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.

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