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AS IN HEAVEN, SO ON EARTH
Address by Lars-Erik Wiberg
for Sunday, November 28, 2004
As we greet again the first Sunday of Advent, is it not a propitious
time to propose and present something that is new and freshly
aborning? We surely have not quite been awaiting it, as with that
first blessed Advent. Nevertheless, as you will hear, it has a
heavenly connection and would surely benefit from the spirit of our
small Candle of Hope, for we are truly hoping for success as we
attempt a course of action that is without precedent of any kind and
is intended for the benefit and advancement of our Faith . A few
ideas are going to be laid out before you, and you may wonder, as we
examine them in turn, where they are all leading. But all will come
together in one connected cluster of dependable Swedenborgian
doctrine. So here we start with an observation in a quote attributed
to Carl Jung.
"All round him he saw the fatal consequences of the power to do and
act conferred on men whose being did not match the responsibilities
of the functions entrusted to them. He was to say over and over
again . . . that the right cause entrusted to the wrong man was
disastrous."
So wrote Laurence Van Der Post on page 248 of his book entitled Jung
and the Story of Our Time. Tempting as it may seem to us at this
particular time, so close after crucial elections, to give Carl
Jung's observation a political spin either way, we must remember that
he was thinking about life. He wasn't thinking politics except
insofar as politics is one of the many facets of life. So now, with
politics suitably subordinated in your minds, let me read that quote
again so that you can mentally inhale the immense scope of its
application.
Plainly, the goal of getting individuals to work, to be making
themselves useful, in occupations for which they are suited, is
crucial for success in any calling. Some of the results of
misassignments may well be trivial, serving mainly to keep
dissatisfied and on edge the poor souls who happen to be misassigned.
But then there are the monumental misfits, in whatever field of
endeavor, who should never have been given the functions for which
they are responsible.
Putting it another way, not only do individuals, you and I, deserve
to work at what we do best, but also the rest of the world deserves not to have us work
at what we do poorly. There is a tragic loss of effort, of economy,
of personal satisfaction, even of well-being, that is fostered by the
wrong job. People want to do a good job; it's natural and healthy,
and when they don't, the main reason is the wrong job.
It was with this in mind over twenty years ago that a suggestion from
a client fell on my receptive ears. I hadn't seen the Van Der Post
quote at that time, but because of my involvement with so many hiring
decisions, my thinking had already matured along similar lines. So
you can imagine the enormous lift I received from that quote when
first I saw it. My client is a behavioral psychologist and he wanted
to add a Jung-based instrument to the test battery he uses to counsel
clients as to their careers. So he asked me to help him find one.
Well to put it briefly, we didn't succeed in our search; in some way
all the Jung-based tests were deficient for his purposes. That's
when he suggested that I construct one. Now that isn't so funny
coming from him because he devises tests and thinks it's a normal
thing to do. I started with a doubting outlook.
It was plain enough at the outset that a key ingredient in any useful
test would be that it measured persons and occupations by means of
the same criteria. That way they could be compared directly. Jung's
work as presented in his 1921 text, Psychological Types, would
certainly supply valid criteria. I combed Roget's Thesaurus for
adjectives that would depict his four Functions: Thinking, Feeling,
Sensation and Intuition, as well as the two Attitudes that he had
identified: Extraversion, and Introversion. Armed with 200
laboriously selected adjectives for use as response items, I had them
checked out by a noted Jungian psychologist whose endorsement of my
work was another big lift.
Also at this time I discovered in his Codex 54, which was eventually
published in 1888 under the title Rational Psychology, that Emanuel
Swedenborg had anticipated Jung to some extent. With this in mind,
and out of respect, I renamed the Functions using Swedenborg's terms:
Will, Imagination, Thought, and Sensation, and with that acronym,
WIST was born. Many in our congregation are familiar with it having
used it themselves.
I was quite successful in inducing willing subjects to pioneer with
me as I tried to figure out how to interpret the scores. It was a
complicated process to invent a way simply to present the results on paper, much less make sense of them. I won't
try to detail the mind-wrenching processes I went through except to
state that the eventual key to interpretation became quite evident in
Swedenborg's Divine Love and Wisdom. Therein lay all the clues I
needed about the manner in which the Functions interact and make
interpretation possible.
Now with WIST in hand let's skip ahead a bit and bring in another
facet of what I want to explain this morning. You are probably
familiar by now with a new charitable organization that several of us
are slowly putting together. It is being established as a
corporation, but we like to refer to it as "Uses Trust" which is easy
to remember, and to a Swedenborgian extremely meaningful. The
principals in the firm are Rev. Sarah Buteux, Rebecca Kline, Frank
Vagnone, Brenda Wiberg, and myself. Of these, you may well not know
Frank. He is the executive director of Bryn Athyn Cathedral, an
architect, and an authority on the Arts and Crafts Movement about
which he has lectured right here in this Chapel. Clearly we have
made a deliberate effort to combine compatible influences from both
the General Church and General Convention.
The reason we have done this can be seen in the Purpose of the Trust
described thus: "The Trust is established to finance New Church (Swedenborgian) Uses
by allocating funds for their support that are earned from
WIST-based Websites, correlated media, and other sources. Such uses
will include financial contributions by the Trust to the following:
1) New Church Initiatives for growth and evangelization;
2) The Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem;
3) One-time payments to New Church Societies that have an urgent need;
4) Advancement of Occupational Compatibility as a use and as a field
of endeavor."
