An “Elevated” Mother’s Day Message

The miracle of childbirth and the labors of women to bring a child into the world present us with a most profound and miraculous event. Childbirth and motherhood is such a universally powerful symbol that it used within Scripture to represent a similar miracle on another, entirely distinct scale.

Probably the most misunderstood and intellectually challenging image of motherhood (besides the virgin birth) is described in Revelation 12:1-6. At face value, the biblical narrative presents us with farfetched scenario. First of all, the unfolding drama does not fit any known standard of measurement or law of physics. We have a pregnant woman standing on the moon (without a spacesuit), agonizing over a painful delivery and, if that’s not enough, she is being threatened by a huge red dragon (with seven heads) wanting to eat her child.

This cosmic birthing event ushers in the great battle between Michael and his angels with the dragon and his evil minions. The first key to understanding this spectacular story is that it is taking place not in the physical world but in a pre-temporal and pre-spatial realm – heaven.

The second key is that these fantastic events concerning the Lord’s Second Coming are to happen within each of us. We are told by the Lord in Luke 17:21 that “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” So we are not to view the kingdom of heaven as simply some “other” place but a deeper reality that must be formed within us.

Therefore, the coming kingdom of God represents a new creation within us – a new spiritual rebirth. This rebirth will require a change to take place in our hearts and minds (will and understanding), whereby we will be perfected in love and wisdom.

The mother-to-be depicted in Revelation as clothed like the sun and standing on the moon represents a new love and intelligence, which will bring forth new spiritual life from a more elevated understanding of the Holy Word (signified by wearing a crown of twelve stars). Her standing on the moon represents an elevated relationship with God because she is put “above” the moon - whose reflected light represents the reflection of a worldly and corporeal mind. So we are challenged to transcend our habitual minds in order to receive more profound teachings from the Lord. These deeper teachings are what the Lord wants us to understand as to what is actually gestating in this great cosmic drama of motherhood.

In her womb is growing a new faith-paradigm. Her crying and painful ordeal to give birth represents the difficulty that these new ideas will have being accepted into the world. The great dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, represents a powerful persuasion in the world to resist these changes, even to destroy (devour) them. But these new ideas will eventually succeed and replace antiquated notions concerning the Lord God and Holy Scripture. The “end of days” refers to the replacement of old thinking.

So, on this Mother’s Day, send your mom warm love and deserving gratitude for bringing you into the world. And perhaps, you can also begin to celebrate Mother’s Day on an entirely new level and order - the birth of a new spiritual life in the womb of your own heart and mind.

Are you open-minded enough to receive new ideas from the Lord and begin the process of a new conception within your spirit?

Eating Your Way To Heaven

There is a famous saying that “you are what you eat.” If you eat healthy foods you will be healthy and if you eat unhealthy foods (or even too much of a good thing) it will lead to an unhealthy condition.

The multitudes of diet books for sale attest to the fact that we humans have developed poor eating habits. Eating involves more than satisfying one’s appetite, it also partakes of judgment. We constantly have to judge between eating what gives us the most pleasure and what food will do us the most good.

But is there a food so healthy for us that eating it will turn us into angels and get us all the way to heaven? The answer is “yes.”

Of course, eating your way to heaven does not mean merely switching your dessert from a seven-layered devil’s food cake to angel cake. Heaven is not a physical world, so it requires a steady diet of special, non-physical foodstuffs.

In my previous post I brought up the idea of a more rarefied aliment that is especially suitable to our species. Humans also have an appetite and a thirst for knowledge. The human brain and mind are actually the digestive system of our spirit. Everything the physical digestive system does with terrestrial food has its analog with what the mind does with information.

For example, we chew and ruminate on ideas. This mental activity lets us find out whether ideas or concepts are savory to our personal tastes and worthy of being “swallowed.” Next, our mind churns and rolls these ideas around so that they can be broken down further into their constituents. The mind then scrutinizes this mental material more deeply. In this way our discernment and judgment act as mental digestive enzymes (the acid test). If these constituents are judged as agreeable, they are finally absorbed and enter into the very fabric of our inner being (otherwise they are jettisoned as “crap”).

