(Cover Art By Liz Coggins used with permission).
We find in the book of Proverbs, page after page of warnings about the perils of what life without the Lord is like. Of what life is like without the wisdom of the Word taken to heart and applied in our life.
Duplicity is in his heart;
It is engrossed with evil all the time;
It is instigating quarrels.
Therefore calamity for him shall come suddenly;
He shall be broken instantly,
and there will be no healing. (6:14-15)
On the very day of disgrace a fool makes his vexation known,
Yet a prudent man covers up an affront.
He who breathes out truth shall tell what is just,
Yet a false witness will speak deceit.
There is talk that is like stabbings of a sword,
Yet the tongue of the wise is healing.
The lip of truth is established into the future,
Yet the false tongue lasts only for a moment. (12:16-19)
When there is no vision the people become unbridled,
Yet happy is he who keeps the law.
A servant is not disciplined by mere words;
Though he understands,
yet there is no response. (29:18-19)
But these descriptions can only make sense if one truly understands the opposite of what this life without wisdom is like. Because you can’t know what something isn’t, unless you have some kind of concept of what it is.
We need the contrast of the distinctions.
Otherwise it would be like trying to describe the colour black or darkness, to someone who has never seen white or light. Whilst our experience of the Lord will always be limited due to the fact that we are finite and imperfect and He is infinite and Perfection Itself, we still must always be coming into an idea of the Lord; into an expanding awareness of what constitutes the Divine.
So from this perspective our understanding is limitless.
These are the matters that are meant by progressive stages of development and by continuous derivatives even to the final one. Such stages and derivatives are unending in the case of a person who is being regenerated.
They begin when he is a young child and continue through to the final phase of his life in the world; indeed they continue for ever after that, though his regeneration can never reach the point when he can by any means be called perfect.
For there are countless, indeed a limitless number of things to be regenerated, both within his rational and within his natural. Everything there has limitless shoots, that is, stages of development and derivatives that progress in both inward and outward directions. (Arcana Coelestia 5122 {3})
So we know that we can never reach the point of Perfection Itself because it is infinite and it is the Divine but we can be eternally experiencing new ways of understanding it.
And so therein lies paradox. We can’t know Perfection Itself but we need some finite idea of perfection in order to comprehend what it is that we’re experiencing in these new ways of understanding.
So we’re offered variety.
Variations of different forms of the Divine in our finite understanding; different variations of his love and wisdom united in use.
And the variety of the different forms, take on different colours, different shapes, different smells, different textures – according to the affections and thoughts that we associate with them. And we see these reflected in the text of Proverbs too.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
And all her tracks are peace.
She is a tree of life to those holding fast to her,
And those upholding her will be happy.
Yahweh, by wisdom, founded the earth;
He established the heavens by comprehension.
By His knowledge the abysses broke forth,
And the skies drip down the night mist.(3:17-20)
A lamp of Yahweh is the life breath of mankind,
Searching all the chambers of the inner being.
Benignity and truth preserve the king,
And by benignity his throne is braced.
The beauty of those in their prime is their vigour,
And the honour of those who are old is grey hair. (20:27-29)
She is like the ships of a merchant;
She brings her bread from afar.
She rises while it is still night
And provides viands for her household And dole for her maidens.
She plans for a field and procures it;
From the fruit of her palms she plants a vineyard. (31:14-16)
Although we can never know the Lord in His fullness, the Word itself from our experience, is a limitless source of variations of the Lord’s form. The words of the actual Text itself conjure up images and shapes in our mind which convert instantly into affections and thoughts that are associated with the words in our memory. And our actual interior state of mind or interior mood at the time of reading the Text, is going to dictate what associations the literal words of the Text connects with. So put another way, our spiritual state dictates how we receive the Word when we read it and then the Word itself expands our awareness of our state because it brings our affections and thoughts out more for us to see.
What we then choose to do with what arises for us will become our work because responding to what the Word evokes and brings into our awareness is the work of spiritual life. We find then that when we move our attention to our surroundings in the physical world, that the thoughts and affections that the Word has brought forward for us, start to filter what we’re looking at. So in this sense the Word then starts reading our life for us; it starts to review or judge our life. The natural landscape in which we live and move and interact with others then becomes the field in which the Word can be worked with and experimented in with its truths.
The more we look around us with the Word as our lens, the more variety we see. It’s wisdom offers to us in how we view objects and things in nature and it offers to us in our interactions with others. With the latter in particular, we see our own reactions to others’ behaviours, gestures, speech and content, body language and even tone of voice. There are opportunities to feel and see His love and opportunities to see and feel the absence of it. Our interior and exterior dialogue within our own selves between what we think and feel and what we actually say and do, becomes an opportunity to observe and try out using the Word’s wisdom, to see if it changes our affections, thoughts and perspectives; to see the distinctions between the lower and high self; the exteriors and interiors; to see the distinctions of life with the Lord’s wisdom and life without.
Dialogue with others provides the field in which the dialogue of the Word within us can occur.
The dialogue with others therefore brings us into an expanding awareness of the Divine Form. The varieties of the shapes of the experiences with others, through others, bring awareness to the varieties of His Form, of love and wisdom united.
…. The Form makes a one the more perfectly as the things entering into the Form, are distinctly different and yet united.
Unless the understanding is raised up it can scarcely comprehend this, since the appearance is that a Form can make a one only through likenesses of uniformity in the things that make up the Form.
On this subject I have often talked with angels, who said that this is an arcanum their wiser ones perceive clearly, and the less wise obscurely;
yet it is a truth that a form is the more perfect as the things that constitute it are distinctly different, and yet have become united each in its own way.
This they showed by the societies in the heavens, which taken together constitute the form of heaven;
also by the angels of each society, in that the form of the society is more perfect in proportion as each angel is more distinctly his own, and therefore free, and thus loves his companions as if from himself and from his own affection.
(Divine Providence 4)
So the more frequently we use a truth in our life to act as our lens to the field and dialogues and allow it to be experimented with and observed in the life of our mind of our thoughts and affections, then the more opportunity we have to see finite variations in our understanding of the Infinite of Divinity, of Perfection Itself.
The closer we examine wisdom from the Word, the more perfect and beautiful it becomes the Lord. Never arriving but always coming….
…..But the truth is that the simpler and purer any thing is,
the more and the fuller it is.
It is for this reason that the more deeply any object is examined,
the more wonderful, perfect, and beautiful are the things seen in it;
and thus that the most wonderful, perfect, and beautiful of all
are in the First Substance.
(Divine Providence 6{1})