The Cosmic Implications of Gratitude
Thanksgiving address for Sunday November 21, 1999, Cambridge Swedenborg Chapel.
Copyright 1999 Carl Schroeder, all rights reserved.
Scripture Lesson: Psalms 147:1-9; Matthew 7:7-11, 25:34-40
Hi. My name is Carl and I’m very grateful to be here today to give to you my inspired address for the holiday of Thanksgiving. As some of you may know, my favorite topic in all the worlds is the nature of heaven, and I do feel that I have a piece of heaven right now, to be speaking to you here in this beautiful chapel of Swedenborg, on the Cosmic Implications of Gratitude, as the spirit has revealed them to me. And so I begin.
Gratitude. Great Attitude.
This is the slogan that was issued to me by the bumper sticker department of my brain a few years ago. It has served me well, to remind me from the fenders of passing thought vehicles, that gratitude *is* a great attitude. Plus, I’m grateful for the play on words. I like to think that words can lead us to more truths as well as truths can lead us to more words, so that in the greater spiritual logic of life, the English language was designed for us to hear an abbreviation for Great Attitude every time we say the word gratitude, like a nudge and a wink from God. Gratitude. Grrrr-attitude! Great Attitude.
Gratitude. Praise. Thanks giving. These are some of the very first tools we are given on our spiritual journeys, in our spiritual heritage, our heritage as spirits. Naked we come into these fertile worlds we call lives, amazing realities of steep sheer abundances, worlds in which we have yet to grow, yet to know, yet to realize and make real our potentials and powers as children of God. Babes of the flesh, babes of the spirit, we have nothing to give, and all to receive. Yet here we can begin, divinely, admirably. Give thanks. Just give thanks. For it is said ‘tis better to give than receive, so what shall we make of these two, receiving and giving, which do we attempt first, being not particularly good at either? Well, now you can do both, give thanks and be done. Receive, and in how you receive give thanks for what you receive. Uphold the value, uphold the tradition, become the living proof of God. And all debts shall be paid, end of discussion. God is satisfied, you have given thanks, and you are one with the abundance which you have made holy, again and for always. From this time hence, you will know what to do. With this particular gift for which you have shown gratitude, that is. There will be many more gifts, of course, so best ye prepare. Give many thanks, get good at it.
So really, gratitude the great attitude is only the beginning. This has incredible implications of cosmic proportion, this thanks giving thing. Like some fabulous crystal, you too can grow God, in you and around you, just by finding that which you were given to appreciate, and living in earnest with it. Protecting and abiding, fulfilling and responding, nourishing as you must from the heart that knows praise, you cannot and will not go wrong. For who among you would give unto your child a stone for bread, or a serpent for fish? You will re-enter the kingdom of God, again and again, you already have. For it is your divine right, this ability to respond, this responsibility, to go home, as often as you like, to find your way out of all scarcity and fear, to know that your needs are satisfied and required, and for this heaven’s sake shall gratitude find you, sooner or later, when what you were most in need of shall be there waiting for you, when you least expect it, and you shall be struck dumb and dumb founded, reduced to the wonder of a child, grateful with tears and tearful with thanks, ready to begin again, play again, holy inside. And the bearers of God shall say here, have some more! There’s plenty more where it comes from, for God’s worlds are abundant with the things you require, to live and to love, and this is how it should be. And will be, and has been, beyond greed, beyond measure, beyond judgement, forever.
I chose the scripture readings today because they show the evolution of God with the help of our gratitude. We begin in the Psalms, thousands of years ago, singing praises to our Lord, for it pleasant and praises are beautiful. The Lord’s gifts are beyond telling, yet tell we must, for who but God prepares the rains for the earth, makes the grass to grow, feeds all the beasts and binds the broken hearted, and calls all the stars by name? We want to be like this, dear Lord, to belong with You in your creation, so we too call the miracles forth by their names and praise them all with a boundless gratitude. Now by the time of the New Testament, the pattern of abundance is established, civilization is rich, the storehouses are full, and the people want to know, who is deserving of all of this, who? And Jesus answers, All who ask receive, all who seek find, and to all who knock shall it opened. But, but, how can this be? And Jesus answers, you have the pattern, you know what it’s like. You’ve been living here. You have bread, you don’t give your child a stone. You have fish, you don’t give your child a serpent. So, now you can empathize with God, and how much more He would want to give to you. Imagine that, empathizing with God! Knowing how God feels, because we used a gift well. But wait, there’s more! What of the afterlife, what’s it all for? Well, here’s the biggest surprise of all. When we face our God, our God is grateful to us! But... but for what? We just consumed your many gifts! Ah, but you gave them among yourselves, showing gratitude and respect. And whatsoever you did to the least of you, you did this to me. Thank *you*.
One can almost imagine a mutual admiration society of cosmic and comic proportions here. God says to us thank you. And we say, oh no really, ‘twas nothing, thank you. And God says, well thank you for thanking me, but I simply must thank you. Well if you say so I suppose you’re God so you must know what you’re talking about, but I just have to say again thank you. And so it goes, on and on, the business of heaven, helping each other grow, giving and receiving and giving thanks to complete and sustain those cycles of abundance. Needs are gifts. Joys are love. Receiving that you may give, you become the gift, and thankfully, you grow to live forever.
All things are growing. All things are receiving more and more, and interdependently. This is old and this is new. For the universe is expanding, this we have heard from the physicists of our day. But this is an expansion like no other, and it’s taking even the physicists some time to get used to it. Will the universe reach a limit and collapse in on itself again they used to ask us? No, because this is not about a flying apart. This is about growing. All that you were you shall always be as you become more. Galaxies are expanding. You are expanding. Your molecules are expanding. Today’s hydrogen atoms are bigger than those of a billion years ago. Space itself is expanding. How can space itself expand, when it is not a thing in itself to get bigger? Oh, well maybe if I call it a fabric, then I can imagine the fabric of space getting stretched. But no, that’s just a trick of language.