Like physical food, there are ideas which can seduce our thinking and bring us lots of pleasure, but are not necessarily going to do us the most good. This is why we need to reflect on all our compulsions. This is also why we need a higher form of nutritional guidance and wisdom to help our judgment.

God’s Holy Word is actually a Divine Diet Book. The whole cosmic drama of Adam and Eve was based solely on what to eat and what not to eat. In the same way that physical food is metabolized and becomes part of our spiritual being, information is metabolized in a way that it can become part of our inner or spiritual being. Therefore, both types of “eating” represent appropriation. We can accept God and religion or reject it.

Now the phrase “you are what you eat” takes on a more critical and eternal meaning. When one sheds his or her physical body after death in this world we are left with our spiritual fabric, which was formed out of the ideas, concepts, and belief systems we developed a strong appetite for. We then gravitate to either a world of compulsions or an unselfish world of wisdom.

It is not hard to imagine that a world where compulsive behavior runs rampant will be populated by individuals who seek to satisfy only themselves. This creates an environment of hatred and sets up a condition whereby there can only be eternal frustration in people’s never-ending hunger to dominate others and have things their own way. This frustration is the eternal “fire” of hell.

On other hand, those in heaven have developed their spiritual bodies to be able to metabolize and act according to God’s love and wisdom. I hope I have made these ideas easier for you to digest.

Bon apetit!

Religion As God’s Evolutionary Strategy

Science is more concerned with the “how” of things rather than the “why.” If we are to have a constructive dialog between science and theology the answer to the “why” question will have to generate new knowledge about the world and actually change the direction of progressive research.

Emanuel Swedenborg, in his great theological work, Divine Providence, states that the purpose and goal of creation is to form a heaven from the human race. But WHY does God need to create anything at all, including humans?

Since the essence of spiritual love is sharing, God creates a universe as an object in which to direct and focus all that divine love. In other words, nature is the object of God’s love. Nature’s ceaseless drive towards order, self-organization and bio-complexity tells us that existence is relationship, and that all created things are self-representations of God’s nature (the essence of love is to unify).

But such a one-sided situation cannot fulfill love’s ultimate plan.

Love is not complete unless it is reciprocal. For spiritual love to be truly reciprocal, a creature must emerge in the physical world with a level of consciousness capable of acknowledging a Creator and loving God back. God seeks this ultimate relationship. (In religion this is called God’s covenant with humankind.)

Evolution, even when described in Darwinian terms, shows an obvious pattern towards increased intelligence and consciousness. However, evolutionary biology does not fully take into account that, unlike other creatures, the human species has found its niche in the world of information (as opposed to simply adapting their physical form to respond to the changing pressures of a natural environment). Humans seek out information in the same way other creatures forage for food.

Information is food and is much different than, let’s say, an apple. If you share half your apple with someone else, you are left with half an apple. If you share half your information with someone else you still possess all your knowledge. Information and knowledge are not under the same constraints of physical laws as an apple.

Knowledge and information do, however, come under the constraints of our personal values. What each of us seeks, intends, wishes and believes, shapes our attention and gives order and real organization to the ideas of our memory. In other words, it is in this non-physical niche of the mind and human spirit that evolution can still continue.

Religion deals with values.

In order for God to create a heaven from the human race, humans must be able to evolve beyond the physical world and adapt their lives to the laws of a distinct and more rarefied environment. Heaven is not a reward but is something we become. Obtaining heaven requires that the inner bio-organization of our spirit becomes responsive to, and adapted for, receiving God’s spiritual love and values.

When we adopt God’s tenets into our lives we are actually re-organizing the spiritual substances of our mind and spirit into new living structure. This process produces a spiritual body, which is the real embodiment of the spiritual principles and values we each choose and put into practice throughout our lives.