Use Number One dealing with New Church initiatives has been covered
by means of an address from this place and has also been discussed
widely, so there's no need to emphasize it again here. Use Number
Two which involves this Society is important because, after the long
and expensive struggle to keep Swedenborg Chapel in our hands, we are
in a delicate financial situation. In Use Number Three, the Trust
envisions itself as being a resource for any Society that has a
crisis requiring money in a hurry.
But what of Use Number Four? Why emphasize that? Well to start with
Occupational Compatibility has never been named as a field of
endeavor although it arguably deserves to be. On the other hand the
very idea of it underlies innumerable tests, career planning
resources, and a plethora of self-help guides, all meant to aid
individuals in getting into the right lines of work. But these
resources, besides being a random lot, generally have no academic
home. There is, to be sure, a guidance function in most high
schools, but as often as not it consists chiefly of materials
representing various colleges and universities which, for their part,
do have placement services and facilities for recruiters. Yet where
is there a department operating under a charter to develop valid ways
to measure what I call Occupational Compatibility in a way that would
dignify it as a legitimate field of inquiry? I don't know of any.
So although this Trust objective does not have top priority, it is
our hope that we will find, or even make, a way to give it academic
life.
Of course Occupational Compatibility is what WIST is designed to
measure directly, and it is a self-scoring version of WIST, made
available through a Trust website, that, it is earnestly hoped, will
fund much of the Trust's work. But what is the connection between
Occupational Compatibility and a charitable effort in the hands of a
small group of Swedenborgians? Even further, what in Heaven's name
could be the heavenly connection between all this and the earth?
Your tipoff was in the reading from The Writings this morning. It is
apparent that heavenly societies are populated by individuals who,
although they may not work at quite what we work at, do in fact work
and perform uses much as we do. It is also far beyond reasonable
doubt that they work at what they are good at. Here, as is my
typical approach to questions explored in this pulpit, is that
cluster of Swedenborgian doctrine, that I promised earlier, on the
very subject. We read:
"The delight from good, and the pleasantness from truth, which make
up the blessedness in Heaven, do not consist in idleness, but in
activity. . . The activity with those who are in Heaven consists in
performing uses." AC ¶6410
"The correspondence of the world with Heaven is through uses, and
uses conjoin them." H ¶112
"In Heaven equally as in the world there are meats and drinks; there
are banquets and feasts . . . and there are games and spectacles; and
there are music and singing; and all these things in the highest
perfection." CL ¶6
"In Heaven there are administrations, ministries, courts of justice
greater and less, also handicrafts and works." CL ¶207
"Heaven is a kingdom of uses. . . The kinds of uses are innumerable;
both those which they are aware of and those which they are not aware
of. For there are those who instruct others; those who lead to good;
those who are with men; those who arouse the dead; those who defend;
those who are set over others; in a word there are innumerable
offices." SD ¶5158
"They asked the Angel, what then is heavenly joy? He replied, "It is
the delight of doing something which is of use to one's self and
others; and the delight of use derives its essence from love, and its
coming forth into existence from wisdom. This delight of use,
originating from love through wisdom, is the soul and life of all
heavenly joys." CL ¶5
"Therefore when a man sincerely, justly, and faithfully performs the
work that belongs to his office or employment, from affection and its
delight, he is continually in the good of use, not only in the
community . . . but also to individuals. . . And the good that he
does are the goods of use, which he does every day, and when he is
not doing them, he is thinking of doing them; for there is an
interior affection . . which longs for it. Hence it is that he is
perpetually in the good of use from morning to evening, from year to
year, from his earliest age to the end of his life." Doc Char ¶158
So let me ask three questions: First, is it important to be useful?
Second, can we be more useful doing work to which we are suited that
to which we are not? Third, would it be useful to make Occupational
Compatibility a field of endeavor? Plainly the answer to these
questions is an unqualified "yes". It is truly unthinkable to
contemplate being useful in heaven if we pursue uses that are wrong
for us, which is to say the wrong work. Since "the correspondence
between the world and Heaven is through uses", should we not bend our
most serious efforts toward making the wrong work unthinkable right
here?
Emanuel Swedenborg never even hinted at that remotest of
possibilities that there were misassignments in Heaven - - that they
could ever occur. Much of what you read about Heaven in The Writings
explains that you are going to wind up where you belong and makes it
apparent that you will be doing what you are supposed to be doing.
With our eventual locus, our home in heaven, in mind hadn't we better
get started by being in the line of work to which we are suited.?
We'll certainly save a lot of time when our permanent address has a
heavenly zip code. Indeed, since there must be many ways in which
earth can become more heavenly, it seems beyond doubt that a crucial
one of these involves improvement of our usefulness, cultivation of
our strengths, minimum dependence on our weaknesses, right here and
right now. We read that correspondence between Heaven and the world
is achieved through uses. Hadn't we better make sure that the uses
for which we are responsible stimulate that powerful interior
affection, love of our work, to which Emanuel Swedenborg refers?
In the spirit of today's reading from scripture, should we not be
alert, you might say be awake, to that usefulness we will be called
upon to fulfill in the Lord's Heaven. Our lesson from the word
emphasizes a need to prepare, to be in readiness against the day and
hour that no one knows. Certainly part of that preparation involves
what our uses will be. We don't want to find ourselves caught in the
Jungian mode so aptly described as "fatal consequence". We want our
efforts aimed in such a way that they are truly representative of the
best that is in us and not askew from the responsibilities entrusted
to us. Thus among its uses will the Uses Trust seek to find ways in
which a formalized concept called Occupational Compatibility will
make this earth a bit more heavenly.
Amen
Copyright 2004 by Lars-Erik Wiberg
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