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

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