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 that ground my life, that inspired the life of the great Helen Keller, and that create a portal for the new life that so many of us long for.

This week: Regeneration.

All right, let’s get into regeneration. I just took a shower, so it’s a great time to talk about it — water and the activity of washing are a beautiful correspondence to the journey of regeneration and spiritual growth.

You probably remember that in the Scriptures, Jesus speaks about being born again — not of water, but of the Spirit. The sacrament of baptism signifies this journey of regeneration: of washing, of being renewed. That is integral to the path of life we all want.

Unlike some more traditional visions of this invitation to be born again, in the New Church we understand this process as an ongoing one. Similar to some of the myths I debunked about heaven and hell last week, being born again is not something that happens in an instant and then it’s done. It’s not something that happens through a particular profession of faith. It’s actually an ongoing, eternal process of being made new, continually.

Some of you may have participated in the Creation series we recently did, looking at the seven days of creation as symbolic images of the stages we go through on this journey of being born again, of being made new.

This is a universal process. It is something the Divine — God — is doing in us and through us all the time. It’s something we sometimes think we’re taking part in, and certainly the history of the church, in seeking to create a container for understanding this process, in seeking to offer insight and wisdom into how it unfolds, has sometimes led us to think we are controlling it or choosing it. But ultimately, this is something God is doing in us. God is growing us.

And the direction God is growing us in is the direction of heaven. The process of regeneration returns to us the truth of who we are. It returns to us the truth that we are beloved children of God, just as we were on the first day we were born from our mother’s womb. When we are born of the Spirit, we become like children again — we recognize the Divine source of our lives, we recognize all the support that exists around us, and in that recognition, we let go of some of the hubris of our earthly selves. We become aligned with the Divine, surrendered to the Divine life, humble — because when we recognize that we are connected to all of this Divine life, we also recognize that so is everyone else.

I’m not going to cover all the stages of this journey in this video — feel free to go back and visit our Creation series for more insight into that — but I will speak to the goal. The seventh day, if you remember, is the fulfillment of creation, and the fulfillment of the regeneration journey. What happens on the seventh day? Rest. The fulfillment of the regeneration journey is resting in God — recognizing that God is living in us, and that we can rest in that knowledge. We can trust that we don’t have to work so hard to achieve, or overcome, or receive that blessing. It’s already there. It’s already our birthright.

That’s a wonderful, interesting, beautiful paradox of the spiritual journey: we enter it with intention, with longing, with hope. We’re seeking — we take on this image of being a spiritual seeker, looking for insight, because we know this false illusion of separateness, we know all the negative voices that pound in our heads, and we don’t want that anymore. We want out of that. So we look for a way out, and that’s what propels us on this regenerative journey.

Then we discover, the further we walk along the journey, that the answer — the blessing — was actually there all along, underneath the noise, underneath the illusions, underneath the misconception that we are separate and on our own. And we’re reborn. That process of being reborn continues on, deeper and deeper and deeper levels, always in the direction of freedom, of love, of truth, of humility — but also of enoughness, of abundance, of fulfillment, as we rest in the wholeness of all that is.

So regeneration is essential to the journey, and it’s so helpful to me to know that I am here to grow. It gives me such clarity around the purpose of each moment — there’s no arrival, no moment when it’s all going to be set right. It’s always changing, always growing. And when we’re faced with needing to let go of things and move beyond — as painful and difficult as that can be — we can know it’s just part of the process. There is more ahead. There’s more being revealed. Every obstacle, every challenge, everything we face is actually helping us strip away some of this falsity and get clearer and clearer, closer and closer, to our true selves — and to divinity itself.

I find that really useful, and I hope you do too. I hope it might help encourage you in this particular time of so much change, so many challenges, so many experiences of what we thought was true being stripped away — but to see that, too, as just part of the regeneration journey each one of us is on individually, and that we are on collectively as a species at this time.

So, blessings on the journey of change.

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, because I’d love to hear your experience with them. These truths are only true insofar as we live them.

Many blessings, friends.

Continuing this series on what's on my altar and why: this week, a portrait of the man whose vision shapes my whole ministry.

Hey friends, welcome to week two of me sharing different items from my home altar, to share a little bit more about me and how I’m cultivating sacred space in my life.

So for the second week, I want to share this image of Emanuel Swedenborg that I keep on my central altar. There it is — a little closer

So why do I have Swedenborg back here? Well, of course, I am a Swedenborgian minister, so it makes some sense. But the life of Emanuel Swedenborg is deeply impactful to my understanding of myself, and what it means to be alive. Emanuel Swedenborg was a pretty cool dude, and not everybody knows about him. He lived in the 1600s and 1700s — he was like the last, greatest, smartest person on the planet. Someone who wanted to know everything there was to know in his time, and that search for knowing was always driven by this desire to know ultimate reality, to know God, to know what was really true, and how to be connected to that truth.

I think I have a lot of similar energy to Emanuel Swedenborg. I think, had we been contemporaries, we would have been friends. He was just a deeply curious and devoted human being. He really questioned the truths that were available to him at his time and wanted to know more. His father was a Lutheran bishop, very devoted to the church, and Swedenborg himself had powerful experiences, even as a young child, of the spiritual realm.

Then, in his fifties — I’ll be fifty in January, so I’m excited to be entering this era for myself — after a long career in the world and a long scientific career, he decided to enter into these deep meditative states. He started to take on a very powerful breathing practice, went into periods of isolation, and in that experience, received a call from God — received a visitation from the Lord God manifest as Jesus the Christ, telling him to go further, to explore these inner realms, and to share his experiences with others: to share what he was receiving about what was true about the spiritual world.

