Abraham Lincoln once said regarding our country and our democracy, that the ultimate danger to it "cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and Iinisher. As a nation of free people, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
The United States, which we abbreviate as the U.S., which spells us, is just that. It is us, not us and them. In his book entitled Them, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska points out that while our pledge of allegiance says that we are one nation, we are not in the strictest sense of the word, a nation. The word ‘nation’ comes from the Latin word, natio meaning birth and race. Sasse writes that while the nation states of Europe and Asia are, generally speaking, real nations in that they each consist of one people with one language, the United States is and always has been a conglomeration of peoples from all over the world. Adolph Hitler mocked the United States, calling it not a nation, but a hodgepodge. But we all saw what Hitler's version of nationalism wrought.
We in the U.S. are not one nation in the literal sense of what a nation is. As a result, we have a vast number of cultures within our borders, with more being added all the time as immigrants seek to come to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where they hope to make a better life for themselves. We are a nation of humanity at large.... under God... whether we like it or not.
For us there is no us against them. Our nation consists of us...and them. Given this reality of the U.S., or us, we must Iind a way to be a united nation in spite of our many differences. If we fail to do this, we will fail as a nation, and with our demise will follow the demise of this great experiment of government by the people for the people.
In this latest election the majority of Americans showed once again that we do not want this to happen. We simply will not let this happen.
The world is depending on us. So I want to ask a very important question. What can we do to prevent our demise from within? Is Abraham Lincoln correct? Is our greatest danger division from within? We must always Iind the way to protect our democracy and keep us together as one nation, under God.
One nation, under God. But whose God? We can say in a very general way that every religious person worships the same God. We know there can be only one God. Read chapter 3 of Exodus. God is the great “I am”, the creator, the underlying reality of all that is, so there cannot be another underlying reality of a different reality. Both realities would be part of what is, and therefore there would be something greater that was the real God. Thinking along these lines is fruitless. There is only one God and all religions recognize this. Only those who reject God altogether are outside the "us" that believes in one God. So here is a starting point. Belief that we are all the children of the one only God makes the human species itself one nation under God.
Oh, dear. I've outed myself as a globalist. Well, I guess I am. But what other choice is there for a Swedenborgian Christian? I believe in one vast nation under God called the human species. And as a Christian I believe I have a responsibility to God to minister in any way I can to my fellow human beings. But belief cannot be legislated. We cannot dictate to one another what we will believe. Each of us must Iind what we hold to be true from our own search for truth.
To be there when others need us to be with them, we need a certain gift from the Lord. It's not one of the two gifts Emanuel Swedenborg often writes about, the gifts of freedom to choose and the rationality to make good choices. It is a gift we acquire when we seek to use those gifts to discern what it is God
truly wants us to be doing to love and serve our neighbor. It is the gift of empathy.
What does it mean in our reading from the Gospel of Luke that says, "he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal." Does it mean go out and demand that everyone become a believer in our Swedenborgian version of Christianity? Well, of course, that would be a very satisfactory outcome, and perhaps even what God has in mind for this planet eventually, but the reality today is that this hodgepodge of a country, this conglomeration of peoples and religions of the entire world, cannot be brought together under one religion, but we can be brought together under one God, worshipped in many different ways and all equally saving in the eyes of that one God.
But to have such a country, one hodgepodge nation, under one all-encompassing God, we must have empathy for our neighbor. We are not only to proclaim our understanding of the Lord as the Savior of the world. We are also to heal. We are to go out into the world around us to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. Healing takes empathy. But we will have no adequate empathy until will heal ourselves.
Here's the main point I want to make. Empathy is not the same thing as self-examination. We often mistake the two. When we empathize with others, we can make the mistake of believing we are looking within and seeing our intentions in our self. Noticing we are acting out of love for our neighbor gives us the impression we are observing our self. It is easy to confuse the two. But they are not the same.
Benjamin Franklin famously told the woman who asked him what kind of government had been devised in the Constitutional Convention that it was "A republic, Madam, if you can keep it." I suspect Ben Franklin did a lot of introspection. He knew himself pretty well. And as a result, he understood the rest of us pretty well also. He knew that keeping a nation would
not be easy. It was not to be taken for granted the way we have been taking it for granted since the end of World War Two and the beginning of this modern technological society.
The focus of the vast majority of us has been turned outward more and more as we have developed technology and become engrossed in our computer-driven lives. We seek external entertainment constantly. Ben Sasse calls our obsession with cable TV news politainment. We aren't just obsessed with political news, either. Screens pervade our lives. We take them with us in our pockets and purses wherever we go. Studies have shown that the average adult American, not the kids, many of whom are online continuously during their waking hours, but we adults, check our so-called "smart" phones every 4.3 minutes.
How much does your smartphone tell you about your internal state of being? The honest answer is, "nothing", unless it brings us to a realization that our attention is being drawn out of us by this artiIicial intelligence we live in today. The idea of living in an artiIicial meta verse should be frightening to all of us.
Sherry Turkle is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying the effects of our technology on us for decades. Initially, she was an advocate for the use of technology, but her research has made her aware of its downside, especially the effects it is having on our relationships with each other.
Looking at screens all day has very bad effects on our psyches. For instance, sleep patterns. It turns out that the blue light emitted by these screens we are all staring at has the same effect as the blue light of the coming dawn. That light is a signal to our brains that it is time to wake up, just as the red light of the setting sun calms us and makes us drowsy.
Waking up is greeting the day and looking outward, getting into the Ilow of external activities. It is the opposite of
introspection and self-examination. The excessive use of screens not only affects our sleep and other mental functions, but it steers us away from introspection.
Another negative aspect of the use of screens is their effect on our relationships. Turkle refers to this as "being alone together." Ben Sasse writes about one teenage boy who begged his mother for a cell phone because, he said, when he and his friends get together, at some point everyone gets out their cell phone and conversation stops, leaving him alone with himself while surrounded by his group of friends, all staring at their screens.
What can we do about this state of affairs? Technology is making the spread of false rumors about our so-called enemies, formerly known as our neighbors, into a multi-billion dollar industry. It is dividing us into us and them.
The answer is within us. It is in each of us individually. We need the empathy for our neighbor that only belief in God can bring us. We need the sense of one global nation under God, which is the true reality that underlies all being on this planet. Politics will not solve these problems that confront us. Good politics will only come from those who look within themselves to Iind their true intentions, and then seek to turn those into good actions to bring us together as a true nation, under God.
We must "take nothing for our journey, no staff, no bag, nor bread, nor money. We must therefore abandon our growing dependence on smart machines and realize that our true self lies within us, in the heavenly kingdom our Lord has created for us. Cetainly we can use these gadgets to serve us, but we must not serve them.
Instead we must serve God and our neighbor. We must go forth and preach the gospel, healing the divisions among us and making us, once again, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
Readings
Old Testament Reading: Genesis 4:2-5
Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel, too, brought forward some of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. The Jehovah looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.
Reading from Emanuel Swedenborg’s Secrets of Heaven #350-351.
“And Abel, too, brought forward some of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And Jehovah looked with favor on Abel and on his offering.” Abelhere symbolizes charity, as he did earlier. The firstborn of the flock symbolize holiness, which is exclusively the Lord’s. The fat symbolizes the actual quality of heaven, which is also the Lord’s. Jehovah looked on Abel and on his offering means that everything connected with charity was pleasing to the Lord, as was all worship springing from charity. Abel has already been shown to symbolize charity. Charity means love for our neighbor. It means mercy too, since if we love our neighbors as we do ourselves we have mercy on them when they are suffering, as we would on ourselves.
