ODB senior editor Rev. Thom Muller recently sat down with Rev. Sage Cole, who has been spearheading a series of exciting Swedenborgian programming and community-making, inspired by the life, work, and legacy of famous Swedenborgian Helen Keller, including the Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful project and the Helen Keller Collaborative. Read the interview below and find out more about how you can get involved!
(You can find links to the respective projects below the article)
Sage, thank you for sharing about your exciting recent projects! Would you like to give us a quick update on what you’ve been up to?
Sure, thanks Thom. Quick updates are sometimes tricky for me, but we just had our first major event in March. This was our Be Love event celebrating Helen Keller’s spiritual birthday which she always celebrated on March 3rd. We had a lot of other different scholars from around the country who are studying Helen Keller from different perspectives.
We continue to have a weekly Zoom meeting, and we recently had our first retreat at the Almont New Church Assembly. It was really gratifying to kind of bring this model into a retreat setting. We’ve been experimenting with different formats, exploring these central values and elements of what we Swedenborgians understand God to be. You know, I think in my ministerial journey it’s just become really important to me to consider what the essence is of our faith, and I see Helen Keller is someone who was living that essence out in a unique particular way that really resonated with who she was.
I sort of see that Swedenborgians in general, we all do things very differently, but Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful really gets at the core, and I’m interested in exploring how, from that central trinity, we can bring in other elements of our theological understanding and practice, and that’s what we did at the retreat.
In our Be Love session, we celebrated communion together, thinking about how we’re nourished by God, in our Be Honest session we celebrated remembering our baptism ceremony where we thought about regeneration and the call to grow and change, and to be honest about the stuff we got to wash off, so that we can remember our kind of divine nature. For Be Useful we celebrated anointing to recognize the way we’re each uniquely called. I think there’s a lot of space for this trinity to kind of hold a lot of diverse ways of being and coming together so we’re playing with it and I’m actually right in the process now of pitching a plan for the fall, where we will do a Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful Bible journey, using that trinity to kind of ground us in terms of how we interact with the Bible, and how we make it a part of ourselves, because I think at the heart of this whole journey that I’m on is to consider how to make the New Church a part of our being, our lived experience. I love holy books, and holy books come from holy people. They’re written because of the experiences of our ancestors and so I’m interested in bringing those experiences into the now, and reflecting on our current experiences of life.
I personally had to step away from the Bible for a minute, to just remember that ultimately is about who I am and how I’m living and what I’m experiencing, and sometimes my experience has been that when we do Bible study, we can sometimes get lost in the past, or in the question of what ultimate truth is, versus “well, wait a second, how is it being lived?” I think I needed that for my own development and growth, and now I feel ready because I think there is truth in the Bible. Swedenborg’s writings are pointing us in this direction right of bringing the the law “into our heart” and and embodying this invitation to regeneration.
Sounds like you’re off to an great start! I’m wondering, both for individuals and Swedenborgian communities, what would be some ways to get involved in this exciting project?
I love that you framed those two ways of being involved because my eyes are very much on those two options. We are calling people who participate in our work “collaborators”, so you don’t become a member of the collaborative like you would at a church. Rather, you become a collaborator with us, and you can collaborate with us any way you want!
I publish a Substack that comes out on Sundays (see link below) with an essay or a video of my own reflections on how I’m “making worship life”. You can subscribe to the podcast that comes out on Tuesdays that I call the “Be Love Podcast”. That’s another opportunity to get an idea of what’s happening. I’ve been interviewing a mix of people, mostly within the Swedenborgian movement from different branches of the church, although I’ve also been interviewing people from other communities.
On Thursdays and Sundays, I hold a Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful Zoom gathering. So that’s an opportunity to come and be in community with others. Those gatherings are really about sharing our experiences… What are the things that have given us a feeling of love and belonging, the stories, the experiences? What are we learning? What are we being challenged by? How are we being called? The Thursday group is totally open. At the Sunday group, we follow a theme. The first Sunday of the month, we reflect on communion together. Second Sunday of the month is baptism. Third Sunday of the month is anointing.
As I mentioned, regarding this Bible study, I’m kind of hitting the pavement, trying to build connections with congregations because I’m hoping that a lot of communities will want to jump into this Bible journey. Obviously we all follow different liturgical calendars and, you know, it might not work to totally integrate this into congregations’ programming. But I hope people will be interested.
I haven’t completely decided, but I think we’ll probably be following Anita Dole’s lectionary, the four years, different journeys through the whole – so we can go through the whole story each year, but taking some different paths to get there. And the Dole notes are so beloved to so many communities.
I think a big desire that I have is to just be more connected, to be learning from each other more. We all have so much wisdom, especially our elders. I’m really hoping we can teach some of our elders how to learn the technology, so they can get in there and share their insights. Maybe we’ll create kind of a singular platform where we can all come together and share our insights with each other asynchronously in terms of reflections and notes. I’m also hoping people will want to share art or music or, you know, other things that they feel speak to the message of the week.
