new church life: jan uary/february 2015
have first learned from revelation. We may even be able to see a few extra
details based on what we find. For this paper we turn our eyes upward into the
natural heavens, to the celestial spheres: sun, earth and moon.
The earth revolves around the sun directly, whereas the moon revolves
around the earth, and thereby the sun. In this we see a fitting symbol of the
doctrine that women receive an inclination toward true love directly from
the Lord, whereas a man, having “not an iota” of this directly, receives it only
through his wife when he dedicates himself to her as his beloved. (Conjugial
Love 161, 263)
Men typically represent the intellect and women volition. (Apocalypse
Revealed 620, 910; Arcana Coelestia 3134) Intellect in isolation is cold, distant
and without passion, just as the moon is cold, distant and lifeless. Volition
on the other hand is where we experience vitality. Interest, desire, emotion,
affection and love are the stuff of volition and are what make us feel alive.
Similarly, earth teems with an astonishing array of extravagant life – not
just species and specimens, but the interwoven connections necessary to
sustain each individual life form. These ecosystems, too, can be considered
life-forms in their own right. Even the seas surge and rage with a kind of life,
the streams laugh and babble, the lakes rest serene. Earth is alive.
If we had to choose one property that makes earth unique, it is that she
is full of opulent life. The earth loves her children. She bears the burden and
strife inherent within sentient life, a strife that reminds us through contrast
of the unsearchable value of life and a burden that she bears selflessly for the
sake of life. As a mother gives of herself to her children without thought of
herself, so earth gives all she has to us. Blessed are we when we also care for
our mother earth.
But the moon is special, too. It is the second densest of all known satellites
in the solar system and boasts the largest relative to the object of its orbit. It is
the second brightest object in the skies of the earth, after the sun. Though all
life (of which we are sentient) of the earth-moon system exists on earth, the
moon shares an essential part in that life.
Believing that lunar tides play an important role in the vacillation between
ice ages and interglacial warming, Bruce Bill speculates in Scientific American:
“Such glaciations caused migrations of animal and plant species that probably
helped speed up speciation.” (Dorminey, Bruce, 2009: Without the Moon,
Would There be Life on Earth?)
In the same article Peter Raimondi says: “Without our moon, our marine
environment would be much less rich in terms of species diversity.” The
article says that because the moon was once significantly closer to the earth,
its gravitational influence may have pulled the seas deep inland to create tide
pools where many believe the very first rudiments of life evolved.
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