Maslow and Swedenborg

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

in Conversation with Swedenborg’s Process of Regeneration

Rev. Alison Moore, Nov. 17, 2019

Montgomery New Church, Cincinnati, OH

Genesis 28:10-16; Luke 6: 46-49; Divine Love and Wisdom 330 

I left my composed sermon behind, due to a lack of ink in the host’s printer, but also following my own deep sense that speaking from my heart was the better thing to do this day.

The Readings

Genesis 28:10-16  Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.  He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.  There above it stood the Lord, and he said: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying.  Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.  I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”

After the reading from Genesis, I invited the congregation to reflect on the detail that Jacob was to be a blessing. He wasn’t just to be blessed, he was to be a blessing to others. The path of regeneration opens to each of us a connection with heaven, which is like Jacob’s vision of the angels ascending and descending between us and God. It is the gate of heaven.

Luke 6:46-49  “Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?  As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on a rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on sandy soil. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.”

After the reading from Luke, I observed that I grew up believing my spiritual house was already built on a rock simply by virtue of being born into the right denomination. We “had” the rock, and it was everyone else whose house was built on the sand and that would fall. I now believe that we all build our houses on sand repeatedly until we learn what spiritual rock truly is. The process of spiritual growth and regeneration may mean that our spiritual house falls down several times, requiring us to re-examine the things upon which our beliefs are founded. I invited everyone to forgive themselves and be open to the times when the foundations of everything they believe seem threatened because that is an invitation from God to grow.

DLW 330: The divine purpose of creation is that all humankind enters heaven. Every secondary goal in creation is in service to this primary goal. Because the whole focus of creation is on the regeneration of humankind, this focus breaks down into three areas of human life: our physical bodies, the development of our rational capacity, and ultimately our spiritual life which grants us union with the Divine (which is heaven). We are united to the Divine by a spiritual life; but we cannot live a spiritual life without a developed rational faculty, and we cannot maintain a rational perspective when our physical life is unstable. Our body is like the foundation of a house; the rational faculty provides a sturdy dwelling; and because of these structures, spiritual consciousness flows in from the Lord, dwelling within them.

From this, we can discern the priorities of providence regarding our lives: to support the health of our bodies, so that we can develop our rationality so that we can be made spiritual and become joined to the Lord.

Following the reading from Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Wisdom I highlighted that the very purpose of our life on earth is to become angelic—that all of Providence is aimed at our spiritual growth—and that by engaging on this path of regeneration we are asking God to make us blessings.

The Sermon
The following is the best I can recall of what I said in lieu of a sermon:

Welcome to this beautiful harvest feast celebration. It is a lovely thing to see the two congregations coming together in shared worship. As someone who left the one tradition in order to pursue ordination and the right to serve as a minister in the other, I know a bit about loss and about needing to find comfort within new traditions. And I imagine that, for some in this room, the ways we will worship this morning will feel unfamiliar.

I have come to understand the two traditions as representing the two directions of the cross. The Glendale New Church which comes from the “high church” or conservative branch worships in a very vertical way. The focus is on God. The relationship is between the individual and God, therefore there is a discouragement of anything social and a preservation of what is called "a sphere of worship". It favors silence in the sanctuary, and that all social conversation remains outside in the hall and the rest of life.  There is something beautiful about that.

The Montgomery New Church, which comes from the original flavor Swedenborgians in North America, is more casual. They hold the place of the horizontal bar of the cross, welcoming space for our connection with each other. There is hugging and quiet chatting in the sanctuary. Their art and music are more homespun. Their ornamentation and ritual tend to be simpler and their presence unpretentious. There is something lovely and comforting in that. It is unintimidating.

I see value in both. And I give each one of you here permission to be uncomfortable with things that are unfamiliar, and still to prefer what you prefer. I invite you to be curious about the unfamiliar practices and to open in yourselves a way to appreciate the other without any need to feel inferior or superior. This is how we walk together. We can hold fast to what we love, without needing to invalidate things that are different.

