75. The first account:

When I was once meditating on conjugial love, my mind was seized with a desire to know what that love was like among the people who lived in the golden age, and afterwards what it was like among those who lived in the following ages which are named after silver, copper, and iron. And because I knew that all those people who lived well in those ages are now in heaven, I prayed to the Lord to be allowed to speak with them and be instructed.

Then suddenly an angel stood beside me, and he said, "I have been sent by the Lord to be your guide and companion. First I will guide and accompany you to the people who lived in the first age or period, which is called golden." He also added, "The way to them is difficult. It lies through a dark forest which no one can pass through without being given a guide by the Lord."

[2] I was in the spirit, and so I readied myself for the journey, and we turned our faces to the east. And as we went I saw a mountain, whose height extended beyond the level of the clouds.

We crossed a great desert, and we came to a forest thick with trees of various kinds and dark on account of their density, as the angel had predicted. However, the forest was intersected by many narrow paths, but the angel said they were all winding ways leading astray, and that, unless a traveler's eyes were opened by the Lord to see the olive trees covered with leafy vines and to make his way from olive tree to olive tree, he would wander off into infernal regions which surrounded the forest on each side. "This is what this forest is like," the angel said, "in order to guard the approach, for none but the earliest people dwell on that mountain."

[3] After we entered the forest, our eyes were opened, and here and there we saw olive trees entwined with vines, which had bunches of purplish-blue grapes hanging from them. Moreover, the olive trees were arranged in a continuous series of circles. Consequently we went around and around as each one came to view, until finally we saw a grove of tall cedars, with some eagles on their branches.

Seeing them the angel said, "We are now on the mountain, not far from its summit."

We went on, and lo, beyond the grove, there was a circular field, where male and female lambs were grazing, which were forms representative of the state of innocence and peace of the people who dwelt on the mountain. We crossed this field, and suddenly tents appeared - tent after tent - reaching many thousands in number, in front and on each side, as far as the eye could see.

And the angel said, "We are now in an encampment. Behold the army of the Lord Jehovih! That is what they call themselves and their dwellings. When these most ancient people lived in the world, they dwelled in tents. Therefore they also live in tents now. But let us turn our way southward - where the wiser ones among them are - to find someone to talk with."

[4] As we went, I saw in the distance three boys and three girls sitting at the entrance of one of the tents. But when we drew near, they looked like men and women of average height.

And the angel said, "All the inhabitants of this mountain appear at a distance like little children, because they are in a state of innocence, and early childhood is the way innocence appears."

Seeing us, the men hurried over to us and said, "Where are you from, and how did you get here? Your faces are different from the faces of our mountain."

But the angel answered and told them how we were able to pass through the forest and the reason for our coming.

Hearing this, one of the three men invited us into his tent and led us inside. The man was dressed in a blue-colored robe and a tunic of very white wool. And his wife was dressed in a purple dress, with a blouse underneath of embroidered fine linen.

[5] Then because I had in my thought the desire to learn about the marriages of the most ancient peoples, I looked by turns at the husband and wife, and I observed a seeming unity of their souls in their faces.

So I said, "You two are one."

The man replied, "We are. Her life is in me, and my life is in her. We have two bodies, but one soul. The union between us is like the union of the two tabernacles in the breast which are called the heart and the lungs. She is my heart and I am her lungs. But since when we say heart here we mean love, and when we say lungs we mean wisdom, therefore she is the love of my wisdom, and I am the wisdom of her love. Therefore her love outwardly clothes my wisdom, and my wisdom is inwardly within her love. Consequently, as you have said, the unity of our souls appears in our faces."

[6] Then I asked, "If such is the union between you, are you able to look upon any other woman than your own?"

He replied, "I can, but because my wife is united to my soul, the two of us look together, and then not a trace of lust can enter. For when I look at other men's wives, I look at them through the eyes of my wife, who is the only one I am in love with. And because she, as my wife, can perceive all my inclinations, she acts as an intermediary and directs my thoughts, taking away anything discordant and at the same time inspiring a coldness and horror towards anything unchaste. As a result it is impossible for us here to regard any of our companions' wives with lust - as impossible as it would be to look at the light of our heaven from a state of infernal darkness. We have no mental concept among us, therefore, and not even any word in our speech for the temptations of libidinous love." He could not say free love, because the chastity of their heaven resisted it.