Nothing exists without form, neither in this world nor in the next. Our values and principles (whatever they may be) become the real fabric of our innermost being and involve real bio-structure. What we love molds our spiritual body exactly to our disposition. Under this system goodness is its own reward and evil is its own punishment.

So religion is God’s strategy to extend both bio-complexity and the biosphere into a non-temporal and non-spatial realm called heaven. This makes religion a “scientific” belief system with lawful intelligibility. True religion explains the laws of the heart and mind with the same systematic and rigorous methodology that science uses to explain the physical laws of the visible universe.

Do you believe that the mysteries of faith can come under the comprehension of human reasoning, as does science?

The Subtlety of Prehistoric Human Thought

Are we smarter than our ancestors? Do present day humans make better use of their brains than did cavemen and women?

If you look at intelligence as gathering useful information about the physical world—information that leads to new technology—it seems obvious we modern humans are ahead on that score.

But in terms of abstract thought, and understanding the true nature of reality, I think we have slipped a bit. Actually we have slipped a lot. This cognitive slip amounts to a condition where the human mind only understands and believes what the eye surveys. This is called naturalism. In some cases naturalism causes an outright denial of God, but even in those who are considered religious, the Holy Word is taken simply at face value.

In previous posts, I have pointed out that Scripture is a multidimensional document. This allows an Infinitely wise God to reveal eternal truths to us on different levels. On higher levels, the narratives contain a “quantum language” whereby ordinary words gain expanded meanings.

In my previous post I developed a simple children’s story to communicate the idea (or provide a strong hint) that the animals depicted in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark represented “animated” qualities of the human heart. In other words, a quantum language in Scripture would not portray things of the physical world as mere physical things, but as various aspects and qualities of the human spirit.

For instance, the Lord Himself is called a “Lamb” to communicate the gentleness of love, not His physical form. How else do we make sense out of the biblical passage in Mark (16:15) to “preach the Gospel to every creature”? An animal could not respond to the Gospel. But the things of the human heart most certainly could.

How are we to imagine a harmonious future world where “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah, 11:6)? Would such a biblical prophecy make more even sense if a child came into the world for the purpose of helping humans find inner peace from a reconciliation between all their conflicting worldly passions, emotions, and drives?

How are we to comprehend God’s direct command in Genesis for the human species to have complete dominion over the earth and all its creatures as representing the foresight of Infinite Divine Wisdom? Such a command, literally interpreted, can only lead to the extinction of animal species, cruelty, and destruction of the ecosystem. However, such things make more theological sense if this divine command means, on a higher level, that humans must gain some control over the things of their inner world – these are the passions, appetites, intentions and various emotions of our inner world.

This kind of interpretation, which views animals as representing the fauna of the human heart and will, requires an elevated mind (as opposed to a sophisticated or cultured mind).

Now for the real shocker - prehistoric art has nothing to do with the things of nature. It has everything to do with the inner world of the human spirit.

So, the next time you come upon a picture of prehistoric cave art depicting animals, please keep in mind that these images are much more than early human attempts at naturalism. Early humans loved nothing more than to assign spiritual qualities to the things of nature.

There was never a time that humans did not know of God. This knowledge is what made them human. When God made the Holy Word available to later generations, its narratives preserved the same correspondences between natural and spiritual levels of meaning that our remote ancestors embraced.

I am sharing this important information with you so that you might gain a new measuring stick and perspective on the degree to which the modern human mind has become seduced by the five senses.

My apologies to anyone who feels I have stepped on their academic sensibilities.

Brenda The Bookworm’s Ark

Once upon a time there was a very precocious bookworm. Her name was Brenda. She lived in a library because it was full of interesting books to read – books about everything.

But Brenda was different from all the other bookworms. She was not just interested in gathering all kinds of knowledge. Her true passion was to discover the most important information in the world.

She just didn’t want to be smart, filling her head with endless data and factoids. She wanted to be wise.

