December23

Compel Yourself

And coming into the house, they found the little··Child with Mary His mother, and falling down they worshiped Him. (Matthew 2:11)

In genuine humility 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)

Humility 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 [what is his own], which in itself is wholly evil; when this is removed, the Divine fills him and raises him up. (Apocalypse Explained 77.1)

[The angel of the Lord said to Hagar, “Return yourself to your mistress and humble yourself beneath her hands”] (Gen. 16:9). “To humble oneself” is expressed in the original tongue by a word which signifies “to afflict.” That “to afflict oneself” is, in the internal sense, to compel oneself, may be seen from very many passages in the Word, and will be treated of in what follows. That man ought to compel himself to do what is good, to obey the things commanded by the Lord, and to speak truths, which is to “humble himself under” the Lord’s hands, or to submit himself to the sovereign power of the Divine good and truth,... The arcanum herein contained is that a man is thus gifted by the Lord with a heavenly Own,... In all freedom there is man’s life, because there is his love. Whatever a man does from love appears to him free. But in this freedom, when the man is compelling himself to resist what is evil and false, and to do what is good, there is heavenly love, which the Lord then insinuates, and through which He creates the man’s Own; and therefore the Lord wills that it should appear to the man as his, although it is not his. (Arcana Coelestia 1937.1, 3, 6)

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