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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit worshipislife.substack.com