December
24

“Fell Down and Worshiped Him”

And when they had come into the house, they found the little Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him; (Matthew 2:11)

In genuine humiliation a man divests himself of all ability to think and do anything from himself, and wholly leaves himself to the Divine, and thus draws near to the Divine. (Arcana Coelestia 6866)

There is also a correspondence of the thoughts and affections with the actions and gestures of the body; as is well known in regard to those which are of a voluntary as well as those which are of an involuntary character. For humiliation of heart produces kneeling, which is an external gesture of the body; humiliation still greater and more internal produces prostration to the earth. (Arcana Coelestia 4215.2, see also 5323)

Humiliation before a man produces a bowing down, according to the estimation of him; but in presence of the Divine it produces total prostration, especially when man thinks that the Divine in respect to power and wisdom is everything, and man in comparison is nothing, or that from the Divine is all good and from man nothing but evil. When man is in this acknowledgment from the heart he comes as it were out of himself, and thence falls upon his face, and when he is thus out of himself he also is removed from the proprium, which in itself is wholly evil; when this is removed, the Divine fills him and raises him up. (Apocalypse Explained 77)

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