Afterlife: A Guided Tour of Heaven and Its Wonders - Swedenborg ...

Heaven
by sacrifices and burnt offerings was called “bread.”
Because of this correspondence too, the most sacred wor -
ship in the Christian church is the Holy Sup per, in which
bread and wine are shared.
We may note briefly how the union of heaven with the
world occurs by means of correspondences. The Lord’s
kingdom is a kingdom of purposes that are functions or—
which amounts to the same thing—of functions that are
purposes. For this reason, the universe has been so created
and formed by the Divine that functions can clothe them -
selves in materials that enable them to present themselves
in act or in results, first in heaven and then in this world,
and so step by step all the way to the lowest things in
nature. We can see from this that the correspon dence of
natural phenomena with spiritual ones, or of the world
with heaven, takes place through functions, and that the
functions are what unite them. We can also see that the
forms that clothe the functions are correspon dences and
unions to the extent that they are forms of the functions.
As for us, though, our acts are services in forms to the
extent that we live according to the divine design—that
is, in love for the Lord and in thoughtfulness toward our
neighbor. To that extent, our acts are correspondences
that unite us to heaven. In general terms, loving the Lord
and our neighbor is being of service.
We need to know as well that it is humankind through
which the natural world is united to the spiritual world,
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