: . .
heals people’s souls, draws them out of hell, and leads them to heaven.
The Lord Himself is the supreme example of the connection – and in fact
oneness – of Divine truth and Humanity. The doctrine of the Divine Human is
the cornerstone upon which the whole edifice of New Church theology rests.
The Lord’s prophetic statement in the Gospels, quoted from the Psalms,
has now in the Church of the New Jerusalem come to pass: “The stone which
the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” (Matthew 21:42;
Psalm 118:22)
“The stone which the builders rejected” is the truth of the Lord’s Divinity.
When His disciple Peter acknowledged that truth, the Lord said it was the
“Rock” upon which He would build His Church. (Matthew 16:18)
On earth, though, that truth was rejected and He was crucified. And again,
the first Christian Church which had been founded upon it eventually – in its
Trinitarian theology, not necessarily in the hearts of all the people – lost sight
of that simple, fundamental truth.
And thus the Divine and the Human which God had joined together in
the Lord Jesus Christ were put asunder by false human reasoning. And many
people today are unable to see how Jesus, who lived on earth as a Man, could
be God.
But this is the Rock upon which Norman built his house. He loved being
able to worship a visible, knowable, Human God – the Lord Jesus Christ, the
one God of heaven and earth.
A third main interest of Norman’s was the world of nature and its
spiritual significance.
Norman was an avid gardener and you could tell just by looking at him
that he loved the outdoors. And as we might guess it wasn’t just nature itself
that he found so delightful but the spiritual significance he saw in it.
The doctrine of correspondence in the Writings reveals the soul of nature
– the spiritual dimension that fills it with meaning that transcends the material.
“A clear-sighted observer,” we are told in the Arcana, “can see that each and
all things in nature bear relation to truth and to good, and thus can know that
universal nature is a theater representative of the Lord’s kingdom.” (Arcana
Coelestia 4409)
Norman Riley was such a clear-sighted person. Nature, for him, was
charged with intimations of the Divine. In the words of the poet he could see
“heaven in a wild flower.” In the words of the Lord he considered “the lilies of
the field.” (Matthew 6:28)
Because human beings are inhabitants of two worlds – our minds being
in the spiritual world even as our bodies are in the natural world – everyone
has some perception, however vague, of the dual nature of creation and this is
reflected in countless ways in our common speech.
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