So I like to keep Swedenborg on my altar to stay connected to him as a person. I think it’s actually nice to have a picture of this person, because so often, when churches form around the vision of a person, sometimes their work becomes almost disembodied from who they are. I think it’s important to remember that the insights he brought, he brought through his own experience — his lived experience, his body, his humanity. So I like to connect with Swedenborg’s humanity. I like to keep him here because I think he is a part of my journey now. I think he’s on the team of the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative.

I feel like part of what I’m working to do is to look again — look anew — at his vision, and really come to understand what it means for me in a lived, embodied, practical way. Because that was so much of his message, right? His message was that religion is not just about what we profess that we believe. It’s not just about what we practice, the rituals we take part in — it’s our life. It’s who we are as people. It’s a life of kindness.

"His message was that religion is not just about what we profess that we believe. It's not just about what we practice, the rituals we take part in — it's our life. It's who we are as people. It's a life of kindness."

I feel very strongly that the calling I am receiving is a calling that also Swedenborg received, and there is a lineage that connects us. I feel deeply connected to him, and supported by him, in the work I’m doing right now. So it’s really important to me to have him on this altar, reminding me that he’s on the team, and that this is good work to be doing. And to see that he’s part of a community — a family of humans seeking to be truthful, seeking to be loving, seeking to connect with the source of life. While I go about that work differently than he did, because I’m a different being, there are these common threads that tie us together.

So yeah, that’s Emanuel Swedenborg. I am a Swedenborgian minister, and he is in my altar space, always informing me in the work that I’m doing — through reading his writings, but also through just remembering that on a spiritual level, he still very much exists. He’s around. He’s with me, and with many others, continuing, I’m sure, to be curious and to want to bring into being something new — which is what I’m all about.

So yeah, there’s Swedenborg. I wonder if he’s on your altar, or if there are other beings — saints, luminaries, seers, or teachers — that have informed your path, that you keep in your altar space. Let me know. Let’s talk about it. All right — take care, friends.

Share images and stories from your altar in the comments!

I’d love to see what spaces you are creating ❤️

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: heaven and hell.

I want to talk about heaven and hell from the most practical perspective possible. First off, we have to clear out of the way any idea that heaven and hell are places of reward and punishment — that God is some big, booming authority figure in the sky watching what we do and giving us rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad. God is not Santa Claus.

When I talk about heaven and hell — when we think about heaven and hell in the New Church — really it’s an invitation to consider the different experiences we are able to have while we’re on this human journey. And I’m guessing that when I say the word heaven, and I say the word hell, you can think of times in your life when you’ve experienced both. They really represent two sides of a powerful polarity — a polarity that we as human beings are given full freedom to experience.

On the one side, we have heaven: a feeling of deep connection to all that is. A sense of belonging. A sense that what we are is intricately connected to everything else, where everything we have to offer is received, and everything we need is offered. This is the experience of being one with the universe. Heaven is a free exchange of life, where everything fits together — it’s the epitome of wholeness. When Swedenborg experienced heaven in the spiritual world, he described beautiful portraits of that wholeness: angels working together in different communities, living, loving, caring. That’s the ideal state, and it’s the state that is most real, under the surface of all things.

And yet, when we come into these human bodies, we are given the freedom to experience something very different. It’s quite interesting — Emanuel Swedenborg specifically states that it’s human beings who create hell. Before human consciousness emerged, hell was not a thing. Life was just life, expressing itself in balance, in equilibrium, and changing forms. But when consciousness emerged in human beings — now creatures able to look down and consider ourselves as autonomous and separate, able to imagine the past and the future, and feel a sense of agency — we were then empowered to create hell, to turn away from the natural flow of life we had always been a part of before.

This is the story of leaving the Garden of Eden — the inevitable journey we human beings take away from connection to God and into the experience of separation. The feeling of hell really is that understanding of ourselves as entirely separate from everything else, on our own, unsupported, and finding satisfaction only through very materialistic means: either dominating and controlling others, gathering the most stuff, having the most pleasure, or even sometimes finding pleasure in our pain. All of that really resounds with the experience of hell. This is why some people say that earth itself is a hellish realm — much of our consciousness on this earth is shaped by this sense of separation. We have come to be very materialistic beings who judge the world through the lens of the physical, often unconscious of all the forces at work that are beyond the physical — the forces that ground us in connection, in wholeness, in heaven.

Heaven and hell are not states of eternal reward and punishment, but states of being that we human beings can experience. And hell is that state of limitation we are uniquely crafted to be able to choose. But thank goodness — and perhaps I’ll explore this in next week’s video — the journey of regeneration is the journey of exploring all of the possibilities of hell, all of the possibilities of limitation and isolation, and then remembering, returning to that deeper experience of oneness that is, in fact, more real, and escaping from the illusion that is hell.

Swedenborg tells us these are experiences we have now, and they are realms of being where we continue to live after we die — some souls stepping into a life of heaven and continual expansion unto eternity, some souls stuck in this material illusion, in the sense of separation, and continuing to perpetuate that separation even after they die. There’s a debate in Swedenborg about whether or not hell is an eternal realm. What he does say is that the more we move in one direction or the other, the more energy and life respond to that movement. The more into heaven we get, the more angels we’re attracted to, the more positive experiences continue to build — and vice versa. The more hellish choices we make, the more separation we believe in, the more negative voices we allow in and share with others, the more that kind of state can build. And yet, at the same time, we’re always kept in this equilibrium — this balance between the two. All of us are in that balance.