My angel guide then said to me, "You hear, now, the speech of the angels of this heaven, that it is a speech of wisdom, because they speak in terms of causes."

[7] After this I looked around, and seeing that their tent appeared covered with gold, I asked why this was.

The man replied that it was due to the flaming light, which glittered like gold. "It shines and strikes the curtains of our tent," he said, "whenever we are engaged in conversation on the subject of conjugial love. For the heat from our sun, which in its essence is love, then bares itself and tints the light, which in its essence is wisdom. It tints it with its own color, which is golden. This occurs because conjugial love in its origin is the interplay of wisdom and love, for man was born to be a form of wisdom, and woman to be a form of love for the wisdom in a man. From this come the delights of that interplay in conjugial love, and therefore between us and our wives.

"We here have seen, for thousands of years, that those delights become more excellent and exalted in abundance, degree and strength, according to the worship of the Lord Jehovih among us. That heavenly union or that heavenly marriage which exists between love and wisdom infuses itself as a result of that worship."

[8] When he said this, I saw a great light on a hill at the center amid the tents, and I asked where that light was coming from.

The man said, "It is coming from the sanctuary of our tabernacle of worship."

I then inquired whether we might go there, and he said we could. So I went, and I saw a tabernacle which, outside and in, exactly fit the description of the tabernacle which was built for the children of Israel in the wilderness, whose form was shown to Moses on top of Mount Sinai (Exodus 25:40, 26:30). And I asked what there was inside the sanctuary that was giving off so much light.

He answered, "There is a tablet, which bears the inscription, 'The Covenant Between Jehovah and Heaven.'" That was all he said.

[9] Then, because by that time we were getting ready to leave, I asked, "When you lived in the natural world, did any of you live with more than one wife?"

He replied that he did not know one person who did. "For we could not think of having more," he said. "Those who had had such thoughts told us that their states of heavenly bliss instantly receded from the inmost depths of their souls to the outmost parts of their bodies, even into their fingernails, and along with them the virtues of manhood. When others perceived this, they were exiled from our lands."

Having said this, the man hurried to his tent and returned with a pomegranate containing a number of seeds made of gold. He gave it to me and I took it away with me, as a memento to me that we had been with people who had lived in the golden age.

So then, after saying farewell, we departed and returned home.

FRIENDSHIP IN MARRIAGE

A Sermon by the Rev. Peter M. Buss, Sr.

The states of this love are innocence, peace, tranquility, inmost friendship, full confidence, and a mutual desire of mind and heart to do each other every good Conjugial Love 180.

Beautiful words. But a list of words seems to slip through our minds and we dont notice what they are saying, and are left with a general feeling that conjugial love produces a lot of happy states.

This list means a lot more than that. It starts with the deepest mind, and the most precious thing there is innocence, the willingness to let the Lord lead us. That absence of pride and self-love is the spirit of all good, and when we let the Lord guide us, we feel His love flow down, softly, gently, as peace. Two people who love each other truly have peace within, and in their lower minds they have tranquility: they are content with what the Lord has given them.

Innocence, peace and tranquility: these are the deep joys of marriage love as they inflow from the Lord. Below them is friendship and full confidence, and they are delights we can recognize and understand. They produce the desire of heart and mind to do the other every good.

The subject today is friendship in marriage, what part it plays in welding the hearts of two people into one, and how it deepens until it becomes superior to every other friendship. Friendship is love on a lower plane, and sometimes it is taken for the love itself, but it isn't. It is supposed to serve and give happy expression to what is in the soul and the deepest mind. True love is a wish to enter into the life of another (Arcana Coelestia 2738). It is the molding together of two people on every plane of life. It is the innocence and the peace and the tranquility which are above friendship. It is the image of one, written on the heart of the other, so that the loved one is present in everything he or she wills or does. True marriage love is the human form itself, for two people, forever individuals, are made by that love into an angel of heaven.

Friendship, ideal friendship in marriage, is the garment and the face of that love. Love is the person himself. But a person has a face, and clothing (Conjugial Love 214).

Clothing is supposed to be an attractive covering to the body, but no particular dress or suit is essential. There is a kind of friendship which is like a garment in marriage, and it is our enjoyment in shared activities. Married people do things together, they have fun together. They share cultural things or sports or vacation trips or social life. These things give them things to talk about, to communicate, to show interest in each other.

