Church of the Holy City

One Up-manship

One Up-manship
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
January 4, 2009

2 Samuel 15:1-12 Matthew 2:13-18

The New Year has arrived. For some of us, this means choosing resolutions for the next year. It is a time for examining ourselves and looking for areas we want to be better at. It’s a time for letting go of limiting behaviors. In this light, I’ve chosen a topic this morning in keeping with Swedenborg’s concept of repentance. That is, self-examination and choosing to let go of sins that may be blocking our reception of our love for God and for our neighbor. But don’t be alarmed—I don’t intend to spend the whole new year talking about sin. Love and joy are as much a part of the Christian experience as is sin. And, in fact, this very sermon will conclude with a discussion of mutual love, and heavenly joy and happiness. That is the nature of repentance—to the extent that we let go of spiritual baggage—sin—then we come into the love and joy of God.
Today I’ve picked a particularly nasty sin. Swedenborg claims that it runs deep within the hearts of the whole human race. He says further that it is the source of all other sins. So if we can get a handle on this sin, the rest will fall away like leaves from a fall tree. The sin I am referring to is self-love.
This is a tricky sin to talk about today. Most everyone today has been taught by the media and by psychology to love themselves. We are told that unless we love ourselves we cannot love others. I’m not exactly sure what this means. In order to distinguish between healthy self-love and destructive self-love, Swedenborg gives us some symptoms to look for. Destructive self-love shows itself by contempt for others compared with self. That phrase runs all though Swedenbrog’s theology. Along with contempt for others compared with self, is a dislike for people who don’t favor us.
They are in a love of self who despise others in comparison with themselves, and hate those who do not favor, serve, and pay a kind of worship to them; and who find a cruel enjoyment in revenge and in depriving others of honor, reputation, wealth and life (AC 2057).
There are many ways to look down on other people. We can think we are smarter than others. We can think we are richer than others. We can think we have a better job than others. We can think we are more sophisticated than others. We have a better education than others. We can think we have better taste than others. We work harder than others. We can think we have better clothes than others. Our children are better than other children—yes, your own children can be an extension of your self-image. You fill in the blanks. But the long and the short of it is that we think we are better than other people.
Along with this feeling of superiority over others comes a desire to top them. In the work place, it can show itself as a desire to advance in the office. We may want to become manager, or foreman, or supervisor. In the bad sense, we want only the title of manager and we don’t care about the work we would do as manager. In the worst case, we will tear down those who we perceive as above us, or better than us. We sabotage their position by any means. We smear their character. We look for dirt on them. We spread damaging rumors about them. We do everything we can to make them look bad and to make ourselves look good.
The most obvious example of this kind of behavior is in politics. There, we almost expect politicians to be power hungry. There is even a phrase that is used for the kind of destructive self-love I’ve been talking about. The press calls it “negative campaigning.” This is when one party finds all the dirt they can about another party and makes a public display of it. In negative campaigning the party doesn’t have a platform of its own—it doesn’t have policies or plans for bettering the state—it spends all its energy on knocking down the other party. And the sad fact is, polling shows that negative campaigning works.
So politics is a good and clear teacher of self-love in its destructive sense. But it isn’t only politicians who have this self-love. Swedenborg claims that it lies in the heart of each and every one of us.
. . . the whole of his life which he derives from his parents by inheritance, and everything which he himself superadds of his own, is of love for self and for the world—not of love to the neighbor, and still less of love to God. And inasmuch as the whole of man’s life from proprium is love for self and for the world, it is thus a life of contempt of others in comparison with himself, and of hatred and revenge against all who do not favor himself (AC 5993).
What Swedenborg is talking about here is ego. It is an exaggerated sense of our own importance compared with others. We need only ask ourselves how we feel when people don’t show us the respect we think we deserve. Or how we feel about people who we think have more than us, look better than us, drive better cars, or wear better clothes. I’ve had people resent me just because I have a Ph. D. Hatred and revenge are strong words, and I doubt if many of us would feel that extremely. But we may well bear a grudge against people who don’t show us the respect we think we deserve. We may wish to take them down a peg, which is a soft form of revenge.