When Brenda was very young, her mom used to read a book of very special stories to her before going to bed. Her mom called it God’s Great Book. It was the Holy Bible.

As Brenda grew up, she kept these stories safe in her heart. However, she did not continue to read these stories on her own.

She also had lots of other things deep inside her heart that were important to her. These were her invisible friends.

When you are surrounded by as many books as she was, it was easy to create a rich imagination. You see Brenda had an animal friend for every kind of thought and feeling that lived inside her heart and mind.

When she felt kindness in her heart she always imagined lambs. Courage would bring lions into her thoughts. And when she was feeling very smart, her thoughts would turn into birds that soar high above everything else. But since she had not yet found the most important information in the world, all these wonderful animal friends were turning her imagination into a wild zoo. All her animal friends were fighting for her attention at the same time. She knew that she needed to organize her thoughts and feelings.

Brenda felt that if she could find wisdom, her animal friends could live in a better home and more easily find peace and order among themselves.

One day, after she had spent many exhaustive hours seeking out new information from all kinds of books and surfing the Internet, she heard a loud crash on the library roof. Alarmed by the loud noise, she went outside to see what was going on.

To Brenda’s surprise a television suddenly fell out of the sky and landed near her. Then came a radio. Next, a cellular phone fell. Soon books, magazines, newspapers, computers, and even more televisions, radios, and phones began to fall all around her.

Brenda found herself caught in a torrential rain of information resources. This scared all her animal friends as well. She knew that if she did not escape, she and her animal friends would drown in this deluge of data.

Back inside the Library she looked for the safest place where she and all her animal friends could go. She spotted God’s Great Book and headed towards it.

The world was being inundated by information and causing total sensory saturation everywhere. The whole world was being flooded by facts and even the library was quickly becoming overwhelmed.

Quickly, Brenda opened God’s Book and hopped inside for protection, taking all her invisible friends with her. Amazingly, God’s book gave her and her animal friends buoyancy to ride out wave after wave of information.

The world was completely covered in a mess of messages and uncategorized information. So the little bookworm’s problems were not over yet. She was still adrift and did not know how to navigate through this flood of facts and knowledge.

All this cognitive confusion rocked Brenda’s world along with her animal friends. She began to be bounced around by larger and larger waves of conflicting information and discrepant, disconnected data. She not only held on tight to God’s Big Book, but for additional stability, she began reading its stories intensely. Now she was holding on to every word with her dear life.

Brenda suddenly realized that she had found the most important information in the world. God was watching all this and decided it was time to perform a great miracle. As Brenda continued to read the Bible, the great flooding of facts that was threatening to suffocate her began to subside.

God was now creating a new place for Brenda and her animal friends to live. God began to transform all the televisions, radios, computers, cell phones, journals, newspapers and magazines that had covered the earth to a great depth into a mountain of ideas, according to their importance. God’s Great Book then took Brenda and her friends to the top of this wonderful mountain.

Brenda now realized that it was God, who from her earliest childhood, was acting in her heart to help her discover the most valuable information. The big lesson to be learned is that when you discover what the most important information in the world is, all the other knowledge and ideas in the world can then be arranged, higher and higher, into more logical order and majesty. This mountain was the perfect place for all the things of Brenda’s heart and mind to find safety, peace, and joy.

This was the place for Brenda and all her animal friends to start a new world. This world would develop into a Land of Wisdom.

Was The Forbidden Fruit A Crisp, Juicy Apple?

Eating fruit is supposed to be healthy for us. The saying, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” is a positive testimonial to its nutritional value and fiber content.

So why would God warn Adam and Eve not to do something which offered real health benefits? What made the forbidden fruit forbidden? If one does not think deeply about this, then the only conclusion to be made is that this particular fruit was not necessarily bad to eat, but that the act of disobeying God made it evil.

If one does think deeply about this biblical event it becomes quite troublesome. The outcome, called “The Fall,” challenges our intuitive and deep sense of justice and rightness.