When they are first married, a couple has divergent interests. Their tastes in food or music or books might be different. Probably they will never share all these things, unless they try to force agreement, and that isn't healthy. Yet as they live together, and love grows up between them, there is a tendency to wear garments that attract the other. They develop those recreations they can share, and the ones they cannot tend to get discarded, like a once-pleasing dress which has lost its charm. As a couple goes through life they also choose new recreations and activities, and tend to find ones they can share.

They will not share everything, and in the things they don't do together their love is shown by taking an interest in the delight the other person has in something. The garment is the least important, and it is a pity that quarrels can arise from trying to force agreement on this lowest plane of mental joy. A man may be offended by his wifes lack of interest in something that is important to him. He might compare her unfavorably to someone else who likes that particular activity of his, implying that she loves him less than she should. Such feelings are common even where there is love; but we should recognize that this is selfish and therefore destructive love, not true charity.

Friendship is the garment of love. It is also the face of love. The face doesn't change, it doesn't get cast of with the changing times and uses of life. Two people who are friends share their feelings and thoughts about things in life, and this is the face of love. Love itself is sharing our deepest, inmost thoughts, and that sharing is often communicated without words. But below that there is the ability to talk about the things of this world, and how we feel about them. We can communicate how we feel about life, here and now, and into the future. We can share our fears, our worries and insecurities with someone whom we can trust. We can share our joys and our successes and our hopes with someone who will always enter into them.

That ability to communicate freely is one of the most precious things in all of life, and it is learned. It is not there in a moment. Thats something we know about friendship - that it grows slowly, and you have to learn it, but we sometimes don't realize that the same is true of love. People often think love is all there on the wedding day, and when it doesn't move them strongly ten years later they are disillusioned and don't feel bound by its laws. But we do know that friendship develops. We know that we care for our partners, yet find it hard, many times, to say how we feel and how we think. We may want to speak, but the words are wrong, or we seem too busy to take the time or we talk about generalities instead, or we are less than honest; or perhaps in times of cold we just don't want to communicate.

We know we have to work on friendship. As time goes on we learn how more easily to touch that other mind, what words or expressions or what kind of silence best conveys the thoughts of our hearts. We have to learn - and none of us learns it easily - that pride is a great barrier to real friendship. We have to learn when not to feel hurt, when not to read meanings into things; when to ask for help instead of standing back with injured pride, preparing to be affronted because our partner didn't see what we needed. We have to learn how to admit our wrong feelings and take a chance on his or her forgiveness, instead of finding some excuse. Then over the years comes a sharing of how we feel and think, an awareness of how the other will react in a situation, the ability to look across the room and know how she feels. This is the face of love. It is a complete friendship which often shows in the face of partners who are truly beloved and makes them appear similar, though the features are quite different. Swedenborg once saw a married couple in heaven and noticed a oneness in their faces, and he said, You two are one. The man replied, We are one. Her life is in me and mine in her. We are two bodies but one soul (Conjugial Love 75).

This is the ideal friendship in marriage. Yet friendship has its special use long before the ideal is reached, and the Lord has told us about that as well.

The love of two newly-married people isn't pure. It is full of wonderful idealism, and there is some innocence in it, a precious seed. But the love itself, that flame which starts marriage, is more of the body than the spirit. It burns down after a while, its too intense (Conjugial Love 162). When it burns down the business of marriage, the work part becomes evident.

When this happens a couple is far from perfect. They are still natural and earthly in their values, not ready to receive the holy love which the Lord is wanting to give them - even though the seed of it is deep in their souls. Their interests are too centered on the here and now. In this state of normal human life on earth, it is friendship which bridges the gap between the first love, and the true conjugial which will follow (Conjugial Love 214; 162). As two people settle down to the business of living and the first excitement of marriage wears off, they are often held together by the fact that they are willing to be good friends. They wear pleasing garments - they spend hours in each others company, and work together, building and furnishing a home, feeding and clothing and raising children and struggling to balance their budget. They relax together, take vacations together.

They also have the face of love, for they talk of these things, and share the problems of living. They succeed together, and share that; and fail and share that too. Most of the time they are friends. It is only a few times that they remember and love the total ideal, or touch the heights when the Lord opens their spirits and lets them look at the tranquility and the peace and innocence that are to come.