So this morning I want to talk about the way psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs can be in conversation with Emanuel Swedenborg's foundations of regeneration. “Regeneration” according to Emanuel Swedenborg is the reason we are here—to become better people—to see the ways we are short-sighted and selfish and insensitive to others and to make small changes daily as we seek to become better people. We are here to become a blessing to others. This process takes a lifetime of experience and learning (and sometimes big mistakes), and I think we are meant to be patient with ourselves so that we don’t give up.

Maslow stated that there are five stages of human needs, each stage completely dependent on the previous stage for it to exist. The same way Swedenborg describes the health of the body and then a sound rational mind as necessary before a human can be regenerated, Maslow describes similar requirements that seem to map very well onto Swedenborg’s teachings.

Abraham Maslow’s most foundational human needs are the ones you might imagine if you were plunked down on an alien planet and knew nothing about how to survive. Immediately you would need to know what is good for shelter, what is good to eat, and how to clothe yourself. You would need to be able to rest—to get sufficient sleep without needing to worry about remaining vigilant.

This leads to the next level of human need which is safety and security. Once our most basic physical needs are met, we need to know how to protect ourselves. What is dangerous? We need to know we can relax into knowing our physical well-being is not imminently threatened before we have time for higher pursuits. Security in today’s world financial security. We need to know where our next paycheck is coming from. And this brings to mind our many fellow citizens who are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to hold down three or more jobs to do so. This breaks my heart. This shouldn’t be. It seems to me that our duty if we believe that all humans deserve the ability to be regenerated, is to see that many more members of society can earn a living wage with dignity, so that they can be freed up to grow spiritually too.

The third level of human need, once our bodies are well cared for and our future is relatively secure, is love and belonging. We do better in a loving supportive community. We are designed to live in community, and it is life in community that invites us to see the ways we are falling short. I can’t help but think all of the people that I know who have been rejected from their family or community for reasons of gender identity, orientation, religion, skin color, or even their politics today. It is terribly hurtful and reduces these people to a spiritual homelessness that can take a long time to recover from. I see so many people who have been rejected from their church communities, and the hurt is so deep, that they resolve never to belong to any church again. And I have to ask, if love and belonging in a safe social community is required for us to be able to regenerate, how are we serving these people by kicking them out of our churches and families? Ironically, these folks often go on to build for themselves a new social network that does love and support them. It does not reflect so well on the group that did the rejecting.

It is never simple. It is never black and white.  It is usually in need of a lot more humility and love, regardless.

The fourth level of human need Maslow calls “esteem.” Esteem has recently been translated as confidence and could also be called faith. This “esteem” is not an arrogant certainty of one’s own correctness or superiority. This esteem is faith in the process of regeneration which could also be called trust in Providence.

“Esteem” requires first that we feel secure enough to face and acknowledge the ways we make mistakes without overwhelming shame. So many of us are prone to shame. Like Adam and Eve, we are more likely to cover up and hide our mistakes than be open and honest. This hiding and covering up prevents our growth. This hiding and covering up create distance between ourselves and God, and distance between ourselves and each other. I submit that the real sin of Adam and Eve was not eating the fruit, but hiding and covering up out of shame. It was shame that made them hide. It was shame that made them distance themselves from God. They projected onto God an inability to forgive and stepped away. They didn’t even give God a chance.

This maps on to my experience of working with people trying to heal relationships. We seem so quick to blame when in truth the one we find it hardest to forgive is ourselves. We use shame and blame outward to protect ourselves from feeling our disappointment with ourselves. We armor ourselves with feelings of superiority which are as fragile as glass. It is so easy to throw stones when we forget we also live in a glass house. Why is it so hard for us to see that throwing stones helps nobody? Our shame, like the snake, tells us we are not safe being open with God. Our shame is the opposite of the esteem we need to regenerate. We don't need to be perfect to get to heaven, we need to trust that God's providence, compassion, and wisdom are more than enough to get us to heaven if we would just stop hiding.

