Book: My Religion

Overview
Published in 1927, My Religion is Helen Keller’s personal statement of faith and a lucid introduction to the Swedenborgian Christianity that shaped her inner life and public work. Written decades after the breakthrough of language in childhood and the fame that followed, the book reframes her biography through a spiritual lens, explaining how she came to see God as living love and wisdom, how suffering can be transformed into service, and how religion, to be genuine, must express itself in use to others.

Spiritual Journey
Keller recounts her early hunger for meaning and the disillusionments she felt with creedal quarrels and materialistic explanations. She found a home in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose depiction of a living, rational faith seemed to reconcile reason and revelation. Through Swedenborg she encountered a God not remote but present in the deepest affections and thoughts, and a vision of life in which the seen and unseen interpenetrate through correspondences, the spiritual realities mirrored in nature and story. This framework gave her a vocabulary for experiences of inward light that had sustained her since childhood, long before she could speak them.

Core Beliefs
Central to her faith is the conviction that God is love and wisdom united, fully revealed in the Divine Human of Christ. Salvation is not a legal transaction but the gradual regeneration of character as selfish loves yield to neighborly love. Heaven and hell are not distant locales but states of life we freely choose by what we love; no one is compelled into either, because freedom is the ground of moral growth. Scripture is holy in its inner sense, whose spiritual meaning underlies literal narratives; miracles and parables carry lessons about the transformation of the heart. She embraces the Swedenborgian doctrine of uses: to love the neighbor is to serve the neighbor’s good, and the joy of heaven is the joy of being useful.

Suffering and Inner Light
Keller rejects the notion that disability is punishment or that God wills evil. Evil arises when freedom is turned toward self alone, yet Divine Providence continually bends what is hurtful toward healing ends. Her deafblindness became, in this light, not a wall but a doorway to deeper sight. The absence of physical senses did not isolate her from reality; it sharpened a spiritual sense that perceives values, purposes, and beauty with immediacy. The disciplines of patience, gratitude, and service became her way of cooperating with grace.

Prayer and Practice
Prayer, for Keller, is not an attempt to change the divine will but a steady alignment of human will with divine purposes. It issues in action. Faith proves itself in deeds that relieve suffering, enlighten ignorance, and make communities more just. She ties this ethic to her advocacy for people who are blind, for workers, and for peace, insisting that religion without humane service is sentimentality, while service without spiritual grounding becomes brittle.

Scripture and Revelation
Keller’s reading of the Bible through Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences lets her affirm inspiration without literalism. The crossing of a sea, the opening of eyes, the banquet of a king, these images point to interior passages of liberation and charity. Revelation, she argues, is not closed; God’s self-disclosure continues as truth and love find new forms suited to human freedom and understanding.

Afterlife and Providence
She adopts Swedenborg’s view that angels are perfected humans and that the spiritual world is orderly, humane, and intimate, a community formed by affinities of love. Providence does not micromanage events, yet nothing good is lost; even failures can be woven into uses that bless others. This hope animates her confidence that every life, however constrained, can become a channel of joy.

Style and Aim
Plain, earnest, and reflective, My Religion draws theology down to the level of daily choice. Keller offers neither dogmatic system nor vague uplift, but a coherent vision in which doctrine clarifies experience and experience tests doctrine. Her faith is finally practical: to know God is to love, and to love is to serve.