Episode 9: The Church

Join me, Reverend Sage Cole, founder of the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative, each week as I share different doctrinal truths of the New Church — truths that ground my life, that inspired the life of the great Helen Keller, and that create a portal for the new life so many of us long for.

This week’s Note from the New Heaven is about the topic of church.

I debated driving over to my husband’s church to film this, or over to the Jehovah’s Witness meeting house just a couple of streets away from me. But I decided to film here, on my hammock — because while there are lots of places we call church, and those places certainly are places where church happens (I’m not disputing that in any way), at the core of the invitation to be church, as far as I can tell, is the invitation to honor the Sabbath: to honor God’s activity in our life, to rest from our labors, and to recognize all that God is doing that we might be here, that we might be alive.

So it felt like my hammock was a good place to record this message. This is a place I come to rest and to remember all that is being done around me and in me right now — without my efforts, without my management — all that God is doing.

Emanuel Swedenborg really blows open our understanding of church. He says that while church does happen in organized capacities, in buildings and denominations, at its core it’s something that needs to happen in us as individuals — that church is within us insofar as we are recognizing and acknowledging all that God is doing to sustain our lives and guide our lives, and insofar as we’re taking the time to stop our incessant doing and managing.

So whether we do that on a hammock or in a kingdom hall, in a church, in a synagogue, or in a river — wherever we do it — to be church, to honor and manifest church in the world, is to give our attention to that Divine life.

Another way Swedenborg describes the church is as the meeting point between heaven and earth. It’s where heaven and earth come together, and where the Word is acknowledged and celebrated. (You can go back and look at the video I released a few weeks ago about the Word, if you want to sit with what that might mean.)

Whether we live into this invitation through forms like traditional churches, or whether we take the time to be the church in our own unique way, the invitation — and the importance of church — is that we take the time to listen to God, to make space, to remember all that God is doing beyond all the things we think we’re doing, and to align ourselves with that Divine activity. To be a bridge.

I like to think of the church as a bridge between heaven and earth, and I want to be close to that bridge. I want my earthly life to be infused with the Divine life, and I want that Divine life to come into this earthly life. I don’t want to just float away into some transcendent state, and I don’t want to toil away here thinking that’s everything life is about. I want to hold both at the same time. And insofar as I hold both at the same time, I am the church. And when I get together with other people who are also holding both of those things at the same time, then we get to be church together — and this is how the church manifests in the world in larger and larger ways.

Perhaps this is a good moment to say what I mean when I talk about the new church, for those of you for whom this is all still new.

The new church is what Swedenborg saw the church growing into. Remember, he was writing in the 1700s, in the years after the Reformation — the church was the Catholic Church, and then it was these new Protestant churches. He perceived that the branches of the church that existed at the time were focused on outward form: on doctrine and practice as the measure of true religion, rather than on the deeper transformation of who we really are. Swedenborg saw that church had to go much deeper than that. It wasn’t about outward observance — it was about who we were becoming on the inside.

He foresaw a new church coming into being in the world, where human beings would come to understand that it was this inner reality of who we are — more than the ways we practice together — where God met us.

So when I say you can be church on your hammock, or in a building, or taking care of your kids, or in the river, I’m speaking of that new church. And even though we’re all sometimes doing it in very different ways, there’s a unity that connects us — a spiritual connection where this new church is coming into being, where we are recognizing the Divine life, honoring it, resting in it, making space for it, receiving it, and bringing it into our external lives. We’re seeking to do that individually, and we’re seeking to do that with others.

I hope that makes some sense. I hope wherever you are, you might take some time today to remember and give thanks for all that God is doing to make life possible in this given moment.

So I hope you get to church today.

Blessings, friends.

Thanks for tuning in — and if any of these truths particularly speak to you, I hope you’ll join us this fall for some larger conversations I want to hold. I’d love to hear your experience with them. These truths are only true insofar as we live them, and I’m so excited to hear about yours.

Many blessings, friends.