We Can’t Make Cupcakes Without the Lord

Stay Humble, Take Credit

            Throughout our lives, we are taught to stay humble, and not become overly egotistical. On the other hand, we are taught to take pride in our work and the goodness that we bring to the world. Which one are we supposed to focus on? Are we supposed to do both? This paper discusses what the heavenly doctrines have to say about this contradiction. I came up with an analogy that walks through the process of doing good in a concrete, understandable way, and hopefully by the end of this paper, you’ll remember to think of cupcakes when you accomplish a good deed.

All good comes from the Lord. When we do good, it’s not from ourselves, but rather the Lord working through us. In fact, it’s quite dangerous to believe that we can produce good without Him. Swedenborg specifically writes that when we think we can do good on our own, it comes straight from our proprium and our love of self and “there is sin in every particular of it” (SE 1561). Not only that, but if we start to try and take credit for the good that we do, we begin to focus on being rewarded as our goal. This focus on reward overtakes our mind and totally smothers our love to the Lord and to the neighbor (TCR 439). So, we obviously need to be careful to keep in mind that we are merely vessels for the Lord’s love to work through us, and that we can do no good on our own.

            But there’s more to it, isn’t there? As DP 321 says, our “as of self” – our apparent autonomy – is what makes us human. Without the ability to think that we are doing things by ourselves, our freedom and rationality would be pointless (DP 96). We need to believe that we’re the one doing good in order to become regenerate and go to heaven. In AR 224, an angel is quoted as saying that “to the extent that a person does good and believes truth as though of himself, he is an angel of heaven.” In fact, the entire purpose of the universe rests on the fact that we have apparent autonomy. DLW 170 and CL122 say that in order for us to have reciprocal conjunction with the Lord, we need to love him as if we’re doing it on our own. We need to be able to take credit for, or feel ownership of, the good that we do in order to become angels and serve the Lord.

            But doesn’t that contradict what we said above? The angels from AR 224 provide this reconciliation between those two seemingly conflicting statements: "In a word, do it of yourselves, but believe that you do it from the Lord, thus doing it as though of yourselves." The Lord gives us the freedom to totally believe that we are acting on our own because we can’t perceive God working through us. However, if we give into that belief that we are doing good all on our own, then we easily fall into the belief that we are God. That is one of the most evil things we can do, because we both deny God’s existence and make ourselves more important than all others (TCR 598). We need to keep in mind that the Lord reigns, and that anything good we accomplish is because of the Lord. In this paper we will explore a model that looks at five different components of the process of acknowledging the Lord and taking credit for our good.

            This doesn’t require a radical shift in our thinking. We can’t escape our proprium and our sense of self. AC 141 makes that very clear. It describes how natural people, spiritual people, and celestial people experience their proprium. Natural people are stuck in their proprium and they cannot see anything beyond themselves. Spiritual people still cannot feel anything past their proprium, but are able to acknowledge the Lord at least in speech. Even celestial people feel all life through their proprium, although they are able to perceive good and truth from the Lord. This paper will focus on the spiritual step of acknowledging the Lord even though we can only feel our proprium.

But what does that look like in our lives? How can we take that with us throughout the day? I’d like to walk you through an analogy that will more clearly and concretely illustrate this process. Imagine doing something good as baking cupcakes for a friend. The cupcakes are the goods that we do. It’s easy to understand the role that we play in baking those cupcakes, but where does the Lord fit in? We start with an intention to bake cupcakes (to do good), and then there are five steps to baking cupcakes in which the Lord is present.

First step: find a recipe. When baking a cupcake, we need a good recipe. The best recipe we can get our hands on. We don’t know nearly as much about making cupcakes as the top pastry chef in the world, so seek out a recipe written by an expert, and try to follow it as closely as possible. The recipe is the Lord’s truth. It’s imperative that we find a moral compass that comes from outside ourselves, and that we shun evils as sins because they go against what the Lord says (TCR 330). His truth needs to be more important than our own idea of what’s right and we need to do the right thing because the Lord said so.

Step two: assemble ingredients. When baking, we need to gather the ingredients that the recipe tells us to use. On a spiritual level, these ingredients are all the things in our life that we need in order to accomplish a good deed. The Lord provides a limitless supply of these – anything from our physical hands to our affection for the truth. All blessings in our life are from the Lord and the Lord alone. We should recognize this and be grateful to Him.

