Sermon

And when he was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he said in

response, "The kingdom of God does not come with observation, nor will they say, `Here it

is!' or `There it is!' For behold, the kingdom of God is within you."

Luke 17:20f.

A few years ago, I saw a videotape of a minister interviewing a woman who had had a near

death experience. It was frustrating to watch, because the while there was no open

agreement, the two were actually at cross purposes. If you listened at all carefully, it

was clear that the important thing for the woman was that her life here and now had been

changed. Her priorities were different. The minister, though, kept asking her about her

belief in life after death, not life here and now.

From a strictly scientific point of view, near death experiences do not prove that we live

forever, and the efforts to center discussion on that issue are more of a distraction than

anything else. They do seem to demonstrate quite clearly, however, that human

consciousness is not nearly so dependent on the human brain as materialism has assumed.

People have seen their own bodies from a viewpoint outside those bodies. They have seen

things that happened outside the room where their bodies were. This has happened when the

EKG was flat--when there was no heartbeat whatever--and according to one account by a

highly respected researcher, when the EEG was flat--when there was no brain activity

whatever.

It is somewhat surprising to me that so little attention has been paid to this. It would

seem that one of the commonest scientific assumptions, namely that consciousness is the

product of the physical senses and the physical brain, has had the rug pulled out from

under it. Granted, this has not been demonstrated in controlled experiments. We may trust

that it never will be, since this would mean deliberately bringing people into the state

of clinical death in order to observe the results. Not only that, in the very nature of

the case, the only evidence consists of the reports of the individuals themselves. No one

else can observe their reactions, since their bodies are not reacting. The only test of

their objectivity is the accuracy of their reports of physical events that happened during

their clinical death. Slight as this evidence may seem, it would appear that no theory of

human consciousness is now adequate unless it can explain how someone can see and hear

from a perspective centered somewhere up near the ceiling while the body is lying utterly

inert on an operating table.

We can see at least the basis for an explanation in the age-old presumption that physical

matter is not all there is to reality, and that we are in fact spiritual beings as well as

material ones. This leaves an immense amount of detail to be worked out, of course, but it

is hard to think of a more promising hypothesis to account for the facts. It is a

particularly appealing one for Swedenborgians, of course, because Swedenborg did work this

explanation out in rather daunting detail, on the basis of nearly twenty-eight years of

extraordinary experience.

The main point, though, remains the same. If we are spiritual beings, we are spiritual

beings here and now. Spiritual life is not something that happens after we die, but

something that is happening now. This is precisely what people who have had near death

experiences emphasize. This is what had changed the priorities of the woman in the

interview. She knew for the first time in her life that she was essentially a non-material

individual. She knew what our theology keeps trying to tell us, that there is nothing

vague or ethereal about "spirit." Spirit is vivid and potent, live and moving. The light

experienced during clinical death is far more brilliant that physical light. The

non-physical senses are far more acute than the physical ones.

That, in a way, is part one of the message. It is startling enough in its own right, but

it is not the whole message or even the heart of the message. The heart of the message

seems to be a qualitative one. Person after person has reported being met by a being whose

depth of insight and compassionate acceptance virtually redefined what it means to be

human. This being clearly knew everything about the individual--all the things we try to

keep hidden, all the things we are ashamed of. Yet there was in this being no hint

whatever of disapproval or condemnation. There was a kind of absolute love that was

absolutely clear-sighted; and it seems that to experience that love from another is to see

oneself in a whole new way.

Usually, we associate our faults with rejection. We do not like ourselves in regard to

them, and we assume that others will share our distaste. In a sense, we almost regard it

as our duty to dislike ourselves in regard to our faults. This may well carry over into

our attitudes toward others. When we read that someone has committed a particularly ugly

crime, and then read that this individual was severely abused as a child, part of us

insists that that is no excuse. It was apparently awfully hard for us to separate a clear

view of the ugliness of the crime from an outright condemnation of the criminal.

Yet that seems to be precisely what the angelic being is able to do. There is no glossing

over what is wrong, no fuzzing of the view, no fudging of the standards. There is no

pretense that everything is fine. What there is, instead, is a total focus on the

potential for good in everything that has happened. There is an appeal to the very best

within the individual, an appeal that is possible and potent because this being is able to

see that best and address it.

That "best" is within each one of us. We make mistakes, yes, and we know they are mistakes

because that "best" tells us so. In fact, we can decide we do not want to be told, and cut

ourselves off from that voice. Our theology refers to this as "closing our internals," and

makes it very clear that it is a choice of hell in preference to heaven. It also tells us

that we cannot destroy this best, we cannot kill this voice. We can only deafen ourselves,

in a way decide to live in a part of our being that cannot hear because it does not want

to.

This is more than a mere theory. We can test it out, in a way, simply by honestly

observing our own inner ups and downs. We can notice how one day compassion seems to make

all the sense in the world, and how the next day it can seem like a romantic delusion.

Conversely, the behavior that seems utterly selfish and stupid one day can make all the

sense in the world the next.

We may tend to think of these as "mood swings," as different feelings that wash over some

kind of person or personality that is in itself relatively constant. I find Swedenborg

telling us that it goes deeper than that. We are experiencing different aspects, even

different levels of our being. The great service that Freud did us was to convince us on

fairly empirical grounds that there is a great deal more to us than we are conscious of at

any one time. Whatever one may think of his images of repression and adjustment and the

like, the message of the reality and potency of the unconscious is an important one.

Our theology takes this message in a distinctive direction. For us, part of that

unconscious, in fact the most vital part, is that "best" within us. It is not just the

animal urges, not just what we might call the subconscious. It is also and especially the

compassion and insight we are capable of, what we might call the superconscious. This is

the person the Lord designed and created, the person the Lord wants us to discover and

become. This is the person that is locked up inside, waiting for us to listen to the

messages it is sending and heed them in our everyday lives.

We are not talking some starry-eyed optimism. There is no use for rose-colored glasses

here. Just as the being of light is supremely clear-sighted, that best in us will not be

party to self-deception or to any compromise of standards. How can we understand this?

Perhaps we can say that no matter how violent or ugly the outward behavior, this "best"

will search and search until it finds the kernel of legitimate need within. It will

recognize that the means are wrong, terribly and disastrously wrong, but will not let that

recognition blind it to the profound, inherent legitimacy of the essential human being.

When we get involved in political struggles, we tend to lose sight of this absolutely. It

is as though there was a law forbidding it. "The opponent" has to be entirely, inexcusably

wrong, and we have to be totally and luminously right. It is an attitude doomed to

failure, both because it is disastrously unrealistic and because in precludes any actual

communication between parties. We will not have a just society, we will not have

ecological sanity, until we not only admit but insist that everyone, the oppressor as well

as the oppressed, has legitimate needs, that everyone, the abuser as well as the abused,

has, somewhere within, that humanity that is so radiant and winsome when it breaks through

the walls we have built around it.

We are not angels. We do not have that lightness of being which enables us to see with

perfect clarity and at the same time to love without reserve. This means that there will

be people, probably many people, we cannot get through to. But this must not debar us from

believing two things--that this angel is within everyone, and that this angel is the

Lord's intent for us. For perhaps the most startling thing Swedenborg would add to the

near death experience is that there are no angels so created from the beginning, that all

were once people like us--in other words, that we are designed to be the greeters.

Amen.