In this story, God concocted an artificial test, which had nothing to do with a person’s actual character or morality, yet became so indignant by this minor infraction that all humanity was doomed to suffer. Why would someone’s moment of weakness be transferred to future generations as deadly original sin?

It seems as though God acted more like a spoiled brat than one possessing Infinite Love and Wisdom. And why did God later choose to become more practical with the Ten Commandments, which does indeed address and test the quality of human souls? Was God still tinkering with how humans should behave? Tinkering does not suggest inerrancy.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. The problem is that the literal interpretation of its stories kills heavenly communication.

The Word of God could not be the Word of God unless it contained the boundless depth of Infinite wisdom. God could not have created everything in the universe, including bio-complexity, from the Holy Word, unless it too, contained unimaginable complexity. The only way Infinite Wisdom and complexity can exist in a finite book is if Scripture is a multidimensional document with layers of meaning.

These higher meanings allow God to reveal more and more divine wisdom to us. For instance, on a higher level, the act of eating in Scripture represents appropriation. When we eat and metabolize food (or fruit) it enters into our very fabric and becomes “us.” The same thing holds true with ideas and beliefs – which we can swallow whole.

Simply put, the forbidden fruit was harmful because it was really poisonous to eat – poisonous for the soul. God warned against eating this fruit because it came from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which represents humankind’s misguided belief and faith in their own self intelligence, rather then being led by God’s wisdom (Tree of Life).

To be expelled from the Garden of Eden is to be removed from God’s wisdom. Everything wrong about today’s world and human affairs is not from any ongoing punishment. It all stems from a lack of wisdom.

Don’t you think that the “fruits” of one’s self-pride and ego reasoning are much more tempting and sweeter than a mere apple? This higher lesson is carried over into the New Testament by the Lord’s words, “wherefore by their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:20) and “for the tree is known by his fruit” (Matthew 12:33).

Neuroscience And Proper Fishing Technique

Many of my posts have been written so that interested readers may get a small preview of how I will attempt to unify science and theology in my next book, Proving God. In some cases I show how natural laws emerged from spiritual laws and put God’s character on display. In other cases, I focus on showing how real science is creatively woven into the very fabric of the narratives in the Holy Word.

The second strategy involves everything from physics to neuroscience. Today I would like to touch on how neuroscience is incorporated into the sacred stories of Scripture. First, we have to grasp how Scripture is a multidimensional document that communicates information on several discrete levels.

Its lowest level involves our ordinary language. Higher up, each word sheds its natural meaning and represents non-physical events taking place in the human heart and mind, especially with respect to our relationship with God. On the highest level, every word expresses a Divine meaning and treats of the Lord exclusively (high Christology).

In a nutshell, Scripture contains a natural level, a psycho-spiritual level, and a purely Divine level. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find that the Holy Word can address human psychology and neuroscience on a level beyond its literal interpretation.

The New Testament account of the Lord teaching His disciples how to fish provides us with a perfect demonstration of this unique thesis. In John (21:6) we read that the disciples took out their boat out at night to catch some fish. During that night they caught nothing. But then Jesus appears the next morning, on the shore, and tells them to cast their net on the right side of the boat. This switch in tactics was so successful that their net became too heavy with fish to pull into the boat.

On a higher level, this biblical story was actually about the Lord teaching His disciples how to become fishers of men. Modern neuroscience tells us that the left side of the brain is more intellectual, while the right side is more emotional and creative. So the lesson for the disciples was that they would not be able to convince others to follow the Lord from any mere intellectual argument - but from love.

That the disciples began fishing “at night” represents that they started their task of recruiting new believers from a state of mental darkness or obscurity. The Lord appeared in the morning to represent an awakening in the cognitive function of His disciples. In other words, they were enlightened by the Lord’s appearance and influence.

Another unexpected example of neuroscience being expressed in Scripture is to be found in the story of Noah’s Ark. The Ark’s construction consisted of three levels. These three levels also represent the cognitive architecture of the human intellect and its distinct functioning. The lowest level is the memory and its knowledge. The middle level is reasoning. And, the uppermost level represents and our highest intellectual qualities.