It is up to each of us to ask him or herself how much we have contempt for others compared with ourselves. Is Swedenborg right when he says we have such an inclination from birth and our upbringing? If so, then we need religious practice to break up this destructive self-love. And as much as Swedenborg claims that we all suffer from destructive self-love, he also says that God works ceaselessly to break up our contempt for others. This takes the form of temptations. Temptations aren’t just competing desires like choosing between a Granola bar and a Reese’s peanut butter cup. Temptations are mortal struggles. They are disruptions in the order of our lives that break down our ego. Often they take the form of misfortune and sorrows and tragedies. As Eckhart Tolles writes,
It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people’s lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of ego would begin to crack open (A New World p. 285).
This is almost exactly what Swedenborg says about the breakup of our ego, or in his Latin, the proprium,
The second state is when a distinction is made between the things which are the Lord’s, and those that are man’s own. Those that are the Lord’s are called in the Word remains . . . These are stored up, and not manifested until he comes into this state; which is a state rarely attained at this day without temptation, misfortune, and sorrow, that cause the things of the body and the world, and thus of man’s proprium, to become quiescent, and as it were dead. The things of the external man are thus separated from those of the internal (AC 8).
So we are not left with our ego. We are not left with destructive self-love. I can hardly think of anyone I know who has lived a little, that hasn’t been through some of these hard knocks. And that beautiful confidence we witness in adolescents soon can become a destructive pride in young adults. So we say that youth is wasted on the young. And often we see in those of more mature years an acceptance and toleration with life and with others. As my grandmother put it, “Well, you grow up and you see that you can’t have things your way.”
This talk wouldn’t be complete without discussing the flip-side of destructive self-love. When our ego is broken up by hard knocks, we begin to learn love for our neighbor. We learn love for our neighbor when we get out of the way. Love for the neighbor is shown by a love for giving to others. It is a heartfelt desire to share our joys with others and to receive the joys others wish to share with us. Imagine a place where everyone wants to give and receive joy. Imagine a place where happiness flows from one to another in an unbroken synergy. That place is heaven. Swedenborg devotes a long passage to this dynamic in the Arcana Coelestia. He wants us all to know the nature of neighborly love just as much as he warns us against destructive self love. So while he cautions us against evil, he also gives us a vision of heavenly good.
Mutual love with those in heaven consists in loving the neighbor more than themselves. Hence the whole heaven represents one person; for all are consociated by mutual love from the Lord, and thus the blessings of all are communicated to each one, and those of each one to all. Consequently the heavenly form is such that every one is as it were a certain center, thus a center of communications, and accordingly of blessings from all; and this in accordance with all the differences of mutual love, which are innumerable. And because those who are in that love perceive the highest happiness in being able to communicate with others that which flows into them, and this from the heart, hence the communication becomes perpetual and eternal; and on this account, as the Lord’s kingdom increases, so the happiness of each one increases (AC 2057).
What I like about this passage is how each person is the center of all the blessings of heaven. All the blessings of everyone in heaven flow into you as if you were the center of it all. And like a hologram, each person is the center of it all. All the blessings of heaven flow into you and you pass it on to everyone else. We experience something like this on earth. I think of Christmas dinners, when everyone is full of the holiday spirit. At table good cheer is in everyone and everyone is talking with each other and the spirit of the room builds and builds all together. Everyone is happy and everyone wants to spread good cheer. That is what humans are capable of when we get out of the way. That is the heavenly image we all are born for. That is the place God is leading us all toward. It may be a road of misfortune and sorrow at times. But we can trust in God’s providence that wherever we are led, by whatever means, it is toward that mutual love and happiness that makes up heaven—either in this world or the next.