Step three: mix. We can’t just be pleased with the fact that we have a recipe and ingredients. We need to do something with them in order to turn them into cupcakes. Turning our ingredients into something useful by using our recipe is using our human prudence to make plans to do good. If we don’t take the goods and the truths that the Lord gives us and decide to use them, then we are not confirming them in ourselves (AR 224). This requires us to have freedom and rationality and our apparent autonomy, so that we believe that we are doing good and so that we can love the fact that we are able to do good.

Step four: bake. If we don’t bake our cupcakes before serving them, we will end up with a sloppy, inedible mess. We need to put them in the oven, which funnily enough doesn’t require much work on our part. In fact, we can’t do it at all. It’s not like we have 375 degree hands that can bake our little cups of batter. This part is when we turn over control to the Lord. His love (which corresponds to heat) is what makes our attempt at doing good real. We might not think about this step very much, but it’s crucial to our success in doing good works. Still, it’s usually invisible to us and requires no effort on our part. The Lord takes care of imputing his love into everything (TCR 650).

Step five: share. Making cupcakes for ourselves is rather pointless. This is the same with doing goods. We need to do good for others, not just for ourselves, otherwise it’s a selfish endeavor and it stifles our love for the neighbor (TCR 439). This also involves the idea of discriminate charity, in that we need to use our good to serve the neighbor in the way that it would best help them (NJHD 85). Note that we are in complete freedom to claim that we made the cupcakes all by ourselves. We can pretend that we came up with the recipe, or pretend that we made the sugar that we used. It doesn’t diminish the usefulness of the cupcake for the person we give it to, but it cuts off our ability to love the Lord and the neighbor because we are taking credit.

It’s also interesting to realize that we can totally mess this process up. If we do follow the recipe perfectly, we will be able to do exactly what the Lord wants, because the Word is complete and holds all truths (SS 53). But there are many ways to mess up our cupcakes. Maybe we heard from a friend that adding three more cups of flour works better. Or maybe we couldn’t read the recipe very clearly and mistook tsp for tbsp when adding baking soda. Maybe we intentionally add arsenic to the cupcake when we give it to our neighbor because we hate them. There are many ways to make these cupcakes go bad and become harmful. Just like when we try and do good. So it’s important that we follow the recipe exactly as the Lord gave it to you.

As with all analogies there is a point where this breaks down. On another level, we are the cupcakes. We are trying to conjoin goods and truths in ourselves so we can become a regenerate person. We need to find truth (a recipe), then the Lord gives us goods (the ingredients) and as long as we try to use those truths to do goods (mix), then the Lord can impute goodness to us and rearrange our loves so we become more angelic (bake). We end up sharing this with others as we go through regeneration. However, I think that using the model I outlined above as we live our life and strive to become good, can help create a clearer picture of what it’s like to acknowledge the Lord as we live our life as our own person.

I think the usefulness of this cupcake model partly comes from the fact that we can use it retroactively. Maybe we are so good at acknowledging the Lord that his action in our life is constantly on our mind. I think it’s more realistic though, for us to find ourselves taking credit for something good we just did. Using this cupcake model, we can look back at that good work and find the places where the Lord was present. For example, imagine that you just held the door for someone. You might be thinking “Ah, I’m such a good person for holding that door. I’m so good at being good.” Stop yourself in that moment and think back about how the Lord made that simple action possible. You were probably brought up on the belief that the Lord asks us to be kind to others. You know that that’s the right thing and you should do it because it’s right (recipe). Then you remember that you were given working hands that allow you to hold open doors, and you were given a perceptive nature to notice when someone is coming up behind you (ingredients). Remember that these come from the Lord. Then, you can be thankful that the Lord gave you the ability to use your freedom and rationality to conjoin His truths with His blessings (mix). You can recognize that the Lord is actually the one making that conjunction real in us by imputing His good (baking). Then we can be thankful that we are able to use this ability to positively affect the lives of others (sharing).

It’s easy to remember these steps if we remember how to bake cupcakes: Recipe, Ingredients, Mix, Bake, and Share. I encourage you to take these ideas with you through your life to help you become a more useful, more loving, more regenerate person. Take credit for your good deeds. Realize that you are becoming better and loving true ideas and good things. Just remember to stay humble and be grateful to the Lord for his omnipotence and his ever present love.