Maybe some other groups might form. I had a great visit recently with the Fryeburg New Church and they’re excited to collaborate, and I think they’re kind of poised to have a Fryeburg New Church Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful Bible study group. So, you know, the idea has always been to have local groups that are kind of meeting in this way, but then also spaces for us to come together. Maybe one congregation wants to partner with a congregation across the country…
We have the technology now to find one another, and we’re so small. It seems worth it, you know, to bring that critical mass. So I’m really hoping congregations will become “collaborating congregations” and join in this Bible journey to really reflect on the story of regeneration.
There’s another dimension of it that I’m foreseeing right now, which is really more related to Helen Keller’s life, and that’s continuing with these March events. Something that emerged from our March gathering was this interest in potentially organizing some pilgrimages to sacred places that were important to Helen’s life. She’s buried at the National Cathedral in DC, and was born in Alabama. Boston was also a very important part of her life and education. I’m hoping congregations might be interested in sending some people to come on these pilgrimages, bringing people together from throughout this tradition to celebrate Helen, and to tell the story of her spiritual life and then to welcome others in.
There’s a lot of ways to collaborate. And I acknowledge that when I say all these things, it’s not like a specific place. There’s a lot of ways to get involved. Hopefully, as we build some of these official collaborations with local societies, maybe you choose a point person, you know, who’s then the person that information goes through… I’m hopeful that this could be a really fun way to find each other, be a little more connected, and also a fun way at this moment to not be just sitting in the middle of social media, which can be such a landmine of information that people maybe don’t want to wade into.
I’m really trying to create a sacred space on the internet where you can, for 30 minutes a week, come in and connect with people. The simplest way to connect is just send me an email if you want to be a collaborator, if you’re curious (sage@helenkellercollaborative.org). We’re a small operation at this point, so direct communication is always encouraged and well received. I’m very curious about how to create a community that becomes more perfect as more people enter in, which is so central to our vision of heaven. That really expands and, and is flexible because I think that’s what I’ve run into in congregational life is I, congregations are amazing and they’re all wonderful. I really want this collaborative to be a space that’s flexible and changeable, and that honors diversity. So part of my intention always was that Be Love, Be Honest, Be Useful is how we gather to worship, but it’s also how we gather to make decisions and deal with challenges that come up.
I’ve been in conversation with Sony Warner and some others about putting together a team that would be a part of the virtual community that would be accessible should, for example, two people post some idea about something and just really have a problem with what the other person said, so that when something like that occurs, we don’t see it as a failing, but as “Oh, something’s happening here! This is a sacred opportunity and we can use this to be loving and honest and useful in a way that moves through it, where we create reconciliation!”
I keep imagining new groups forming and conflict happening that creates a branching that doesn’t have to be a breaking. We can still recognize each other’s common humanity and maybe even eventually our common usefulness, while being able to hold different positions. There’s a lot of diversity within our little community and I want to find ways of celebrating that and honoring that and respecting that, creating tools for navigating that.
Helen Keller said that her greatest satisfaction came from working with people who were Christian and Jewish and Muslim, but who cared about lessening the suffering of God’s children. I think you can have a lot of different theological positions and ideas about names for God and how you want to have your liturgy, and yet have a common desire to lessen suffering.
What do you think Helen would be saying right now to us Swedenborgians, in 2025? From your very well informed perspective, what would be something you think she might be telling us?
Well, I don’t really have to make it up because she said it quite plainly! She spoke at our Convention twice. The second time, the line that always sticks out to me in her, her second talk was “Don’t value the vessel more than the treasure!”
My deep belief is that this treasure is what’s important. And we have an incredible treasure in the New Church. Helen saw that, and really wanted us to celebrate that, to own that, and live it, and that’s what it always comes down to. How are we living in the world? That’s what she would continue to say to us. She said it to us in 1928. So it’s been a hundred years since she said it the first time, perhaps she would add a little bit more to that statement, although I think it really sums it up. At this time in history, when there’s just so much chaos, so much fighting about what “faith” and “truth” are, it’s time to stop fighting if we can.
I think Helen saw that and she headed in the direction of trying to be loving and be useful, and be honest in the world. I think we are called to move in that direction as well. I see it all as pointing to that really simple life of kindness, and celebrating all of the beauty of that, without making it into an idol.
That’s what I’m trying to make space for in this collaborative, I really want to welcome people of all faiths. You don’t have to subscribe to a statement of faith. It’s about starting to discover what is true for you, and how you are living it in the world. We can bring in the teachings of Swedenborg. We can bring in other mystics. We can bring in the spiritual teachers that you’re watching on YouTube.
We’re taking in so much information nowadays, and to say that God is only speaking in one particular document in one particular way, that’s not something Swedenborg would agree with. I like to believe we haven’t even scratched the surface for the possibilities of what the church could look like on the outside. And I’m excited to make space for that.
To get involved check out the links below!
https://www.facebook.com/helenkellercollaborative
www.helen keller collaborative.org
www.worshipislife.substack.com
www.youtube.com/@helenkellercollaborative
Here’s another interview we had with Rev. Sage some time ago, which you may find interesting!