It is important to note therefore that Scripture views human memory, reasoning, and higher mind as discontinuous operations. It is through the mediation of these three distinct levels of our cognitive architecture that God’s light can flow down (top-down causality) and illuminate the entire human intellect.

The timeless lesson of Noah’s Ark is that God’s guidance allows the human mind to remain buoyant during times of troubled waters and can then be taken to a higher place – represented by “Mount Ararat.” Without these higher interpretations, Scripture could not be perennially relevant to humans of all epochs.

Do you find these ideas farfetched? Do you believe God’s literary skills are no different from the finite talents of secular writers reproducing historical events? Or, do you believe that God would use a multi-leveled style capable of communicating Infinite Wisdom and foresight?

Why Even Great Leaders Can Fall Into Scandal

It seems like every year the news media presents us with shocking disclosures about political leaders, actors, athletes, and members of the clergy getting caught in scandal. These are often people of great accomplishments. Even great leaders, who have started important movements throughout history and whose personal sacrifices have benefited humankind, have succumbed to various personal indiscretions.

How is this possible? How can these transgressions happen, especially when many such individuals often expound noble behavior? They clearly have a sense of right and wrong.

The problem is not civility or morality. It is one’s spirituality. Misconduct is not simply a “slip” or a temporary mental state of bad judgment. It is the rejection of the concept of sin.

Many dynamic individuals may understand that certain behavior is immoral and loudly condemn such behavior as going against the public good. But if these things are not seen as sins, they remain soldering in the heart and are merely kept hidden from the world for the sake of reputation.

This is why Scripture warns us to “clean the inside of the cup” (Matthew 23:26). If something is not viewed as a sin, the inside of the cup remains as it is.

What is not usually taken into account is that humans have an inner and an outer reality. Humans are both physical and spiritual beings. But these two realities of our life can be completely separated from each other. We can be outwardly good but inwardly challenged. This leads to hypocrisy.

This inner deceit has led to a faulty reasoning of modernity which has adopted the life-slogan and inner conviction that, “something is wrong only if you get caught.” But how is it that such individuals can do great things for humanity and gain our deepest respect and praise?

Great things can be, and indeed are, accomplished by those who do not inspect their inner reality. In fact, they are often more motivated to accomplish great things which can benefit others than those of a more humble animus. The reason is quite simple. Such individuals are inwardly driven by the powerful principle of self-love and have pride from the glory of their own self-intelligence. So, in order to succeed and gain proper recognition, they push themselves more than others to accomplish great things.

The Lord God often makes wise use of those who are intoxicated by the power of self-love. For instance, various ego-centered individuals have been quite successful in spreading the Holy Word throughout the world by their immoderate passion for quoting scripture and speaking about God from the pulpit.

The problem is that while such individuals can be of real value to others, they shoot themselves in the foot. The spiritual world (heaven and hell) consists of the inner realities of people. That can be either a comforting or scary thought.

It is wrong to think we screw up because “to be human is to err.” We get our humanness from God and increase it through following spiritual tenets and the Commandments. God is always focused on our inner realities.

Do you think the concepts of “sin” and “evil” have relevancy in our post-modern world, or are they simply archaic terms used by the unenlightened?

The Second Coming Is NOW!

I am deeply involved in the growing movement of theologians and scientists who are seriously attempting to unify science and religion. In fact, the results of my own labors will become available later this year in an ambitious book entitled “Proving God.”

The Apostle John (1:1-3) tells us that everything in the manifest universe was created from the Holy Word. However, a mere literal interpretation and exegesis of Scripture is inadequate for providing us with the rational evidence for such a belief (beyond simple faith).

The Holy Word is a multidimensional document with layers of meaning that are abstracted from any involvement with time and space. These rarefied narratives transcend the spatio-temporal arena and describe events taking place in the psycho-scape of the human heart and mind. In other words, they refer to spiritual realities creatively concealed within our ordinary language.

