“People who have applied the teachings of the church from the Word directly to their lives are in the inmost heaven and more than anyone else are absorbed in the pleasures of wisdom. They see divine realities in particular objects. They actually do see the objects, but the corresponding divine realities flow directly into their minds and fill them with a sense of blessedness that affects all their sensory functions. As a result, everything they see seems to laugh and play and live.” (Heaven and Hell 489.3, emphasis added)

I remember reading this passage as part of my Logopraxis study last year. That last line grabbed me, it’s captivating! “Everything they see seems to laugh and play and live.” How jovial! I want to see the world around me laugh and play and live!

When I walk with my dog in the woods, I relish the feeling of being engulfed in nature. I love it! I love being surrounded by the greens and browns and yellows of grasses, leaves, vines, mosses, trees and logs, the gray rocks, the blue and pink and purple and yellow and orange wildflowers, the dark earth….  It’s all beautiful to the eye, which is a blessing, to be sure! But it doesn’t really feel like it is joyful and laughing, to me. I hear many birds in the trees above my head: some of their sounds could certainly be interpreted as laughter! Colourful flowers, maybe I could pretend that they look cheerful; lush grasses and moist, verdant trees, maybe…. but rocks? Roots? Soil? Nope; I’m not seeing it.

Reflecting on this, straining to envision these inanimate, dead-looking objects as laughing, playful and living, it occurs to me: personifying nature may be my mistake. The natural world around us may be living, but it isn’t human, it isn’t a person. None of it has feelings or a higher consciousness (well, depending on who you ask, but that’s a deep-dive for another day!). Nature can’t laugh, play and live the way we laugh, play and live; I reckon that thinking of it as responding, reacting as we do, is misguided.

“There is a spiritual meaning throughout the Word and in all its details. “ (Doctrine of the Sacred Scripture 9)

On each day of my working life as a proofreader I looked closely at words. Now that enjoyable task has re-entered my life, and in the past few months I’ve been pondering on the associations between three word-related things I do every day.

1. Each morning, my husband and I play Wordle on his iPad. At first it’s a total guess as to what that day’s 5-letter word will be. We usually figure it out well within the six tries that players are allowed.

2. Then we move on to Connections, where we must arrange 16 words into 4 groups of 4 associated words. This is trickier, and is heavily weighted to American thinking, culture, expressions etc. We’re getting better at it, even if we don’t really always ‘get’ the connections the game makes.

3. Finally, if time allows, I’ll spend a while proofreading an assigned part of the digitised version of Potts’ Concordance. (Early in 2024 I joined a growing team of people working on this particular aspect of the New Christian Bible Study project.) 

Like the game Connections, Potts’ Concordance has many closely associated words. It goes alphabetically through terms used in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Writings. I love this proofreading work! It gets me deep into what words / phrases used in the Bible mean on a correspondential level, and also shows where to find further references and explanations for words used in the Writings themselves. Even if I don’t always ‘get’ what is being said (which does happen quite often), surely my soul is learning!

Editor’s note – today’s post was written by Lori Odhner and published as a Marriage Moat. Lori writes these messages and sends them as weekday emails as well as posting them on social media. We like to share some of our favorites from past years.

Photo by Anita Halterman

The flowers in California are having a heyday. Several years of drought followed by buckets of rain are a combination for opulent fields of poppies. We went to see them, back when we lived there twenty years ago. It is a marvelous thing to be surrounded by color, as long as no witch is dropping a sleeping potion on you. 

I have had my own seasons of blooming, which coincidentally came after my own dearth. God seems hesitant to tip His hand about such outcomes, leaving us to wonder and wait. 

A blueberry farmer once told me that you cannot get fruit if there is no freeze. I don’t really know about such things but the notion has served me in my own periods of cold. Maybe this is the prelude to sweetness, rather than an obstacle to it. 

The day after the power went out is an occasion for increased appreciation for the flick of a light switch. Days after a bout of an aching back are fertile for gratitude in health. 

“The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever.” Isaiah 40

Love,
Lori

“Then the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant and said to Him, “Do You hear what these are saying?”
And Jesus said to them, “Yes. Have you never read,

‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have perfected praise’?”
Matthew 21: 14-16

This part of the Palm Sunday story has always filled me with joy. I love the idea that little children are the paragons of praise. Where the chief priests and scribes saw a threat, the children saw salvation. While Jesus healed the blind, the chief priests and scribes clung to their spiritual blindness and dismissed His power. But the children believed. They saw His wonders and didn’t doubt Him. In this way, children are also paragons of belief. Their willingness to be led—the very definition of innocence—is what makes children so profoundly special. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many favorite children’s games revolve around sight. “Peek-a-boo” is a classic example. Young children simply delight in covering their eyes, pretending that they can’t see or be seen, and then, magically, they appear again as soon as they take their hands away. “I Spy” is another game that comes to mind. What a simple, but effective way to reinforce a young child’s awareness of the colors and shapes of the world around them. These types of games encourage the players to watch and notice—to embrace what’s right in front of us and to rejoice in the fact that it’s there and that we’ve found it.