The fifth level and final level of human need according to Abraham Maslow is what he calls "Self-actualization.” In this state one become so connected with one's gifts and abilities and loves that one serves intuitively and automatically and without self-consciousness. One is a blessing just in the way one shows up. That description sounds a lot like the outcome of regeneration. Regeneration removes the things that block our usefulness. “Usefulness” does not mean a sort of numb, endless serving out of some sort of obligation or selflessness. In heaven, "usefulness" means coming from joy to contribute to the joy around us. It is a way of being that is hard to imagine. But this is the promise of heaven.

Heaven means all of our basic needs are met. We are not struggling just to get enough sleep or enough food, or to pay the rent. We are supported physically and emotionally. We are safe and we are wanted. We are a desired part of our community where the things we contribute are valued and where we in turn value the contributions of others. The life of heaven will feel something like a really well-executed sports maneuver (bump, serve, spike!), or being part of a really magnificent dance troop successfully performing some brilliant choreography. Each person performs their part to their best, and because everyone is at their best, the combined outcome is brilliant.

This life on earth has only the rarest glimpses of what it could be. The path of regeneration gets all of us there faster and with less suffering.

So this is the summation of what I came to say this morning. I came to say that we are here to become better people; that God is more than wise enough and powerful enough to lead us to heaven, even when we are having trouble forgiving ourselves and believing it is possible. Instead, let us love each other to bits. Let us do our best doing our own personal growth, and try to stay out of each other's business. Let us do better at appreciating each other and not criticizing each other, the same way we each would really like it if others appreciated us more and criticized us less. Let us create together the world we need to bring heaven on earth.

Blessings as you go forward from this place. May you increasingly become blessings to each other. Amen.

Today’s topic was inspired by a TED radio hour on Maslow’s human needs. https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/?showDate=2019-11-01

Releasing Resentment - sermon May 3 2015

“Releasing Resentment”

Rev. Alison Longstaff, May 3, 2015

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Genesis 37:3-8, Mark 11:22–25; HS 4681 

Heavenly Secrets 4681

The phrase, “And they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him,” symbolizes contempt and aversion. “Not being able to speak peaceably to him” symbolizes aversion, because speaking peaceably to someone requires wishing that other person well.  When the earliest peoples heard the word “peace” they thought of the Lord Himself—for this is the meaning of Peace at the highest level.  An angel’s state of peace in heaven, which is also called “salvation,” is the next highest meaning. The lowest and most obvious meaning for the ancient peoples was the comparable state of a peaceful person on earth, which is a state of spiritual well-being.  Being “unable to speak peaceably to [Joseph]” symbolizes that they were in a state which is opposite to “peace” and includes not wishing the other well. Emanuel Swedenborg

This write-up is based on an extemporaneous sermon which included an interactive portion.  My sermons are rarely extemporaneous, mainly because the congregation is used to having a printed copy to consult while I deliver it.  This also makes it easier to share with friends and send out via email.

But from time to time I will do an interactive service that invites deep self-reflection—maybe once or twice a year.  These often include a call to self-reflection that serves rather like a spiritual spring-cleaning. I think these worship services loosen things up a little bit and shake the dust out of our spiritual thinking.  I recognize that they are not everyone’s cup of tea. Today was one of those.

Resentment.

We all know what it is.  We all live with it.

But think about this saying:  

“Resentment is like eating rat poison and expecting a rat to die.”

Resentment eats us up inside.  It does nothing to hurt the other person or to resolve the cause of the hurt.

So what do we do when we are hurt by or angry at a person or group, or some ideology, and cannot let go of it?  So long as we harbor resentment, it is as if acid is eating us up inside, no one else.  Why do we feel like we are accomplishing something by feeling resentful?

Today I am going to teach you a tool for tackling resentment.  I learned it from my experiences with the Twelve Steps.

In the twelve-step program, a very important and transformative step is the Fourth Step which is: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”  A fourth step is intended to be as comprehensive a self-examination as possible.  It is to be written down.  (It is no coincidence that the Twelve Steps embody all the elements of Swedenborg's “repentance, reformation, and regeneration.”  Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of AA was married to Swedenborgian, Lois Burnham Wilson, who also founded Al-Anon.)