Even historically correct events in Scripture portray these deeper scenarios (so archeological discoveries are not the way one goes about proving or disproving the authority or inerrancy of Scripture).

This “layering of meaning” is the patterning principle behind the hierarchical scaffolding of the universe and solves many of the touchy issues arising from our post-modern world-view. For instance, the deeper narratives contained within Scripture offer concepts that are timeless and thus more personally relevant to contemporary life (as opposed to addressing the simple needs of ancient goat-herders).

Without this multidimensional architecture, God’s Infinite Wisdom could not be contained within a finite Book. Nor could it offer us any coherent explanation of how the laws of nature could have logically emerged from our Lord God’s Divine Nature.

The hidden “quantum” vocabulary of Scripture is what will be revealed at the Lord’s Second Coming. The reason I can tell you of these things is because the Second Coming is taking place NOW!

Do these ideas seem anti-intuitive to you? Why?

P.S. If you would rather not wait for my book to come out, you can gain some additional information from several of my previous posts. Better yet, seek out the Swedenborg Foundation. Emanuel Swedenborg’s scientific and theological writings have provided me with the inspiration for my own projects.

The Heart, The Eye And The Hand

There once was a very, very, sad heart. She loved to do everything but was unable to do anything about it. Even with all her passion she did not know how to get things done. The reason was she never received an education. In fact, she did not even know what learning was. All she could do was wish, and wish, and wish.

The poor heart felt that she was out of rhythm with the world’s pulse and was bored of her endless life of diastolic and systolic repetition that was getting her nowhere.

So she began to cry.

“Why are you so sad?” came a voice not far away. Unfortunately, because love is blind, the heart could not see who was addressing her and said, “Who is it? I cannot see.”

“I can see,” said the stranger. “I am an eye.”

“What is an eye?” inquired the heart.

“I was specially designed to see,” answered the eye. “There is nothing in the world that escapes my attention. I can look at everything and learn about anything.”

The heart started to beat with new excitement. “Could you please help teach me what you know so that all my desires and wishes can be turned into action and come true?”

The eye looked around, searching for a way to reply. Then he squinted, as if pained by the heart’s plea. “I know how to do things, but it is quite clear to me that I have never done anything myself, either,” confessed the eye. “No matter what I focus on, I do not have the ability to accomplish a single thing,”

Things now seemed worse than before. Not only was the heart still sad, but now the eye began to shed a tear as well. Together, they wanted to do things and knew how to do things but they still lacked ability.

“Why are you two so sad?’ came a nearby voice. “Perhaps I can offer a hand.”

“Who are you?’ asked the heart.

“I know, I know!” said the eye. “I can see that it is a hand.”

“I have ability,” pointed out the hand. “I was designed to be handy. But alone I am nothing more than a knucklehead.” The hand opened up and admitted, “I need what you two have – the desire and the knowledge.” Then the hand snapped his fingers and said, “Perhaps if we all got together and shared our talents, we could accomplish great things.

The eye opened wide with excitement as he suddenly gained a new grasp of things. And the heart was so touched by the hand that she replied. “Let’s do it. I’m pumped!”

Suddenly, a most beautiful angel appeared before them. She smiled at the three and said, “God has specially designed each of you and brought you together to enjoy a most sacred and holy partnership.”

“Why is our joining together holy?” asked the curious heart.

“Every time you all act together, you are representing and celebrating the three wonderful aspects of God’s nature, which are Divine Love, Divine Wisdom, and Divine Action. God has given you the similar sacred gifts of loving, knowing, and doing.

The heart, eye and hand turned to each other to verify the angel’s words. “That feels right to me,” said the heart. “I see exactly what the angel is saying,” followed the eye. “Those are words I can hold onto for life,” motioned the hand while making an “okay” sign with his fingers.

So the heart, the eye and the hand lived happily ever after – as they were meant to live under God’s divine, eternal plan.