The Children of Israel were told to keep three feasts each year - the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of first fruits, and the feast of ingathering. Should we still do that?

In Exodus 23:14-16, Moses receives the instructions about these feasts. Those three verses in Exodus comprise our brief story. Their inner meaning is explained in Arcana Coelestia 9286-9296.

There are three feasts. In the Word, the number three represents a completeness, a sense of things being covered from beginning to end. Our thankfulness to the Lord is supposed to keep going - to endure.

The first feast, of unleavened bread, stands for worship, for our thankfulness for the Lord's action in our minds to get rid of false ideas. That enables us to start to receive good loves.

The second feast, of first fruits, relates to the planting of true ideas in that "soil" of initial loves for doing good.

The third feast, of harvest, or ingathering, stands for the time when, by applying our true ideas, we receive real good - loves of the neighbor and of the Lord - that become the middle of our lives. This is the state of rebirth, where we have - by working through the year (our lives), and enduring in thankfulness, allowed the Lord to get rid of our false ideas, and push our evil loves to the periphery, so that good can work, and be fruitful.

These feasts, then, represent the progress of our spiritual lives. In some manner, we need to keep them.

2731. I have heard from those most ancient people that conjugial love is such that one partner desires to be wholly the other's, and that this desire is reciprocal; and that when partners are expressing and receiving it from each other they experience the happiness of heaven. I have also heard that their minds are so joined one to the other that the expression and receipt of that reciprocal desire exists in every single detail of life, that is, in every single part of affection and in every single part of thought. For this reason it has been ordained by the Lord that wives should be affections for good which belong to the will and that husbands should be thoughts about truth which belong to the understanding; also that marriage should exist from such affection and thought, like that between will and understanding, and between every single part of these with the person in whom good married to truth exists, and truth married to good.