Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word "love" is “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” Well, yeah, but “strong affection” seems kind of weak, and the motivations can be nobler than “kinship or personal ties.” The dictionary also offers “affection based on admiration, benevolence or common interests,” “warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion,” and “unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another.” None of them exactly measure up to the feeling, do they?
So what’s Swedenborg’s take? Love, in New Christian theology, is all about becoming one with others.
“The hallmark of love is not loving ourselves but loving others and being united to them through love,” he writes in “Divine Love and Wisdom.” “Truly, the essence of all love is to be found in union...”
That, however, is in a way just the tip of the iceberg: Swedenborg’s works say that love - the desire for union - is the actual source of all existence. Love is God, love is life, love is the goal of every person, love is what takes us to heaven or hell, love is the actual source of all matter and energy in the universe, love is the creator of reality itself.
How is that? Swedenborg writes that the essence of God - the actual substance of God - is pure, perfect, infinite love, a desire for union beyond anything we could ever hope to imagine. That desire flowed forth to create the universe and reality as we know it, with the sole purpose of having something to be unified with. And we humans are that something: Beings capable of accepting love and returning it out of free choice.
The means we are created from love, and created with the goal of loving. So it follows that what we love, what we desire, is at the inmost of our own selves, and is actually our life, our essence - is actually who we are.
That leads to two obvious questions: 1. If we’re created from God’s love, why are we so nasty and selfish? 2. What about our thoughts and ideas? Don’t they count for anything?
The answers to those are related.
First, God had to create us with the capacity for evil so that we could be in freedom, because if we weren’t free, then the choice to accept and return His love wouldn’t be a choice at all, and would be meaningless. On a deeper level, God is perfection, and if he created something perfect it would have simply been more of Himself and He would be loving Himself. So we have to be imperfect, but with the ability to choose love.
That ability to choose is really the answer to the second question. Our power to think and know can be separated from our loves, which means we can know something is right even if it conflicts with our desires. We can use that ability to compel ourselves to choose what is right, and to ask God to actually change what we love to make it good. If we’re diligent and sincere, God will indeed change our loves through the course of our lives. By the time we’re ready for heaven, we live in a sincere love for other people and for the Lord, and from that a love for doing good things for others. At that point we are actually in true freedom, because what we want is perfectly aligned with what we know is right, and we can actually do what we want.
On the flip side: If we refuse to engage in that process, refuse to see what is right, refuse to make the effort to do what is right and refuse God’s wish to change what we love, we will end up in hell, together with others who love only themselves.
This creates an interesting and important question we can all ask ourselves: Deep down, in the depths of ourselves, what do we love? Is it good? Are we willing to open it to God and ask Him to change it?
