The Importance Of Being Employed

True marriage, with its attendant blessings, is available to all “who are motivated by a love of being useful” (CL 13.3).  It was seen above that “useful service is to carry out the duties of one’s occupation faithfully, honestly and diligently” (CL 16.3).  Therefore, because “when human beings were first created, they were imbued with wisdom and a love of wisdom, not for their own sake, but for the sake of their having it to share with others” (CL 18.1) it is essential to spiritual life and therefore marriage to be employed.  It is important to see that:

by pursuit or business we mean any effort to be useful.  When as a result a person is engaged in some pursuit or business or other useful activity, his mind is fenced around and circumscribed as though with a circle, within whose bounds it is progressively ordered into truly human form.  Then, from this vantage point, as though looking out from its house, it sees various impure passions lurking outside, and from the sanity of its reason within, banishes them, thus banishing as well the wild insanities of licentious lust.  Because of this, conjugial warmth lasts better and longer in such people than it does in others. (CL 249, see also CL 18; FAITH 25)

It is evident from this that “employment” should not be restricted to mean “wage-earning.”  Earning an income is certainly important to a marriage because it provides for the basic necessities of the partners and their ability to be useful in society.  However, the employment that facilitates a healthy marriage is any activity that provides a useful service to others – whether or not a person is collecting a pay check.

The importance of being employed stems from the underlying reality that:

love and wisdom … do not occur by themselves except in imagination, because by themselves they exist only in the affection and thought of the mind.  In useful service, on the other hand, they exist in actuality, because they exist at the same time in the action and activity of the body.  And where they exist actually, there they also remain. (CL 16.3)

Marriage is the conjunction of love and wisdom in partners individually and together.  This conjunction requires that there be actual, not just imaginary, love and wisdom.  Therefore, marriage requires that both partners are seeking to be useful – for each other’s sake and for the sake of society in general.

The main effect of employment is that “application of the mind in useful service holds … truths and anchors them, and orders the mind into a form receptive of wisdom as a consequence of them.  Moreover, the mind then thrusts aside the shams and pretenses of both falsities and illusions” (CL 16.3).  Therefore, employment not only provides the opportunity for spiritual life in each partner, but also protects them from attacks by the hells.  This is seen by contrast with:

people who surrender themselves to laziness and sloth.  Their mind is not fenced around or set within bounds; a person like that consequently throws open the whole of it and lets in every sort of nonsense and foolishness which flows in from the world and the body and draws him into a love of them.  It is apparent that conjugial love is also then cast out and banished.  For laziness and sloth dull the mind and numb the body, and the whole person becomes unresponsive to any vitalizing love – especially conjugial love, from which, as from a fountain, spring active and energetic states of life. (CL 249)

It is clear, therefore, that successful marriages are built around the framework of useful services. 

One final thought regarding employments – useful services can be spiritual, moral, civil, natural, or merely bodily.

Useful services are spiritual when they have to do with love toward God and love for the neighbor.  They are moral and civic services when they have to do with love for the society or civil state in which a person resides, and with love of the companions and fellow citizens with whom he is associated.  Useful services are natural when they have to do with love of the world and its necessities.  And they are corporal when they have to do with the love of self-preservation for the sake of higher uses … When they are combined, one exists within another. (CL 18.1-2)

All of these services are useful in their proper place.  However, in those who wish to receive life from the Lord, these degrees of useful service must be subjugated in their proper order: corporeal subject to natural, subject to civil, subject to moral, subject to spiritual, subject to God. 

The Importance Of Education

Spiritual life is dependent on education for the reason that “a person without education is not human, and not an animal either, but … he is a form of life which can receive into himself that which makes a person human.  And thus we conclude that he is not born human, but becomes human” (CL 152r, see also DLW 270).  People “are human to the extent that they attribute every good of charity and truth of faith to the Lord and not to themselves; and that in the same measure they become angels of heaven” (CL 154r).  Therefore, it is key to development as a human being, and so to preparation for marriage, that people be educated in such a way that they come to acknowledge the Lord God Jesus Christ and the fact that all good things, including marriage, and all truth, including how to succeed in marriage, come from Him alone.

Consideration Of The Delights Of Marriage

Its is an elementary fact of creation that “every love has its own delight, for love lives through delight” (CL 18.2, see also CL 68).  The delights are on all levels from the soul to the body.

But what are delights of the physical senses apart from delights of the soul? It is the soul that makes them delightful.  Delights of the soul in themselves are imperceptible states of bliss, but they become more and more perceptible as they descend into the thoughts of the mind and from these into the sensations of the body.  In the thoughts of the mind they are perceived as states of happiness, in the sensations of the body as delights, and in the body itself as pleasures. ( CL 16.2; see also HH 386; AC 2744)

In the case of marriage “only those people know the blissful delights of conjugial love who reject the horrible delights of adultery.  And no one can reject these except one who is wise from the Lord, and no one is wise from the Lord unless he performs useful services from a love of doing them” (CL 137.7).

The delights of marriage are the result of an internal conjunction of the souls and minds of a husband and his wife.  These delights “descend from their souls into their minds and from their minds into their hearts … These varieties are infinite, and also eternal….These delights rise and deepen according to the wisdom in the husbands” (CL 69.2).  This beautiful promise of infinitely varied delights in marriage is given by the Lord because conjugial love is the fundamental of all loves. From the basis that conjugial love “is engraved on even the smallest aspects of a person, it follows that its delights surpass the delights of all other loves, and also that it gives delight to these other loves according as it is present and at the same time united with them” (CL 68, see also CL 140).  The Lord promises full delights, resplendent joys, and eternal happiness to people who seek to follow Him in their marriages because in marriage is found the origin of all good loves, the conjugial union of love with wisdom flowing from the Lord.

One example of the difference in quality between delights of other loves and delights of conjugial love is found in the observation that Swedenborg made: “when I beheld one kind of beauty in the maidens and another altogether in the wives, seeing in the maidens only its sparkle, but in the wives its effulgence” (CL 384).  This observation of the difference in beauty between a maiden and a wife illustrates something of the fullness of delights in a life of true marriage, for, as was seen previously, beauty in women finds its origin in the marriage of love and wisdom that exists in the conjugial relationship of a husband and wife. 

The origin of delight in marriage is from the Lord alone.  The delight which a husband and wife enjoy occur because:

there is a never-ending influx of spring like warmth from the Lord.  Consequently they can experience the delights of marriage in any season, even in the middle of winter.  For men were created to be receivers of light from the Lord, meaning the light of wisdom, and women were created to be receivers of warmth from the Lord, meaning the warmth of love for the wisdom in a man. (CL 137.6)

Therefore, when love and wisdom bring about a marriage of souls and minds which descends into the body, the whole of both partners experience the delights of this gift from the Lord.

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