If you want practical, down-to-earth tools to help you on the path to personal reformation, look no farther than the Twelve Steps.  You don’t have to have an addiction for them to transform your life.

A key reason so many of us avoid a thorough self-examination is that we are afraid of what we will find.  It is rather like inviting a deep home inspection.  What if the inspector finds that the foundation is rotting, the roof is leaking, and the electrical is about to short out?  What if we will be expected to fix it all immediately and we can’t afford to?  What if everyone finds out what a mess we are and we feel terrible shame? Who wants to look in the mirror and see that we are much more overweight than we hoped, or that we have lost more hair than we realized, or that our saggy bits are saggier than ever?  Shame and self-loathing can be insidious, and it is no wonder we avoid them.  But they are not ever the intended outcome of self-examination, nor God’s plan for our eternal happiness.

Maybe one of the things we will discover when we examine ourselves is that we are far too harsh with ourselves?

Think about someone you love and admire.  Go ahead.  Close your eyes.  Who comes to mind?  Who comes to your heart?  Now ask yourself, do you love them because of how they look, or because of how they love?  When you see a photograph of that person, do you pick apart their appearance with a critical eye, or do you just feel happy to see someone you love?

Now, how do you respond to most pictures of yourself?  Unless you are unusually gifted in appearance or are remarkably unattached to your appearance, (or are a narcissist,) you would be like most of us.  Most of us do not respond to pictures of ourselves with the same enthusiasm we do to those of someone we love.  We can be pretty hard on ourselves.  Can we learn to do unto ourselves as we do unto those we love?

So when you do your self-examination, do it with the eyes of love.  Be open to seeing the areas that need work, but know that you don’t need to be afraid of them and that everything can be repaired and healed in time.  Everything.

And so now I invite you to do a mini fourth step.  It will be specific, and you are free to meditate, or look like you are thinking, or daydream instead.  But I do encourage you to give this a try.  This particular fourth step approaches self-examination by looking at our resentments, and I have found it a powerful and transformative tool.  No one will see what you write.  There will be no “sharing” or “soul-baring” following the exercise.  This is for you and you alone.

If this process stirs up something that you wish to talk about later, I am available to listen to and support you in a private setting at some future time.  But at this time, this process is just for you.

So take your paper and mark it into four columns.  At the top of the first column write “I Resent.”  Now, take some time and pick the top three that come to mind.  If you were doing a full fourth step you would list and list and list every possible resentment you could think of from your whole life.  It might be pages and pages.  It could take days.  I know for me, thinking of things I was mad about was easy.  I had no idea just how resentful was until I did this fourth step.

For this morning just pick two or three.  They might be related to a person, or an institution, or even an ideology.  It can be from the past or be quite recent.

All done?

Now at the top of the next column write “Why? What Happened?”  Answer this in the column below in relation to the items you listed in the first column.  Be sure to be as specific as you feel you have time.  This is a time of championing yourself.  I know I tend to find this column easy to fill in too.

All done?

At the top of column three write: “How This Affects Me Today.”  In this column you will continue answering according to the resentments you listed in column one.  Again, be specific.  Do not put, “I am fine,” or “It doesn’t affect me.”  If it didn’t affect you and you are fine, you wouldn’t have listed it.  It wouldn’t even have crossed your mind.  There is something dark still lingering in connection to it or you wouldn’t have picked it as one of your top three resentments.  Believe me when I say, no matter how big or old or hopeless it may look, every hurt can be “cast down and thrown into the sea” with good support and tools, with God’s help and being kind to yourself.

Finished? 

At the top of column four write: “My Responsibility Then and Now.”  Now this is important:  You may have shared in the hurtful dynamic of what happened.  But depending on how old you were and the power dynamic at the time, you may have held no responsibility (even if the ones in power tried to blame you).  It is a completely legitimate response to fill in that you did nothing to invite what happened.  For example, if you were harmed as a little child, you cannot in any way be responsible for what happened to you.  If you are not sure, leave it blank.  It will become clearer later, if you wish to understand and are open to it.