This is something I love about the Swedenborgian church: this acknowledgment of all of our messy imperfection, that every human being exists in that equilibrium. Nobody is so perfect that they might never struggle with limitation, and nobody is so limited that they might never experience illumination. The truth is, we’re all free, and we’re all connected. And the deep heavenly life that Swedenborg witnessed in his ability to step into and explore both the heavenly and the hellish realm is that the Divine holds it all. The Divine holds it all, and in all of it, it is good — it is freedom. So perhaps all of it is part of this journey of expansion that God is, and is seeking to bring into being.

As difficult as this life can be, with all of the hellish experiences so many of us are privy to, and that sometimes seem to be the only story in town — all of them give us the chance to see what we don’t want to choose anymore, and the Divine forces continue to support us to choose differently next time. I find this helpful in my own life: to understand that these influences are always around, to not beat myself up too much if I’m in a hard place, and to just remember that all experiences are of use.

So wherever you are on the journey — whatever you’re experiencing right now, whether you’re in a time of heavenly expansion or a time of limitation and struggle — know that there is goodness in it, and that you have the freedom to choose, every day, a little bit more, the life of heaven.

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, because I’d love to hear your experience with them. These truths are only true insofar as we live them. I’m so excited to hear about your experience.

Many blessings, friends.

This week I'm starting something new: each week, I want to share a piece of my altar — the objects, art, and touchstones that surround me in the space where I live, pray, and work. First up: a mandala with roots in my sister's creativity and my grandmother's memory.

Greetings, friends.

I’ve had an inspiration to share, each week, something from my altar. My bedroom has become, in many ways, my sanctuary — my church. I record many videos from this chair where I do all of my Zoom gatherings, and I have a lot of different art and objects around me that I’ve collected. That is my altar. My workspace. Part of the nest, I guess I could say, that I’ve created to hold me in this work I’m doing right now of cultivating the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative, and of cultivating the life I’m called to live.

My suspicion is that we all create this. I wonder — if you’re in your room right now, or your space — if you look around, you might find a picture, or a painting, or an object that carries some kind of emotional charge. That carries some spiritual weight. I wonder if you sometimes think about your own life as a process of creating altars, of cultivating sacredness, in your own home, in the place where you live day to day.

I’ve always been conscious of this, but I think probably when I was working in churches — you know, sanctuaries built by communities to honor the sacred and to live into sacred work together — I didn’t think, maybe, as intentionally about my personal space. But now that my personal space is also where I’m cultivating church community and cultivating sacred experiences, I’m really aware of what has formed around me. And, interestingly, the way I care for it — and the way I neglect it.

Part of what motivates this series is: I just spent some time cleaning up here, and was noticing some of the neglect that had occurred. We had a pet that recently died, and had been sick for a while. There was some debris from all of that tumult. There was laundry I just couldn’t put away. It’s quite a thing when your sacred space is also your bedroom, because there’s a lot of other things that happen there that need to be taken care of.

But at the same time as I noticed all of that neglect, I realized — certainly there have been times in my church life where there has been neglect in the buildings that I have been caring for, that communities have been caring for. It seems like the reality is: when we have sacred space, it’s work. It’s work to maintain it, it’s work to care for it, and it has to be continually renewed. Life has to continually be put into it — life energy, to care for and maintain that which we honor and respect. And it’s useful to be sensitive to, aware of, those cycles.

"It seems like the reality is: when we have sacred space, it's work. It's work to maintain it, it's work to care for it, and it has to be continually renewed."

So I’ve become aware of those cycles in my personal space. I am certainly aware of those cycles in the life of the church — cycles when communities are really caring for their space and loving it, and then times when there’s just not enough resources, or care, or life energy to put into maintaining those spaces. All of this is a natural rhythm, and a rhythm we can learn from.

So, in my effort to make worship life and life worship, and my effort to look for the sacred in the day-to-day and the everyday, I feel really excited to honor the sacred space I’m creating, and hopefully inspire some of you who listen and follow along to look around your space and consider what you have placed there, and what that says about your spiritual life, and your calling, and your way of connecting to God.

I often have the sense that if we just stopped and noticed what was around us, that everything we need to hear from God would be present — is present. It just takes a tuning in, and attentiveness, and intention to look. So that will be my intention with this Altar Space series, and I hope you’ll enjoy seeing some of my altar, and I hope you might share some of yours.

So the first thing I want to share is this mandala that I created. You may recognize this — the dot paintings that are very popular now. You can find them at Michaels: you get a little kit with a bunch of little jewels, and you’re instructed on where to put them. My sister got very interested in this dot art — she’s one of my closest friends and confidants, if not the closest, and I’m often inspired by her ideas. So I got into it as well.

Creating this one felt particularly special because it’s a mandala, and my grandmother, Melissa, before she died in the last few years of her life, really enjoyed coloring mandalas — you know, you can buy those mandala coloring books. She enjoyed it so much that the basement walls in her house were just covered with these mandalas she had created. It was very soothing to her.

She had told me that earlier in life she’d made me a latch-hook rug that was like this beautiful sunburst — I’ll see if I can find a picture of it to share in this post — but it was a mandala shape, and she shared that this was her perception of what God looks like. She really saw the mandala as that Divine image, which of course many of this world’s spiritual traditions see — the sacredness in this mandala image, with all of its diversity and intricate uniqueness, but also shaped around a center point and then expressing outward. So resonant with this idea that we all come from the same source, but then burst off into all of our myriad differences.

