Here, for your enjoyment, is the Autumn 2017 issue of The New Age. Don’t forget that you can also see and read it – or recommend it to someone else – by going online at www.thenewage.net.au

Autumn is often a bit of a relief! We have certainly had a hot summer this year extending well into the first two months of 2017, probably breaking even more records. The sun is wonderful, enabling life to exist, and each of us and each living thing receives its own share – usually quite gently – of all that comes out from the mass of the sun.

In this way, the physical sun is the perfect representation of the Lord who equally and accommodatingly gives out love, truth and divine presence to all living things including each of us where we are; “For He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good…” (Matthew 5 v45)

When the sun we receive is so hot that it is dangerous, it is something else! I always pause a bit when I read these words from Psalm 121: “The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night.” (v6) If the sun means the Lord, it could be thought that He might harm us or punish us in some way, but we know that the Lord does not do those things.

Every representation, or correspondence, can be applied to evil as well as good things. We can be refreshed by water but we could also drown.

It is the same with the sun. Yes, it is the Lord’s love and truth, but in this psalm the intensity of the sun stands for our (burning) self-love and self-righteousness. Little wonder that immediately before the verse I quoted it says, “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.” He guards us so that this “sun” in us will not strike us.

I remember hearing about a New Church minister who said in a discussion about the sun being descriptive of the Lord, “Aah, the sun which hardens the clay yet softens the wax!” Now there is a meaningful thought for us to contemplate where we have hardened and softened.