What they have most of the time is not the true, everlasting love of heaven. It is a good, orderly contented state, and if two people work on their friendship, it gradually introduces them more and more into conjugial love itself. For remember that marriage love is simply charity. It is the responsibility to show kindness to a particular person - your wife, or your husband. Sometimes we think that we are free to fight with and show unkindness to this person just because we love him or her - that love sets us free from the bonds of common kindness. The laws of charity are preeminently the laws of marriage.

As two people try to walk the path of religion, practicing charity more at home than anywhere else, their hearts are opened to each other and they begin to know the inner blessings of love. Then too the first fires of love come back in a different guise, refined, purified, and stronger than before, because now they are the fires of true love (Conjugial Love 214).

Friendship introduces a couple into the true love of marriage. This is its holy use. It is the bridge between the honeymoon state and heaven itself, the happy walking on earth while our eyes are uplifted to heaven; and slowly as we walk we are lifted up to that heaven. Then friendship itself changes. It is purified, made more gentle and wiser from the warmth that is in the soul and mind. The fire of love that has been burned into the heart softens the outward show of love, and conjugial, or inmost friendship is born. That is the true face of love. It is because of this use of friendship that wives are especially delighted with it and foster it with their husbands (Conjugial Love 155a; 355). Because friendship is such a sponsor of true love it endures into old age too, and two people who have been married for decades find contentment in the care and communication with this closest friend in the last years of earthly life. Old age is a time when friendship is especially important, and if a partner has gone early into the other world, or if someone has not been married here on earth, the warmth of relatives and friends is a necessary replacement.

Finally the Writings unite friendship to full confidence. Confidence implies two things - the willingness to confide, and the ability to trust that other person. Trust is something we often want to require of a friend, but it cannot be forced. When two people marry they want to trust one another, but in many things they cant; for without knowledge of the other person, and without experience and maturity, and especially without repentance, it would be foolish to put our most precious and tender thoughts into our partners hands. At first these things would be treated harshly, used against us in arguments, maybe scorned. But after years of living together, trust deepens and become not just a wish but a reality. At first our confidence in our loved one is often shaken, for we are all human, and we are all tempted to use our partners feelings against him or her, - abusing trust. But sincere people regret these things and try to make amends, and learn to treat with reverence the precious feelings entrusted to him or to her. Then the partner sees that effort, and accepts an honest apology when offered, and sees the growing strength we have in resisting the impulse to hurt by means of what we know of another's weakness. Trust is born; and slowly, it grows up.

Conjugial love is a gift from the Lord. We cannot create it, the Lord gives it to us when we can bear it. We can build friendship. Every day we can decide to think first of that person we have married. We can choose to say a kind word or an angry one. We can praise and support or censure and complain. A hundred times a day we have the choice to show friendship or to withhold it.

Yes, we can do a lot to build friendship. It is on this earthly plane of giving and sharing that we turn to the Lord, and into this friendship He causes everlasting love to be born. That is His creation, and we can only marvel when finally it touches us and makes our friendship conjugial also.

Conjugial love is to think and to will as one, to dwell together in all things, even to the inmost. Conjugial friendship is the delight in speaking our hearts to our partners, joy in that free interplay between two minds which have no barriers left, for they have nothing left to guard against. They may put themselves in their partners hands, and know that no harm will come to them. This trust too is a gift from heaven, the confidence of two people who both know that they are trying to be faithful to the laws of love from the King of love. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. Amen

Lessons:

1. Matthew 19:1-12

2. Conjugial Love 162

3. Conjugial Love 214

General References to Friendship in Marriage

1. Its use, especially in the first years of marriage: Conjugial Love 162; 214; 334.

2. Wives preserve friendship and confidence in a marriage: Conjugial Love 155a:3; also love with inmost friendship is with wives as wisdom and its delight is with husbands Conjugial Love 355.

3. Listed as one of the lower delights of love truly conjugial Conjugial Love 183.

4. Sometimes friendship can continue when what is eternal has departed from the thought of the partners. Conjugial Love 216; cf. chapter on causes of apparent love, favor and friendship.

5. Those in conjugial love have continual inmost friendship. Spiritual Experiences 6110

6. The chaste love of the sex is spiritual friendship Conjugial Love 55. cf. how the wife moderates friendship with any other woman Conjugial Love 75.

7. Friendship between men and women enter deeply and conjoin because a friendship of love with understanding. Friendships between those of the same sex cannot enter deeply in the same way. Conjugial Love 55.