So anyway, to have this mandala in my altar space — it reminds me of my sister, whom I love so much. It reminds me of my grandmother. I love that it’s dot art, and it connects me to that playful, childlike spirit of creating. It’s a beautiful mandala, and a recognition of the way the divine operates.

I also had a powerful experience my first year of undergraduate college, when I was at Wesleyan University. A group of monks visited and created a sand mandala in the student center. That was a hard year for me — I only ended up staying a year, and I dropped out, really, with deep existential angst about why I exist and what the purpose of life is. Watching those Buddhist monks in the student center diligently crafting this beautiful mandala — that they would then, of course, sweep away — the impermanence of it really had an effect on me. It was maybe a sacred touchstone in a very difficult time of my life, one that helped me stay tethered to this earth, and helped me connect to the Divine — something bigger than myself — at a time when I felt very alone, isolated, and afraid of life.

So that’s my first installment of this Altar Space series. Let me know if you’re enjoying it. Let me know if you notice something in your own space you’d like to share with me — I would so love to hear it. Let’s just see what unfolds over these next few weeks. I have a lot of things on my altar, so I’ll have a lot to share, and a lot of stories to tell. I look forward to telling them, so that you can know a little bit more about me and what I care about — and hopefully help you feel comfortable thinking about what you care about, and how you’re creating sacred space around you.

I hope you’re having a good summer. We’ll talk soon. Blessings.

Share images and stories from your altar in the comments!

I’d love to see what spaces you are creating❤️

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 that ground my life, that inspired the life of the great Helen Keller, and that create a portal for the new life that so many of us long for.

This week: Divine Providence.

It might be that the doctrine of Divine Providence was the first to fully land in my body in a way that transformed my life. I remember back in college at Urbana University, when I was first studying Swedenborgian doctrine more directly, I was walking back to campus on a particularly beautiful evening. The sun was setting, the sky was full of pinks and purples, and there were some beautiful growing things all around me. And I had this wonderful moment — I’m sure all of you have had these moments — this moment of just feeling the fullness of life and reflecting on this stream of Providence that had brought me to that moment.

My life was full of a lot of shifts and twists and 180-degree turns up unto that moment. There had been a lot of uncertainty in me. I had really entered a dark night of the soul after graduating from high school. I had a strong sense of not feeling like there was anything supporting me, and that it was up to me to figure out my life.

The doctrine of Divine Providence reminded me that there was a lot more going on than that — that something else had figured out how to form my body, my brain, my lungs, my heart. Had given me a family to embrace me. So many of the moments of my life, of course, I had not been creating in and of myself. And yet I carried that perspective — and I think a lot of us do.

Part of being a human being is coming down into this particular, individual form, and having the experience of feeling ourselves as quite separate — separate and empowered to make our own way, to make our own choices — to the point where some of us forget all of the support that continues to also be at play, all of the deep connection between our individual lives and Life with a capital L.

Divine Providence is the doctrine that there is a stream of life moving in a direction, and that direction, that intention, is a heaven of the human race — those are the words that Emanuel Swedenborg uses to describe the goal of this Providence. And if you think about what we know of the history of life on this planet, evolution has been moving and growing and becoming continually more and more complex, up until the formation of us human beings, with our incredible capacity to observe and think and be conscious of our lives.

While it can be hard sometimes, perhaps, to consider that we are moving in a heavenly direction — with all of the challenges that we human beings seem to continually cause for one another — you could say that all of it is this process of ever-increasing freedom. And that, of course, we human beings would have to try out all our faculties, for good or for ill, to see what is possible, what we are capable of. And that, of course, because we are born into these individual forms that are given the experience of feeling ourselves as separate, part of that journey would be this experience of competition, of protection, and violence towards one another.

When I look at life from as high a perspective as I can get, I can see and feel this stream. I can see how a lot of the ills that we experience are part of our coming to see what we are free to do, and that as we experience harm, we become more aware of our desire to move in a different direction.

In my own life, I’m deeply grateful for this faith in Providence, because what it helps me to do is to feel myself deeply connected to all of life, held by the Divine Life that wants heaven for me. And it helps me to trust wherever I find myself.

I know one of my temptations has often been to think, if I am in a difficult situation, that I shouldn’t have come here anyway, that I’ve made a horrible mistake — and I’ve gotten caught in these loops of self-rejection whenever I have faced a challenge. The doctrine of Providence has helped me to see the futility of that perspective. Whatever the cause, we’re here now, facing what we’re facing. The only useful attitude is to accept that, and then to wonder: what can we do in our present circumstances to move in the direction we wish to go — to move in the direction of heaven?

It’s my deep belief that we all want the heavenly life, and we’ll get into that in another video. But just as a little teaser: the heavenly life is the life of giving all that we have and having it be fully received, and receiving everything that we need. That is what all cells in the human body want. That is what all humans want. That is what all life wants. And so the stream of Providence is the stream that is getting us moving in that direction — and it’s always flowing, right now, the next moment, and the next. Even if we’re facing difficult circumstances — even in those circumstances — Providence is moving and helping us to learn and continue to grow in the direction of heaven.

I hope you find comfort in this doctrinal truth of the New Church. I hope that it might empower you to continually come back to trust — trusting your life, trusting where you’re planted, and trusting the energies that are moving through you and the inspiration that is coming through you that wants to be expressed, because all of it is being guided by the stream of Providence.