Everything including space itself can be expanding because in fact, there are no discrete things. There are relationships of patterns, and we all extend without boundaries into one another. I am in you, and you are in me. The 1980’s movie Mindwalk, which I can well recommend, made a good effort to get this across. If atoms are conceived of as particles, then the electrons are mere fleas orbiting a dog in a field miles away. Everything should be falling through everything else, because we are but a few grains of sand thrown up in the air. But we don’t fall apart, do we? We hold our shapes. Because in fact we are not distinct and separable objects, but we are wave functions, and we generate the patterns of ourselves from centers of potential that interact and extend into everyone else. We say hello, we shake hands when we meet, but in fact we’ve exchanged materials and influences long before we knew each other’s names.
Thus it is that we should not be surprised when nature presents us with endless symbioses, serendipitous systems of mutual success and synchronicities. Does it seem strangely coincidental that the fruits of the earth are just what feed us well, and what we excrete from our lungs and our bowels is nourishing to the plants? Why is it not some other way? See, to the evolutionist who thinks in terms of particles, of separations and distances, nature’s successes would seem to hide many failures. Survival of the fittest means much suffering, because all the people who could not eat apples died and thus did not reproduce, that’s why everyone today can enjoy apples together! It was not God’s gift but man’s toil that brought success, and if there is a God, it is by obeying His laws that we thrive. God is stingy, God is harsh in this view, rather like a laboratory scientist looking at his experiments for results. And coming from the laboratory scientists themselves, why are we not surprised. It’s all balderdash of course. Stuff and nonsense. Modern physics shows that our energy fields are in constant communication and influence with those of everything else, so that the bodies of our ancestors developed for the trees which developed their fruits just for us. There was no struggle, there was mutuality and joy. This is known as coevolution, and it is caring, civilized, and full of gratitude. Exactly the kind of gratitude that a human has evolved to show. We’re very good at exalting the details of creation you see, and I believe this to be our gift to the Earth. But don’t wait for science to prove the value of your gratitude. For I have heard it said that one day science shall entirely prove the existence of God, but what science will never prove is that God cares. So, is this a cruel universe of scarcity and fighting for survival among God’s impersonal laws? Or is this a universe of cooperative gift giving, in which you can grow God as much as God helps you grow? Well, you will decide which works best for you, in fact you do every day. We live our lives according to the gratitude we give to all the things with which we grow. And thus do we grow together.
Now the Godly, the mystical, the moral, have always lived by such discernments as these. The seeds of all things are in all things, say the good pagan witches. The Native American hunter asks the deer first for its permission to be killed, for all things are connected, and the ritual of eating to satisfy needs will be another intimacy for the joining of lives. That which is good must bond with that which is true, Swedenborg teaches us, for more of what is good and true to spring forth fruitfully. Thus is Swedenborg’s cosmology fertile and loving, embracing both the masculine and the feminine as equal and complementary embodiments for heaven’s parts which must be joined together to see the next stage. Jesus at his most fertile rose again from the grave, and it was to a woman that he first appeared. As much as the disciples, said to be all men, could not initially believe Mary Magdalene that Jesus had returned in the flesh, they ultimately could not deny us her place at the resurrection. Can you imagine how grateful Mary was to see Jesus again? What wonder, what joy, what love she must have had to offer our Lord!
Scholars show now that Mary Magdalene was not likely to have been a penitent whore but in fact a rare, highly educated woman, and that the separate prostitute personality was superimposed on her own to marginalize and make her story quaint and secondary. Still, the gospel of Mary does exist, and what we have for the woman’s point of view on the Christ begins thusly: "Will matter then be destroyed or not? And the Savior said, "All Nature, all formations, all creations, exist in and with one another, and they will be dissolved again into their own roots. For the Nature of matter is dissolved into the things that belong to its Nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear." Later in her gospel, Mary testifies that the male disciples found these ideas to be strange and unbelievable, and of course they do not appear in the Bible. One gets the idea that Mary’s Jesus would however make a good quantum physicist and modern ecologist.
And so to sum up, let us make it clear. We are each the wombs of God, and by our gratitudes we invite the seeds of one another to grow within our lives, even unto the grateful presence of the Lord himself. The nature of matter is that there are no unconnected objects, but in fact we interpenetrate one another as the infinitely expanding clouds of probability potentials, generated from the divine roots of our identities, our God-respected affections for wave functions. Each of our freely chosen patterns extends into everyone else’s, but only as the potentials for our free-wills to act upon, so that our gratitude for another’s presence in our lives is the first and sufficient recognition we can give to the value of that other being’s presence in our lives. Gratitude says to God, this fellow creature I wish to become actual with, and by the love of the Lord which does precede time and space and all the dimensions of perception, our eyes become opened to the synchronous and mutual gifts of perfect co-evolvement which we have already carried for each other by the virtues of having grown up together in the interpenetrating cosmos of God. The greatest potential of all beings which we all carry inside of ourselves is the love of the grateful Lord, who does know all other living presences, uniquely and individually, completely and boundlessly. Your existence has already made a difference, your choices are known, your needs are known, ask and it shall have become already given. God has loved you through all of us, and our greatest potential is to show this to you.
Let us give thanks for the glories of heaven which we are able to conceive with our minds and our hearts, in the bondings of what is true for what is good and what is good for what is true, for we are God’s gifts to one another, and many are we who give the fruits of a spiritual gratitude.
Amen.
