Dear members and friends,
How has your summer been, have you taken time for yourself to reflect, absorb the beauty of the warmth and light at their peak? Perhaps that feels far away if you’ve spent most of this summer—as I have—in the Bay Area, where we have had our darkest and coldest summer in many decades due to the omnipresent marine layer.
As a Swede, Emanuel Swedenborg loved the summertime, the peak season for the incredible, special garden he tended on his property on the island of Södermalm in Stockholm. Like our own garden at the church in San Francisco, which has special botanical specimens from around the world—a yew tree from Ireland, a Cypress from Lebanon—Swedenborg’s large garden property had specimens from around the known world. African melons, American dogwoods, species of squash from North America, citrus trees from the Mediterranean; Swedenborg’s green space functioned as a kind of plant microcosm, featuring beautiful flowers and vegetables and fruits, providing nourishment and food. Amidst the profusion of blooming and growing things, he built a special lusthus—a summerhouse—where he would read and write in the summer months.
Next time you read Swedenborg, think of these words as being written by the hands of a gardener; fingers that also knew how to weed and prune, and tend to the long time of gestation and growing. As our current moment of larger cultural and political crises can remain a constant din on the television and in the news, it is sometimes easy to forget the deep power of growing and seeding in the abundance of the natural world, which flourishes so effortlessly and constantly around us. Sometimes it’s important to recharge by unplugging, and connecting our eyes and all our other senses—touch and smell—to this other book of revelation, given to us by our Creator. Remember the repeated phrase in the creation story of Genesis, after every day of new creatures and things coming into being: “and God saw that it was good.”
In the remaining weeks of summer, may you also look (and taste, and hear, and smell), that it is good. So good! Swedenborg also writes (in Heaven and Hell) that the angels of heaven learn about God not only by reading books, but walking through their gardens and thinking about the different beautiful correspondences that the plants and flowers there represent and signify spiritually. I hope you can feel like one of those angels (for we are all, truly, simply angels in the making) next time you are outdoors in the greenery.
Blessings,
Pastor Devin