"'[Go up] to a land flowing with milk and honey' means feelings of pleasure and delight derived from the good of faith and love. This is clear from the meaning of 'a land' as the Church, dealt with in the places referred to in 9325; from the meaning of 'milk' as spiritual good, which is the good of faith, dealt with in 2184; from the meaning of 'honey' as celestial good, which is the good of love; and from the meaning of 'flowing' as being full. And since these things are meant by 'a land flowing with milk and honey', feelings of pleasure and delight derived from the good of faith and love are also meant, see 5620. 'Feelings of pleasure and delight' derived from such good are spoken of because the good of faith and love brings real heavenly pleasure and delight. All good brings its own delight; for the word 'good' is used to denote that which is loved, and every feeling of delight owes its existence to love. The feelings of delight meant by heavenly joy and eternal happiness spring from nothing other than the love of what is true and good. The superiority of these feelings of delight to all those belonging to any love that exists in the world is completely unknown to those who suppose that all delight resides in worldly, bodily, and earthly things" (Arcana Coelestia 10530).
Those who are well aware of chiastic structures in themselves and in the Word will appreciate the marriage between pleasure and delight; and recall to mind what the Writing called Sacred Scripture says of parts of the Word which are clothed and those which are 'naked' as our faces and our hands.
Here, there is a naked portion which functions as a key. We can clearly see the predicate cluster of delight, good, and love; which have been designated together as items in a set of the will, a set of predicates of the heart.
Besides which, the order of " the good of faith and love brings real heavenly pleasure and delight" indicates that we indeed have to do with the classification of the good of faith with another predicate of the understanding, pleasure; and the classification of the good of love with another predicate of the will, delight.
Therefore, we can see the incidence of pleasure and delight in the Latin Word as if it were the incidence of bread and wine. See Will in the Light of our Lord the Word. Eat and drink things heard and seen. The chiastic structures may be navigated in all three Testaments with a congruent pattern and identical interrelation with our feeling-ideation feed and thus the sequence of our states or days.
"I beg you therefore, to teach me, if you please, what delight is.'
To this the wise responded, 'Delight is the all of life with everyone in heaven, and the all of life with everyone in hell. With those who are in heaven, it is the delight of good and truth; but with those that are in hell, it is the delight of what is evil and false. For all delight is of love, and love is the esse of man's life. Therefore, as man is man according to the quality of his love, so is he man according to the quality of his delight. The activity of the love produces the sense of delight. In heaven its activity is with wisdom; in hell its activity is with insanity. Each presents itself in its subjects as delight. But the heavens and the hells are in opposite delights, because in opposite loves; the heavens are in the love and thence in the delight of doing good, but the hells, in the love and thence in the delight of doing evil. If, then, you know what delight is, you know what and of what nature heaven is, and hell" (Conjugal Love 461).
If you understand the point of bread and wine, then you understand the point of this passage. And you see that bread and wine are the infrastructure of who you really are and what you really think and what you really intend.
They are not some alien ritual, bread and wine, they are intimately related to the feeling-ideation feed which constitutes your every waking and dreaming moment.
And your every waking and dreaming moment positive or negative true or false in God's sight may be expressed in terms of gold and silver, beasts and fowl, 2 and 3, sun and moon, honor and glory, bushel and hin, bread and water, mountain and hill, adultery and fornication, Sodom and Egypt, Babylon and Chaldea, Canaanite and Perizzite, and in so very many other and alike chiastic encodings of feeling-ideation state.
Each feeling-ideation state correlates with real life experience at all levels of life in each of our days or states or life chapters and may all be expressed in the correspondences in interrelation of the chiastic structures in the Word. Our Lord is the orchestrator of our life chapters state by state and day by day with an eye to what is best for us through many states to come. Great is the honey of the Lord, and many are His counsels!
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