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 that I want to hold, because I’d love to hear your experience with them. These truths only are true insofar as we live them, and I’m so excited to hear about your experience.

Many blessings, friends.

Sage

Welcome to Notes from the New Heaven. 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 that ground my life, that inspired the life of the great Helen Keller, and that create a portal for the new life that so many of us long for.

In the fall I’ll host larger Be Honest Livestream Faith Conversations on each topic, so if one resonates in particular let me know in the comments and join the conversation!

This week: Spiritual Freedom

Spiritual freedom is an essential of the New Church. Emanuel Swedenborg saw, in his experiences of the spiritual world, the statement: now it is permitted to enter into the mysteries of faith. Before, faith was something you were taught and encouraged to accept without much questioning, doubt, or discernment. Swedenborg saw that we were entering a new time — one in which it would be integral for every person to investigate any truths that were offered or suggested. To be a person of faith was to be in freedom to inquire, and to be intentional about witnessing and taking seriously our own inner experience.

Spiritual freedom is an invitation to have a direct relationship with God — a direct experience of the divine life within — and to take our own experience of that life seriously. It’s so resonant with many passages in scripture. I’m thinking particularly of the passage from Revelation, where we hear that in the holy city, God will be with us and be our God.

We are meant to have this direct relationship. In the New Church, that direct relationship is essential. As we come into that relationship in freedom — to feel how God speaks to and connects with us in the most intimate ways — it allows us to live in alignment.

I’ll be fifty in January, so when I think back on my first four decades of life, I recognize that while I sought to be free, what often felt like freedom was really actions of escape or rejection. There was a lot of pinging back and forth inside my heart and mind, where I would act in a spirit of freedom, and then other parts of my psyche would jump in and cause me to feel guilty or rejecting of myself. There was often a great deal of inner turmoil.

I’m not saying that inner turmoil has completely ended, but it’s definitely softened. And part of that softening has come from a deep engagement with this invitation to freedom — recognizing that the freedom God wants for us is alignment, wholeness, an accepting of all that we are, and a commitment to understand that at the center of it all is something good, something free, something loving that wants to be expressed in the world.

It seems to be true that to come to that place of love, we often have to go through a lot of inner turmoil and conflict. You hear that in scripture too. I’m thinking of the story of the prodigal son, whose first understanding of freedom is the experience of being able to reject — of being given the opportunity to leave his father’s house. But then we learn that his real experience of freedom was his ability, and his freedom, to return.

The spiritual freedom most essential to the New Church is that freedom to return — to return to ourselves as beloved children of God, and to return to an acceptance, a curiosity, a love, and a commitment to the life that is flowing through us. As we do that, that’s when we experience true spiritual freedom.

It is the freedom of surrender — of accepting life as it is, and recognizing that we have a role to play in our own lives. It’s accepting and appreciating, feeling awe and gratitude for this life, versus the freedom we also have to reject our own lives and the life given to us. This is the mystery of freedom. On one level, it’s the freedom to reject — the freedom to enter and create hell, if we choose. Or it’s the invitation to embrace true freedom, which is accepting and loving and curious about the life we’ve been given.

As Independence Day comes this weekend here in the United States, I invite you to consider this invitation to true freedom, and what it might make possible for us — as individuals, and as a species. To really embrace your life, embrace all its experiences. And if you’re in a state of inner turmoil, of rejecting yourself, moving this way and that — even embrace that. Consider and understand that even in the midst of that turmoil or struggle, there is love, there is curiosity, there’s compassion, and there is freedom.

We have a lot of limitations in this material existence. I don’t have the freedom to turn down the temperature of the sun, or to shift the essential nature of my body. I was born in a particular part of the globe. There are real limitations to this material form. And yet there is this incredible infinity within us — this divine life within us — that wants us to be free. When we bring that spirit of freedom into our material bodies, that’s when it gets really exciting. That’s when the possibility of the New Church coming to earth really gets going.

Welcome to Notes from the New Heaven. 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 that ground my life, that inspired the life of the great Helen Keller, and that create a portal for the new life that so many of us long for.

In the fall I’ll host larger Be Honest Livestream Faith Conversations on each topic, so if one resonates in particular let me know in the comments and join the conversation!

This week: God as love, wisdom, and use.

God — the divine, the divine source of all that is — is made up of three primary components: love, wisdom, and usefulness. And this is a good day to be recording this message, as I sit here with the sun on my face. Because the insight that Emanuel Swedenborg brought to us is that the sun is a powerful representation, a powerful correspondence, of what God is.

As we know, all life on this planet owes its physical life to the reality of the sun, to the sun’s heat and the sun’s light. We would cease to exist if the sun went out of the sky. And in that same way, we would cease to exist if God was not God — if we were not all connected to this powerful Source that brought life into being and continues to bring life into being.

These three descriptions of God’s character, of God’s reality, are really useful in my experience for understanding who I am and what matters.

First: God is love.

The primary energy of God is this loving energy — this energy of unity, of presence, this energy of heat in life. It is the heat from the sun that is primary. Swedenborg suggests that love is the primary reality of God. It is the substance of life. This is where, in the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative, the love comes from — it comes from that first declaration that God is love, and we are love, and we are here to be that love. That energy, that life, is what is driving this show, what is making possible this experience that we have. Love is the substance of all things, of all life. It is the primary reality of God.

Second: God is wisdom.

Wisdom, as Swedenborg describes it, is the form that love takes. While God is first and foremost this love — this energy, this heat, this life — that love also longs to express itself, to be something. And what is so incredible about this universe that we inhabit is that it is so many things: planets and stars and grass and rocks and blue sky and animals and human beings. All of these forms, all of these expressions of the substance of love, are created, crafted, and expressed through this power of wisdom. Wisdom is the form that love takes, and this is a vital aspect of the divine. The divine is this loving energy that seeks to live out in form — and this is why and how the universe came to be, how God came to create this universe that we are a part of.

Wisdom, truth — what is true, what is wise — is what is real and what is being expressed and experienced in the forms that we inhabit. In our trinity, we speak of be honest to connect with this invitation of truth. I use the word “honesty” instead of “truth” because honesty is something we can do. Our trinity — be love, be honest, be useful — is an attempt to consider what we can do moment to moment, day to day, to connect with these divine energies.

Honesty is the invitation for us, as individual human beings, to perceive, reflect on, witness, and be present to our lives — and as we do that, we can actually come into deeper alignment with what is really true, what is really wise. Right now, we are at a powerful threshold with all of the information that’s available to us: the internet, artificial intelligence, so much truth is out there — so many words, so many descriptions of what this experience is. And we might say that all of those descriptions, all of those words, are only wise, are only true, insofar as they reflect our actual lived experience. The truth is what’s embodied, what’s made flesh, what’s existing in true form and in true life and relationship. And so be honest is the invitation to align ourselves back with this wisdom — this form that God is making manifest in the world, the reality of life.

Third: God is usefulness.

Swedenborg describes this in a few different ways. He talks about it as the divine proceeding. It’s about action. It’s about movement. God is love — heat and life. God is wisdom — form and light. And then God is also the movement, the life, the flow, the activity that occurs within that framework.

Another way to think about usefulness is that it is the marriage of love and wisdom. When love is present and wisdom is present, the two together form useful action, useful movement, useful creation and co-creation. Usefulness is the flow of energy — it’s occurring right now in the singing of the birds, the breeze, the words coming out of my mouth, the breath moving through my lungs. It is the movement of life that occurs over time.

And a big thing to remember about usefulness — because it’s a word that has been misinterpreted for maybe thousands of years — is that it isn’t about overproduction. It’s not about doing all the time, or always making yourself of use to others. It’s much more about that wise, loving flow. It’s about responding in a way that is useful, in a way that is needed. Sometimes the useful thing is a moment of rest. Sometimes it’s activity. Sometimes it’s play. Sometimes it’s creation. Right now and at different times in history, different things are useful and needed. Sometimes we’re in a time of creation, and sometimes we’re in a time of destruction. So usefulness is the third part of the trinity — it is the divine flow that occurs between all three of these energies: the heat of love, the light of wisdom, and then the dance between the two, and between all of us.

To understand God as love, wisdom, and usefulness helps me to understand myself as a child of God — that I too am grounded in this love, that I too carry wisdom and am formed in wisdom, and that I can appreciate and be grateful for this incredible human form I’ve been given, even when my material eyes may be critical of it or wish it functioned a little bit better. Even when that happens, I can remember the gratitude for my breath, for my ability to move and live and love, and then to honor and recognize usefulness as the natural response to that — and that I have a beautiful part to play in this larger dance of life.

To understand God in this way is deeply grounding to me, day to day, moment to moment. And be love, be honest, be useful is a way for me to align with that divinity in an intentional, practical, lived way — with myself and with others.

Thanks for tuning in. If any of these truths particularly speak to you, I hope you’ll join us this fall for some larger conversations that I want to hold — because 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.

Join us this summer for a 12 part series on my experience with doctrinal pillars of the New Church. In the fall I’ll host larger Be Honest Livestream conversations on each topic, so if one resonates in particular let me know and join the conversation!

The New Jerusalem encapsulates the hopes for our human species — that we were not created to live in competition and suffering, but that we were created to live in community, in connection, in a diverse unity. This is the image of the holy city with its twelve gates that are always open, its constant daytime where all is transparent and true, where honesty reigns, and where the tree of life lives, bringing healing to the nations.

Many of the world’s spiritual and religious traditions speak of such a time of unity and cooperation. Within Christianity — and made even more explicit in the vision of the New Church that Emanuel Swedenborg proclaimed — we hold the New Jerusalem as the image of humanity’s fulfillment. That our fulfillment will come, and is coming into the world, insofar as we bring our full selves to the table. Insofar as we grow in our understanding that we are one family made of many diverse parts. That has been the intention all along, and it is a beautiful and glorious thing.

Now, to be honest — as I believe we all must be — it can be hard to hold the belief that that is where we’re headed. When we look around at all of the suffering in the world, all of the conflict, and even when we feel into the suffering and conflict that exists in our own hearts, in our own families, in our own relationships, and in our relationship to this earth and all of its resources — to hold on to the hope that we are moving toward peace, fulfillment, connection, and unity can feel like a huge stretch.

There was a time, certainly in our more recent history, when we carried a bit more optimism, a bit more hope in progress and perfection. Over the last hundred years or so, with two world wars and all that continues to transpire now, we have seen the limits of those visions. And yet, even in facing those limits, even in facing the great conflicts that persist all over this planet and throughout our species, I can’t help but continue to have hope in this vision of the New Jerusalem.

Part of what is occurring is a continual revealing of the limitations we have placed upon ourselves — the old tribal identities that are having trouble loosening, the old prejudices that have lived within our human family for so long. As painful as these last hundred years have been, they have also been incredibly revealing. And at the same time that great harm continues in many places, there are many humans who are waking up to their divine origins, to their connection to all that is, to the many parts of their own selves — going through journeys of healing and transformation that are making this New Jerusalem experience possible.

I know I have begun to taste that, particularly over these last six years since the global trauma of the pandemic. Many false assumptions and false separations are falling away for so many of us. And it is my best hope and belief that this is part of the emergence of the New Jerusalem.

Other words we might use to describe the New Jerusalem: the invitation of a new heaven and a new earth — a new way of understanding who and what we are, and bringing that understanding into being in the world. It is also tied to the Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ: that Christ is coming again through us, through our transformation as a world and as a species. And that is a hopeful prospect.

So my first Note from the New Heaven lifts up this doctrine of the New Jerusalem — this foundational understanding that we are a people of hope, moving toward an era of peace and connection within ourselves and with each other. Even when that is hard to hold, I hope you can feel the utility of holding that hope. It is the belief that something is possible that will make it possible.

Whether you resonate with the image of the New Jerusalem or carry your own image of a renewed society of unity and diversity, we are on the same team. And if you are feeling this transformation happening inside of you, then you too are being invited into this life of the New Jerusalem.

Over these next twelve weeks, as I explore other topics, I hope you will begin to feel and hear how each one is part of this new way of being — this new understanding of who we are and what we are that makes peace possible.

Many blessings, friends.

If any of these truths speak to you, I hope you’ll join us this fall for some larger conversations. These truths are only real insofar as we live them — and I would love to hear your experience.

In this heartfelt message, Rev. Sage Cole shares her reflections on the legacy of going one’s own way, the tension between independence and connection, and her exciting vision for the future of spiritual community. As she steps into new territory with the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative, she offers insights on authenticity, apostolic heritage, and the power of community in the evolving church landscape. Rev. Sage also announces her new series “Notes from the New Heaven,” which will premiere on New Church Day, Friday June 19th 2026.

Main Topics:

* The legacy of independence and personal freedom within family and spiritual history

* The importance and challenges of going one’s own way while maintaining meaningful connection

* The vision for building innovative, inclusive spiritual communities like the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative

* The significance of spiritual freedom, diversity, and authentic belonging in the modern church

* Launching “Notes from the New Heaven” a doctrinal series to connect theology with daily life

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction: Celebrating New Church Day Week and the significance of spiritual journey00:30 - Reflection on family legacy of leaving and going one’s own way01:07 - Celebrating the adventurous life of Sage’s grandfather and his impact01:34 - The concept of legacy as a journey of independence and new possibilities02:05 - Personal orientation towards authenticity and adventure in spiritual calling02:34 - The Swedenborgian Church as a community of spiritual freedom and uniqueness03:04 - The inclusive and diverse nature of the Swedenborgian community03:33 - The idea of being “all distinguishably one” 04:02 - Embracing the beauty of different beings unified in love and truth04:17 - Navigating the hurt that can come from choosing independence04:47 - The loneliness and the need to find community when going one’s own way05:16 - Envy and admiration for families carrying legacy generation to generation05:42 - The importance of supportive spaces that align with individual gifts06:10 - The tension between independence and connection in familial and spiritual life06:39 - Loss of shared purpose and community within the journey of going one’s own way06:51 - The new vision: building the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative07:16 - The call for a community that embraces both independence and connection07:44 - Wrestling with sadness and broken relationships in forging a new path08:13 - Finding fulfillment in creating spaces where full self-expression is possible08:26 - Emerging excitement from reconciling the desire for both independence and community08:57 - The role of Swedenborgian community as a nurturing space09:26 - Launching “Notes from the New Heaven” doctrinal series for spiritual reflection09:55 - Intentions to foster discussions on theological doctrines and personal embodied faith10:24 - The vision for fall gatherings to share and learn from diverse spiritual experiences10:53 - Building a community rooted in love, belonging, and diversity11:20 - Encouragement to explore and embody the life of the new church11:50 - The importance of celebrating differences and coexistence in church life

There is something happening in me. My suspicion is it’s happening in you, and all over this planet right now.

My best understanding of what is happening is that a new church is emerging, coming into being. That this vision of the New Jerusalem from Revelation — the one so many of us have been reading and holding for so many generations — is manifesting in a more real way, perhaps, than ever before.

If I had grown up in a different religious tradition, perhaps I would have a different image to explain what is occurring right now. But this is mine. This is the tradition I have received. It best reflects the experience I’m having right now and that I’m witnessing in others. If you’re reading this, if you’re tuning in to what I’m sharing, chances are pretty high that this is an image that resonates with you as well — and perhaps an experience you are also having.

I want to name that this Sunday morning. I just got off a call with the community in Kenya that I collaborate with. We had our global New Church prayer circle and our celebration of June 19th, which comes this Friday — which marks for us in the New Church tradition the beginning emergence of this new church back in the 1700s. Over these last few hundred years, my take is that that emergence has been picking up speed, and is perhaps at the fastest, most fever-pitched moment it has ever been — right now, inside of us and throughout our communities.

Let me try to articulate the evidence for this, as I’m experiencing it.

My sense of who I am is quickly shifting. The identity I’ve carried for 49 years, the ego structure I have carried, is being revealed to me. The limiting ideas and perspectives about who I can be, about what I believe is possible — the limitations I have carried for much of my life — are being exposed. They’re being lifted up and put in my face for me to feel and experience. And I am moving through deep waves of grief, rage, and fear.

All of these feelings are moving through me. My best sense is that they have been trapped, over the decades of my life, within this ego structure that is now showing itself, revealing itself — perhaps hopefully to be dissolved and transformed. And this process of dissolution and transformation is what this new church is all about. This idea that we are here to be reborn spiritually, to be changed, to be transformed. That transformation includes a healing process — the process of moving through and transforming our egoic structures so that something new can open up. Possibilities of actual heavenly experiences here on earth. Experiences of community and flow and connection that are not possible when we only live within that older egoic structure.

I must confess: this dissolution process is not fun at all.

And I see so many humans all around the planet going through it — seeing themselves, seeing their habits, and starting to suspect that there might be something beyond a constricted identity. Something beyond what they have always known. Many people, through many different modalities and processes and experiences, are going through this dissolution and recreation. I am right in the thick of it. I have been in the thick of it.

To be alive right now, I think, is to be in the thick of it. And to be okay with that. To be okay with being in process. That is, in my sense, part of what it is to step into the new church — to honor and recognize that we are in process, that we are being grown by God, that we are being changed and transformed. And that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to be in this flow of love and transformation and messiness. There is something sacred in that.

When I look out at the world, I see many people in the same place I am: being dissolved, being reformed, seeing themselves more deeply, in the thick and the mess of it. Sometimes despairing, sometimes full of ecstasy. Being humbled, while also coming to recognize their divinity and their gifts and their callings.

And then there is a certain portion of the population that is doubling down on that egoic structure. My sense is that they are terrified to step into that messy place, and so they are standing firm in the ego they have inherited, come hell or high water — and parading around in those egos in a way that, for the rest of us, appears more ridiculous than ever before. For those of us in the mess, in the reality of this humbling process, we can see right through them. It’s like the emperor with no clothes. Because those of us who have stepped into this ego dissolution are seeing beyond our own egos — and so it becomes quite easy to see beyond the egos of others.

It’s scary sometimes. We’re still in process, still caught in fear and survival. Many of those who are holding tightly to their egoic structures are doing so because they occupy positions of power, and they have money and resources on this material plane. They see the benefit of holding on. And so we can find it ridiculous and still feel the fear — because in many ways they do continue to hold power and authority over this material plane.

And yet on a spiritual level — and when I say spiritual, I am not talking about wispy powerlessness — on the most real level, on the actual ground of our being, the power really lies with those of us who are in this process of transformation. Because we’re getting down to what is real. And what is real is not this material plane. It’s not this egoic plane. It’s not this long history of stories that have set us apart from one another and caused so much harm, so much violence and disparity and cruelty.

Those of us in this process of dissolution are getting back to what is real. We’re getting back to the truth that is so apparent — and yet all of these systems of separation have been shielding us from it, holding back this truth, trying to hold the power. And the truth is this: we are all beloved children of God, of divinity. We all come from one source of life. And that source of life is in each of us equally. We all have a kingdom within — a connection to this source of love and truth and life. That is where the real joy of life comes from. And that connection has power. It has power to change us. It is what is doing this transformation that so many of us are experiencing. This powerful force, this divine source, is living through all of us. And it is orchestrating this grand, disillusioning time that we’re in.

Those who are parading around with their big egos and their power and their money, their prestige, their privilege — eventually, and it’s not going to take very long — we’re going to start to see through that. We are seeing through that. More and more of us are going to see through that, and we’re going to start to look to new forms of leadership, new forms of life, fueled by reality, fueled by this real love that is pouring through every single person on this planet right now. En masse.

I gathered this morning with the people of the New Church in Kenya, and there were many more gathered this June 19th than last year. There’s something moving all over this globe. And as every single person wakes up to their divine birthright and starts to recognize that this is where true power lives — not in these parading egoic forms, not outside of ourselves, but inside of us and between us — the new church is descending. It is coming into being.

This New Jerusalem that we were promised so many thousands of years ago has been coming — and it is coming. It is coming in this inner experience and process of transformation and regeneration. If you are going through it, friend, we are one.

It feels like a very individual journey. I have certainly felt, over these last five years, that I am so different from most other people, and that it is so hard to talk about and so hard to find community — because it is this internal process that we do have to go through largely on our own. But at the same time, I’m quite certain I am not the only one going through it. Many of us are. And I believe we are starting to come to a place of being able to find each other again, and to speak to this process.

For me, as a minister in the New Church, as a member of a community that has for many decades been proclaiming that this New Jerusalem is coming into being — that this promise of life that Jesus showed us so many thousands of years ago, this divine human life that he walked and witnessed to, is an invitation for us to follow — I receive that as a calling. To bring the divinity of our own lives out into the world and to live from there: fully, completely, devotedly. That is what is going to bring power and transformation into this world. That is what is going to knit new communities of peace and connection.

And it’s happening, friends.

I witnessed it this morning with my friends in Kenya. I’m witnessing it in relationships and conversations and connections happening within the New Church community and with new people I am meeting and connecting with. And if you’re reading this and feeling this transformation in you — just know that I’m with you.

I pray and hope that my work with the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative can help make more room in the world for us to be on this regenerative journey together, and to knit new forms of New Church life that can nurture new generations of beings on this planet to live in a new way.

More than the words here, I hope you are receiving the feeling beneath them. Something in me, deep within, connects to something in you. I am learning to trust that. The source of these words is that. Words can mix things up, can get us off track. But this heart of being — I don’t think it can be misinterpreted.

So from my heart to yours, friends: happy Sunday, happy June 19th. May you continue to trust this new life that is emerging — inside, through us, together.