how I choose what I want to rule over my life, is based on what I know is true and good and not what I imagine it might be.

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