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.

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