While there are many ways in life that we might have been hurt and did nothing to deserve it, the lingering anger and resentment can follow us and eat away at us long after the event.  Someone who lost a limb or a loved one in the Boston bombing could understandably feel ongoing anger and resentment, and they did nothing wrong to deserve what happened to them.  Such losses are permanent and catastrophic, and one does not “get over” them.  One has to find a way to go on with life despite them.

And here is where the second part—My Responsibility…Now—is especially important.  Our responsibility now is about seeing where we have choices now. 

When I did this exercise, I realized that though I had been hurt deeply as a child, I was still harboring the resentment forty years later.  I was continuing to hold the hurt inside me and I missed no opportunity to bad-mouth the one who hurt me.  I was not approaching that person nor attempting to express my hurt or ask for an apology.  There was even, I admit, a kind of pleasure in feeling so angry and … self-righteous?  I certainly felt better than that person, and I felt entitled to stick little pins in her back whenever I could.

It was uncomfortable to realize that I was now keeping this negative cycle going.  Yet it was a relief, too.  The child in me needed to hear that it wasn’t her fault and she didn’t deserve what happened.  But the adult in me needed to see that I was behaving badly and hurting myself and others now.  I was certainly not treating her the way I would want to be treated—according to the Golden Rule.  While I was feeling spiteful and superior, she was oblivious.  This gave me a feeling of power. While I was gossiping and spinning negative stories about her, she had no idea.  It was not pretty.

I have been on the receiving end of this sort of behaviour and it feels awful.  However I cannot judge when someone does this to me, because I definitely have done it too.

And as hard as it was to see that truth about myself, I was grateful to become aware of it and start to change it.  I did not want to be “that person.”  I had had no idea I was “that person.”  I was too busy being a martyr and a victim.  Was I victimized?  Yes.  Was I now handling it in a mature and spiritually responsible way and owning where I was at fault?  Not until that moment.  And even after that moment, it has taken considerable time and effort to change that long-standing habit of back-stabbing that particular person.

I have been told I’m brave.  But stabbing someone in the back is not brave.  Creating a safe space and talking it out with her would be brave.  I have yet to do that.  I might never actually get that brave.  But I am shifting how I see her and am coming to release the emotions that are eating me up inside. I am biting my tongue when I want to say something mean about her, because that is something I can do that moves me into forgiveness and greater integrity. 

So I will give you time now to explore in that final column the ways you might be part of the ongoing pain.  This is not about blame.  This is about realizing ways we can become free of hurtful emotions that we hadn’t seen before.  Be very gentle with yourself.  Or, just meditate and breathe.  I will give you several minutes to complete this final column.

Forgiveness is a funny thing.  It doesn’t mean that what happened is okay.  It does mean we are releasing all the ways something might continue to hurt us, and that takes time.  It can take years and years.  There is nothing wrong with you if it takes years for you to release all your resentments.  I doubt any of us do release them all in this lifetime. But do know that with each one truly released, life gets lighter, clearer and more peaceful.    

You now may have a potent paper in your hand. It is yours to do with as you wish.  It might be a valuable new friend and reveal a path to a much more peaceful soul.   God go with you.

Amen

Source: http://www.12step.org/docs/Step4_Inventory.pdf

Inventory columns

Column 1: Resentments.

“I resent” List all people, places, things, institutions, ideas or principles with whom you are angry, whom you resent, or feel hurt or threatened by.

Column 2: “Why? What happened?”

The Cause. Be specific as to why you were/are angry or hurt.

Column 3: How It Affects Me Today”

How did it make you feel? How does it still make you feel? Be specific, detailed, and thorough.

Column 4: “My Responsibility Then and Now” 

Where was your responsibility at the time? What is it now?  What might you have done instead? What might you be doing instead today? Where might you be at fault?

The Readings

Genesis 37: 3-8

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made a special robe just for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.

Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”

His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.

Mark 11: 22-25

 "Have faith in God," Jesus answered. 

"I tell you the truth, if you say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you says will happen, it will be done for you.

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 

And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive that one, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins."