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Lord’s Prayer

Readings:

• John 4:34 (to 1st ,)
• John 5:19, 20 Verily
• My. 347:23 FUNDAMENTAL
• My 348:29–6
• My 349:11–16
• Mis. 6:18–21 That

INTRODUCTION

 

I have a memory typical of my childhood with my two much older brothers. In this one, each of them took a sheet of paper, folded it quickly and expertly, and made amazing paper airplanes that would zing around the living room. Not understanding the basic principles of aerodynamics behind those airplanes, my five-year-old self took some paper, folded it haphazardly, and threw it, only for it to flop straight to the floor – much to the derision of my brothers. A quick word from my mother stopped the teasing, and my oldest brother slipped into a teaching gear. He took me through the proper order of folding, step by step, until I too could build my own paper craft. Then he told me what I built correctly allowed the invisible air to keep it aloft. He had showed me the ‘how’. Now he was explaining the ‘why’ of it.

Even if I didn’t understand the arcane points of what the Wright Brothers had discovered at Kitty Hawk, I had a solid grasp that flying my airplane wasn’t accidental, wasn’t mysterious. It was a logical, practical, and expected outcome based on principles I couldn’t see directly … but could see the effect of. Having watched my brothers do this, I knew it was possible.

Over and over again, I built my airplanes – with various modifications I learned from other children – and got pretty good at those flights.

Discovery. Proof. Practice.

It’s amazing what we can accomplish if we learn the basics – the rudiments – of anything. And it’s a bit disheartening when we attempt something without the basics supporting us. We can crash just as easily as that initial paper airplane I attempted.

But here’s the other thing. I don’t think I had made a paper airplane in 40 or more years when I found I needed some new activities to keep our then three-year-old granddaughter entertained while her parents were away. Well, we had a reem of paper, and without any effort, how to build a plane came right back to me. We folded it together. She colored it. And we threw it across the room. A perfect flight, along with her giggles of delight to celebrate it. Why? Because I had learned the rudiments so well … and I could even start teaching them to her. A science – even of paper airplanes – is for everyone.

I assigned to the Association the task of reading (and I hope rereading and rereading) the short publication by Mary Baker Eddy Rudimental Divine Science. If we get grounded in these 13 questions, we too can “fly” with a practical understanding of how to heal from a Christianly scientific basis. At 17 pages, it’s a far quicker read than all of Science and Health, but it lays out the fundamentals of our textbook, and especially the chapter “Recapitulation” – which we know as the basis of class instruction – and so it’s a good way to refresh our understanding of Christian Science and see if we’ve been drifting away from its essential precepts.

Perhaps we should let ourselves be launched into today’s topic with a sentence from the final paragraph of this book: “The ways of Christianity have not changed.” (Rud 17:15 (only)) The same Christianity that brought healing to the woman bowed over, gave sight to the man born blind, restored health to the boy with epilepsy, released the girl exploited for her spiritual gifts, and resuscitated the young man who fell from the third floor – this same Christianity is bringing healing – and redeeming – today. We hear it in our Wednesday testimony meetings, we read about it in our Church publications, and we hear from our fellow Association members their own experiences. It’s not accidental. It’s not based on mystery. It’s not beyond our abilities. It’s a Science that each and all of us are able to practice as we stick to the fundamentals.  So I’ve called our discussion for today: “Back to Basics.”

1. Every superstructure needs a foundation.

One of the more interesting early projects I became immersed in while I served on the Board of Directors at The Mother Church in Boston involved the enormous building now known as One Dalton St. It is currently the third tallest building in Boston – after the Hancock and the Prudential skyscrapers, respectively one and two.

But let me back up. When I was first asked to serve, I freely admit, I hadn’t a clue as to what would be expected of me as a director – The Church Manual isn’t very long on specifics. I thought I would be asked to be a board contact for areas where I had some experience, such as for the Journal, Sentinel, and Herald, or Board of Lectureship, or practitioner activities. Nope. As an English major with a writing, publishing, and speaking resumé, I was given a portfolio of contacts that included: the Treasurer’s Office, Real Estate operations, and Technology. I mean, really? I had zero real world experience in any of these areas.

Doesn’t God have a sense of humor?

After I got over the surprise of that assignment, I had to do some self-examination. In fact, I was taking them over from another humanities-oriented director. Clearly, I wasn’t being asked to be a contact for these activities because I had an MBA or had written code as a software engineer or negotiated deals as real estate tycoon. No. The only arrow I had in my quiver was metaphysics. I was first and foremost a practitioner, which meant I had a lot of experience giving one ear to the human sense of problems and keeping one ear open to God. And I had to trust (and defend) that spiritual understanding was the most critical thing at the table when I sat in these meetings with a roomful of human experts, and often as the only woman there – and one without any street cred whatsover. (I googled a lot of industry acronyms during and after those meetings!) But as I began to realize that whenever we’re simply willing to serve God in whatever capacity, and especially when we don’t feel we have a talent for it, God will use us in ways we may not expect … and bless us for our willingness. And we’ll continue to gain invaluable spiritual lessons in the middle of the chaos and confusion of human experiences.

Here’s one lesson I still savor from a particular moment of service.

So there was this small grassy triangle on a street behind the Colonnade Building on the Christian Science Plaza. It wasn’t a very big piece of land and was mostly used by local residents as a relief area for their dogs. Before I came on the board, the decision had been made that this land was not core to our Plaza activities, and the Church didn’t need it. So after an extensive bidding process and a LOT of prayer by those involved before I was on the board, it was sold to a developer and outside architect.

At the groundbreaking ceremony I attended on behalf of the Church for that project, I chatted with an architect about this tiny plot of land and the 61-story building going up on it. I asked: how deep would the pilings need to be to support it? The answer I got was pretty interesting, not just humanly but spiritually. If you want to go high, you must go down deep, really deep. Something like this building would need pilings driven down about 17 stories below ground. And for months and months after that event, we heard the pile drivers pounding away as the visible superstructure of that tall building had to wait for its foundation to be firmly established.

I discovered online that “a deep foundation transfers the weight of the building down to the earth.” This keeps the weight above the ground from swaying like a pendulum. In other words, without a strong, deep foundation, we have no security to our superstructure. It will topple over. No matter how fancy the architecture above ground, we can’t build on what isn’t there to support it. So we really do need to make sure any foundation is deep and solid.

So, the question comes: what comprises our foundation, our base, our rudimental understanding of Christian Science? And how deep does it go? What kind of base do we need for our healing and redeeming ministry to be solid and secure? If we’re feeling our metaphysical work isn’t as effective as we expect, maybe there’s a need to deepen the foundation to it.

1. Establishing a spiritual foundation

In both Recapitulation and in Rudimental Divine Science, Mary Baker Eddy starts establishing the foundation for our healing practice by asking us to consider how we understand God. This is crucial for our effective practice of the Science of Christ – what God is and what God does. For those who’ve grown up with Christian Science around them or have been involved in it for decades, these ideas are so familiar to the point of taking them for granted. But it’s really, REALLY important for us to recognize how radical and transformative they still are today, even to the seasoned Christian Scientist. And we need to keep – not just knowing but – feeling that radical freshness.

For most of the world, God is still defined in anthropomorphic terms – a manlike God. For Christians, the Trinitarian compromise at the Nicean Council in 325 CE cemented this view as the early bishops horse-traded their personal interpretations of Jesus and God and the unfathomable Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit), and came up with a three-in-one mashup of the Divine. Very much manlike Father and manlike Son and the who-knows-what of the Holy Ghost (that’s in the ‘mystery’ part of religion – so let’s just illustrate it with a dove). You can see this convergence of theological ideas throughout much of the art from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and beyond as artists tried to paint God – the white-haired man in the sky. This mental concept endures. When the Bible says in Genesis 1 that man is made in the image and likeness of God, contemporary translations of that verse have God making humans in the likeness of the Divine. And the inescapable implication is that God is a man. And not a generic man, but a man-man.

Which leaves women … where? And that verse “male and female created he them”?

Not so much a part of this equation.

The history surrounding the establishment of the masculine Trinity was fraught with deadly violence tearing the early Church apart. It wasn’t an inspired compromise. It was a political one. And because Constantine was head of the Empire and only nominally “Christian”, the entrenched pagan and secular hierarchy of Rome (which had been persecuting Christians) soon morphed into the hierarchy of the Christian Church, bringing with it the established masculine power structure. Consequently, the women of the Church who had followed in the footsteps of Mary Magdalene and Phebe and Lydia and Priscilla – and the others mentioned in the Bible, who had been so instrumental to the establishment of early Christianity – were excluded from all official positions of influence and power.

Without a fundamental understanding of God that includes both the masculine and feminine, there will continue to be a devastating inequality in human experience.

This past year has seen its fair share of declines and outright reverses in the view of women as co-equal children of God. Some have been in other religions around the world in terms of what women can and cannot wear, whether they can be educated, or if they can work outside the home without being harassed or assaulted or killed. But some of these reverses have been right here in the United States. One of the largest Christian denominations – a conservative, evangelical church which claims about 15 million members – voted at their most recent conference to expel all women from leadership and pastoral positions in every church, including in some very successful megachurches. Some of these women had been serving as pastors for 20 or more years. Similarly, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which have never offered women a place in their clergy, have reaffirmed that position in recent years. This can seem quite disheartening for both women and men, who know and value the abilities and capabilities of women in these roles, who understand that the nature and essence of God is inclusive of and expressed in both genders.

This isn’t a contemporary issue. Paul addressed it in his letter to the Galatians. He wrote passionately to dissolve the factions and hierarchy springing up in the early Church:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
(Gal. 3:28)

That should have been a waymark for all time, but even Paul struggled in other letters to articulate an equality with what women could and could not do in the Church. We need to remember however much he clearly valued the women working alongside him in ministry, he was navigating extremely entrenched cultures and traditions. And if Christianity was to make its mark with both Jews and pagans, there were only so many radical ideas he could promote. The complete equality of women was not one of them, though he did not rule it out of being a byproduct of these Christian values.

That was then. And little seemed to change.

But there was some progress in the 18 centuries after Paul wrote to the early churches. And the thoughts of at least some men were beginning to shift, for in 1895, another male writer wrote quite a moving essay about “the new woman.” [Well, she’s not that new!] In a magazine called “The New Century” published in Boston (and included in Pulpit and Press in Prose Works), he expresses a very progressive sense of woman to a Victorian audience that simultaneously revered women and increasingly oppressed them by limiting their opportunities to act independently. With a gently persuasive tone, this writer saw a way forward that could lift both genders. He said of the new woman:

She is as full of beautiful possibilities as a perfect harp, and she realizes that all the harmonies of the universe are in herself…. She is the apostle of the true, the beautiful, the good, commissioned to complete all that the twelve have left undone. Hers is the mission of missions — the highest of all — to make the body not the prison, but the palace of the soul, with the brain for its great white throne.
(Pul. 81:20)

Ok, clearly not the language of Christian Science … but very sympathetic to what Mary Baker Eddy was achieving when her beautiful, newly built church in the Back Bay opened its doors to the public that year, and women as well as men were taking their places in leadership roles. His article continues (with great resonance with today):

Woman must not and will not be disheartened by a thousand denials or a million of broken pledges. With the assurance of faith she prays, with the certainty of inspiration she works, and with the patience of genius she waits. At last she is becoming “as fair as the morn, as bright as the sun, and as terrible as an army with banners” to those who march under the black flag of oppression and wield the ruthless sword of injustice.

And he concludes his article with this:

“The time of times” is near when “the new woman” shall subdue the whole earth with the weapons of peace. Then shall wrong be robbed of her bitterness and ingratitude of her sting, revenge shall clasp hands with pity, and love shall dwell in the tents of hate; while side by side, equal partners in all that is worth living for, shall stand the new man with the new woman.
(Pul. 84:1)

We know Mary Baker Eddy experienced a tremendous backlash with the publishing of Science and Health. Her healing ministry kept attracting more and more followers who were leaving other denominations. Her own leadership as Pastor of the church was an offense to the men in the clergy who had been leading the Church for two millennia. In coordinated efforts from their pulpits and in the press, they poured out an astonishing level of hatred upon this one woman. [The social media trolls of today have existed in every culture and every period.] These clergymen circled a lot of hateful misinformation and disinformation to discredit her – and therefore discredit her discovery – that is still being repeated in seminaries and ministers today. And if you’ve ever read Wikipedia’s presentation of Mary Baker Eddy or Christian Science, you’ll see how entrenched this distorted profile continues to be. [Don’t get me started on this injustice … we simply need to continue to pray about Truth having the final Word.]

No one bothered to check the actual facts at that time … or since. There’s the famous quip, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes.”

So what can be done? Usually, giving someone the facts about any topic won’t change their perceptions – something we see too often today in our polarized politics. People want facts that support their entrenched beliefs and will ignore those facts that challenge those beliefs. Instead, we’re going to have to find another way to deal with attacks on our practice of Christianity, our church, and its founder. We’ll need humility and patience and trust in God. These are essential to building a secure spiritual foundation for healing and redeeming humanity.

I mention all this so you won’t be naïve about the ignorant hostility and active malpractice that is still heaped upon Christian Science, a denomination founded by … a woman. A woman who asserted that she had discovered the laws of God that restored “the lost element of healing” in Christianity (Man 17:8). Not only did she assert it, she then proved this law in her own ministry AND taught others to as well because this is not about a personal deity, it’s about a universal Science.

In this Science of Christ – which she explained was what Jesus practiced – we’re not being told what to think about God through traditional approaches, rituals, or creeds. We’re being told that as we know God correctly, we’ll know how to heal. We individually must learn what and who it is we are supposed to love with all our heart, mind, and soul. This is demanding work, for too often people would rather just follow others and do what they are told. But every student of Christian Science has embraced the affirmation: “The time for thinkers has come.” (SH vii:13) Each of us is a thinker.

So the foundational question each of us has to grapple with anew is “What is God?” If we don’t get clear about that, we have nothing to build on. So the first question defining Christian Science in Rudimental Divine Science is:

How would you define Christian Science?
As the law of God, the law of good, interpreting and demonstrating the divine Principle and rule of universal harmony.
(Rud. 1:1–4)

We won’t understand Christian Science – or be able to practice it – unless we have a new view of God. Not as person but as divine Principle. And Principle is then defined in the next question by the other comprehensive synonyms: as Mind, Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, and Love. (Rud 1:5-9) Again, not Person, but Principle.

So the question for us is: how often and how easily do we find we slip back into praying to a manlike God – a “he” who is distant from us, up in heaven, or far above and far removed from our human problems? The language of the Bible does lend itself to that manlike, distant God … but it also has breakthrough moments as well, as we’ll review in a moment. Okay, then, let’s do a mental inventory.

When you think of God, what comes to thought? … Who are you praying to? … How far away is this deity? Is God a ‘he’ … or perhaps a ‘she’? How do you begin your prayer or treatment? Is God a Principle or person? For the next minute, just be still and think about who God is to you.

*** 1 minute ***

Ok. How’d that go?

From my own experience, it is a discipline – a discipleship – to break out of those old habits of personifying the Divine … and to expand and enrich our sense of who God is. When Mary Baker Eddy offered to defend her discovery at Tremont Temple in 1885, she had ten minutes to make her points to a hostile audience of conservative Christians. She understood that moving past a traditional view of God wasn’t easy. But she shared her own journey with them:

Do I believe in a personal God?
I believe in God as the Supreme Being. I know not what the person of omnipotence and omnipresence is, or what the infinite includes; therefore, I worship that of which I can conceive, first, as a loving Father and Mother; then, as thought ascends the scale of being to diviner consciousness, God becomes to me, as to the apostle who declared it, “God is Love,” — divine Principle, — which I worship; and “after the manner of my fathers, so worship I God.”
(Mis. 96:7–16)

There’s a progression out of a personal sense of God to the Principled sense of God. And that’s what we can strive for – starting with a caring Parent and moving to the nature of Love itself.

As our textbook, Science and Health, puts it:

This human sense of Deity yields to the divine sense, even as the material sense of personality yields to the incorporeal sense of God and man as the infinite Principle and infinite idea, — as one Father with His universal family, held in the gospel of Love. The Lamb’s wife [from Revelation] presents the unity of male and female as no longer two wedded individuals, but as two individual natures in one; and this compounded spiritual individuality reflects God as Father-Mother, not as a corporeal being. In this divinely united spiritual consciousness, there is no impediment to eternal bliss, — to the perfectibility of God’s creation.
(SH 576:31)

Personality yields to Principle – to the constancy and presence of unchanging, eternal Love. And Love that is inclusive of male and female. In fact, Father-hyphen-Mother is the unified and co-equal expression of the tender, gender-inclusive Parent of all of us. But it’s beyond gender, for those are human concepts to categorize qualities. Science and Health affirms this clearly:

Gender is mental, not material. … Gender means simply kind or sort, and does not necessarily refer either to masculinity or femininity. The word is not confined to sexuality, and grammars always recognize a neuter gender, neither male nor female. … The intelligent individual idea, be it male or female, rising from the lesser to the greater, unfolds the infinitude of Love.
(SH 508:13–14 Gender, 17–21, 23)

IDEAS have characteristics that we humanly might label masculine or feminine or neuter. Ideas are not personalities, not physiques. By understanding more about God as Principle – incorporeal (that is, without body) and eternal – we are lifted above the so-called ‘culture wars’ surrounding human identity and orientation. And each person on this planet is invited to a higher, more expansive sense of who and what they are based solely on who and what God is as the infinite and eternal Principle of all of us.

A few minutes ago, I said the Bible’s language often tends to reinforce a sense of a manlike God with “he” and “his” and “Lord”, but there are some shining examples where God is identified with Truth, with Life, with Love. In the Gospel of John, the King James Version has “God is a spirit.” (John 4:24) A more accurate translation, and what most modern ones present, is: “God is Spirit.” Even the original language of the Bible is stretching beyond entrenched views of a manlike God, who is separate from us. And it was from the Bible that Mary Baker Eddy found all the elements that comprise the definition of God in the glossary of our textbook:

GOD. The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.
(SH 587:5)

This is not a person. This is Being itself. The great I AM that Moses encountered in the wilderness is a statement of eternal existence. Not I was, nor I will be, but simply and forever I AM. The next “all” words in this glossary definition describe the comprehensive nature of this Being: all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving AND eternal. All … and always. There isn’t anything outside of God, unknown by God, or existing without God. And there is no distance to separate us from our always loving God, who is understood as those seven comprehensive synonyms, who is the only substance of existence, who is intelligence itself.

Science and Health gives us three words in Recapitulation that help us break out of a manlike God apart from us whom we must address formally in prayer or through ritual. These words are omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Always present. All the power there is. And all-knowing. God already knows who we truly are. God is the only real power in our lives. And God is right with us, right now. Perhaps more accurately, we are within God, for Paul reminded us that we live and move and have our being in God, in Spirit. (Acts 17:28) We can’t be external to God. God is inclusive of us.

Just pause with that idea for a moment – what God is and does, includes me. I am not separate from God. I am within God, within all those beautiful, comprehensive synonyms. [Pause.]

Now, as we move from thinking about what God is and does to thinking with God, our prayers become more intimate, more trusting, more open to the transformation needed for our thoughts to coincide with spiritual truth. And instead of addressing God with Thee and Thou, it’s quite simply the word we know today as “You”: You are always present. You are all the power there is. You know all. You know me. I am within Your eternal embrace. [Pause.]

We’re not praying to a person, but communing with a presence, a power, a knowing that is Being itself, comprehensive of all, creator of all, governing all. And we’re giving our all – all our heart, mind, and soul – to this All. We’re loving and we’re listening to the Divine. Let’s take a few moments more to sit with the immensity and the intimacy of knowing God better:

*** 2 minutes ***

Years ago, there was a well-known book by JB Phillips called “Your God is too small”. Well, we’ve just opened ourselves up to the infinity and the immediacy of divine Love, who is ever present Life, and the Mind of all, the Spirit who is the substance of all we are, the Soul who colors us with joy and health and harmony, the Truth who grounds our integrity – truly, the Principle of All, over all, and All.

So how do we keep deepening our sense of God that expands beyond the traditional language in both the KJV and in more modern versions?

One exercise I’ve found helpful, which I’ve shared with some of you over the past few years, is to use our Full Text version of the Bible lessons as a workbook. Now, this presumes of course that you are subscribing to and reading the Bible lessons, which is something I do encourage most emphatically. This is such a rich resource for our daily spiritual growth. Some of you may find the Full Text an expensive subscription, and if so, you might want to consider the electronic version – the digital Quarterly – which allows you to read it on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, and also to print out the lesson yourself. The most economical and in-context version of our Bible Lessons is to use the citation Quarterly and mark the books yourself each week. And this has certain advantages in keeping us in the full experience of these two books as our Pastor.

However you are engaging with the Bible lesson each week, I invite you to use a printed version of it for a month. Take a pencil and every time you see the words “the Lord” (meaning God, not Jesus), put a line through it. Near it, write out the synonyms for God: maybe all, or some, or just one – whatever you feel drawn to. If it’s a lesson on one of the synonyms – perhaps Life – maybe you use just that one. So, from a recent lesson on Life, Psalm 27:1 has:

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
(Ps. 27:1)

Using this substitution approach, it would now read:

[Life] is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? [Life] is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
(Ps. 27:1)

Or even more explicitly state that this Life is God by including divine or eternal:

[Divine Life] is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? [Eternal Life] is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
(Ps. 27:1)

There is nothing anthropomorphic about this. Nothing manlike at all. It is expansive and powerful.

Ok. How about the pronoun ‘he’ when used in the Bible to define God? I’ve tried a couple different approaches. One is to put an s/ [s-slash] in front of he so that it is s/he. Personally, I don’t find that very satisfying, but it can be useful to break that deeply entrenched mental habit of reducing God to a male deity. Instead, I more often turn the 3^rd person approach of describing God – he does this, he does that – to that 2^nd person address: You. Psalm 121 in the lesson on Life gives a good illustration of this:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
(Ps. 121:1–4)

This adapts to:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence come[s] my help. My help come[s] from [eternal Life], which made heaven and earth. [You] will not suffer [my] foot to be moved: [You] that keep [me] will not slumber. Behold, [You] that keep Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
(Ps. 121:1–4)

I find this opens up a familiar Bible passage so that I’m talking with God the way Moses did – speaking from the heart and listening with the heart. We become more aware of who God is to us and what that means in practical, provable ways.

The study of the Bible Lesson through different approaches during the week allows us to take the ideas and utilize them in fresh ways that give us the inspiration we need to meet the challenges we face each day … and then be ready to embrace the world with its truths as we come together to hear it as a congregation on Sundays.

With an infinite God who is infinitely good, always present, and all the power there is, we have a deep, solid, secure, steadfast foundation we can start building upon. We’re no longer worshipping a manlike God separate from us. We have the starting point for understanding a Godlike man –the inseparable image and likeness of the infinite, an image and likeness inclusive of all of us – not as mortals, but as God’s (Spirit’s) eternal ideas.

***10 minute break***

III. What about healing?

Again, Rudimental Divine Science makes sure we’ve blown the doors off a traditional view of God. Not a Person. Not a personality. But an ever presence of Love and Life and Truth – a “trinity in unity”. This is the metaphysical expression of the traditional Trinity that breaks the boundaries of Personality, and gives each and all of us universal access to the one Principle encompassing all.

While Recapitulation postpones the question of healing until quite late in that chapter, Rudimental puts a – shall we call it ‘a teaser’? – question right up front, after this radical reconstruction of our understanding of God. Question 4 asks: “Is healing the sick the whole of Science?” And then lets us know that healing is the SMALLEST part of this Christian and divine Science. This almost seems like a throwaway answer, but today more than ever, it’s become a question that needs us to sit with for just a few moments. It states:

[Healing] is only the bugle-call to thought and action, in the higher range of infinite goodness. The emphatic purpose of Christian Science is the healing of sin; and this task, sometimes, may be harder than the cure of disease; because, while mortals love to sin, they do not love to be sick.
(Rud. 2:24–2)

So, first we have these few questions about what God is in this short book. Then it’s like an impatient interruption: ‘yeah, yeah, ok, let’s cut to the chase and get to how do I experience healing and heal others.’ This Rudimental answer is a reassurance that we’ll get to that important question, but we have a lot of ground to cover first.

Why?

Because we have to rediscover and cherish the fact that this approach to knowing God is not just another healthcare system among the many out there. Nope. It’s not about fixing bodies. It’s about fixing lives in a way that we call ‘salvation’. Not a very popular or interesting word for many in contemporary culture. Today, what we’re inundated with are promises of immediate gratification – with no penalties. Actually, that’s a very old approach to life – there is nothing new under the sun, as the Bible observes (Eccles 1:9). And a Bacchanalian approach (derived from the Greek god Bacchus, with far more ancient predecessors like Baal) of indulging to excess in whatever we wanted might be awesome, if it were possible. But matter always has limits in every direction, and there is no such instant and constant self-indulgence that is actually healthy or healing or satisfying ….

It’s been interesting to observe how many things that seem like pleasurable and culturally important indulgences continue to be exposed as harmful. As an example, many of you may have seen the CDC’s [Center for Disease Control] report this past year that drinking any amount of alcohol is unhealthy, thus discrediting prior studies widely circled that said a glass of wine a day enhanced one’s health.

And then even the very nature of these medical studies, which influence far and wide, has come under fire. This past summer, the president of Stanford University resigned over falsely presented data in several well circulated and cited medical studies where he was the lead author and what he made his reputation on.

Beyond this one individual failure of publishing with integrity, the falsification in scientific journals – especially with medical studies – is far more pervasive than many want to admit because the prestige, influence, and especially the money aligned with medical “breakthroughs” is so compelling. (See NYTimes “The research scandal at Stanford is more common than you think,” Theo Baker, 7/30/2023.)

Every now and again, mortal mind has an ‘emperor’s wearing no clothes’ moment from truth tellers. But it immediately slides past the inconvenient and uncomfortable facts uncovered about its own illusions and delusions with something else to catch our attention, distract, and mesmerize us into giving our consent to a matter-based view of life. Building our lives on sand, as it were. And not putting in those deep structures for a foundation.

Again and again we see the inescapable fact that real healing is part of salvation. Yes, absolutely, as Mary Baker Eddy says elsewhere:

Body and mind are correlated in man’s salvation; for man will no more enter heaven sick than as a sinner, and Christ’s Christianity casts out sickness as well as sin of every sort.
(Mis. 241:3)

So we’re not going to miss the how of this question – how do we find healing ourselves and heal others? But ‘heal’ is a very big word, and it starts with healing our understanding of our relationship with God.

1. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”

When I took the required American literature course in my public high school, we studied some of the most influential writings that both expressed and shaped American culture. One of them was a sermon penned in 1741 by the revivalist preacher named Jonathan Edwards: “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”. I don’t know if they taught this when you all were getting your high school degrees, or whether they still do, but it was quite a moment for me when I encountered this text as a 16-year-old.

Having spent a lot of Sundays in the Christian Science branch church my dad attended, I had often read the quote on the Sunday School wall: “God is Love.” I mean, how can you argue with that? What impelled me to ask to go with my dad to church was the pervasive, quiet goodness and safety that I just felt with everyone who was there. Like any kid, I intuitively was drawn to where I felt loved and at peace. If we want to value what is still able to draw kids to a Sunday School experience today, it’s to recognize and defend the attraction of learning more about what makes us feel truly good about ourselves (and others), and how we find real peace and safety in a social media saturated world.

In my mom’s church, I also felt the genuine kindness and the goodness of the people who attended. But also an undercurrent of sadness because life always seemed rather fragile and inevitably tragic. From the pulpit there, I’d hear a request for prayer for whoever was in the hospital, who had been moved to a nursing home, whose memorial service was that week, and so on. God was good, but… we were still just flawed mortals made out of matter, asking God to help us be slightly better mortals.

It was noticeably different in the Christian Science Sunday School. There was always a sense of our goodness being innate and our lives being eternal. Not that eternal meant much to an 8-year-old – although sitting at the dinner table until I ate my entire serving of now cold fish sticks could feel like an eternity. But rather, God was good … and therefore so were we … in ways I didn’t fully understand then, but I certainly felt as a child. And it resonated within my heart, which is where the Bible says God’s laws are written for all of us. Goodness was and is … normal and satisfying and right.

So when I hit Jonathan Edwards scorching sermon about this angry God and all of us as horrible, miserable sinners, most of whom were going to burn in hell forever, frankly, I was a bit stunned. Who was this God?! And where did all this divine anger come from? All those Bible stories I was familiar with from the weekly Bible Lessons we talked about in Sunday School had a loving God loving us.

If you read through the whole Bible, cover to cover, you’ll find plenty to support that harsh view of God – from an extensive covenant of do’s and don’ts with severe penalties all the way to the prophets like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Obadiah, and so on. But even with these prophets, there are moments of acknowledgement of the steadfast love of God for the children of Israel, though most of these scorching warnings (and eventual I-told-you-so’s) express the impending sense of doom that did befall first the northern kingdom of Israel and then the southern kingdom of Judah. The people had stopped faithfully worshipping God, had broken their covenant with the God who brought them out of Egypt and had given them the Promised Land. And broken it and broken it and broken it. And so, they had forfeited divine protection when first the Assyrians conquered Israel and then when the Babylonians conquered Judah, forcing the 70 years of Exile out of the Promised Land.

All this human unfaithfulness to God is the direct consequence of Genesis 2 – Adam and fallen man, which is why that critical theological topic is one included in the Bible Lessons twice a year. It is still pervasive today in the theology of the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and especially deeply rooted in the conservative elements of all three of them, continuing to blame Eve and to justify the repression of women … and blaming Adam for listening to his wife and not obeying God. But this deeply held belief about God’s ongoing punishment of humanity – perpetually condemning us to be vulnerable to sin, disease, and death – contrasts with two essential teachings in the Bible that are all about establishing our right relationship with God and a right relationship with each other: the 10 Commandments from the Old Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount from the New.

So after first establishing a radically GOOD view of an unchanging God, who is divine Principle, Rudimental Divine Science reminds us of these two essential teachings that keep us aligned with that goodness of God and our relationship safe within that goodness.

As we’ve talked about before, the 10 commandments can be reduced to the 2 great commandments Jesus gave, which come straight out of Judaic teachings: Love God; love our neighbor as ourselves. The New Testament (or New Covenant) is inextricable from the Old Testament (Old Covenant) in understanding what is required of us to fulfil our part in doing what’s right because it is right. Not because we feel personally inclined to do it, or that it’s convenient, or easy. No. We abide by these guides for life because we’re hardwired to know what’s right and to feel the deep peace of doing what’s right. We feel connected to God in a way that is profoundly, inwardly satisfying.

So what IS doing the right thing? It used to be what you learned in Sunday School. But with fewer and fewer globally attending religious institutions, where do we learn what’s right? What cuts across cultural sensibilities and values for a common sense of what’s right? This is the crossroads humanity is at today. On the one hand, there’s the historical, imposed sense of right and wrong from religious traditions and cultural habits around the world. On the other, there’s the contemporary, improvised sense of no judgment, no guilt for what was traditionally taboo … and a new sense of judgment and guilt for contemporary sins called out as racism, sexism, genderism, and so on.

The fact is, both perspectives have valid points about what harms others and ourselves, and both lose sight of the foundation for our wellness as individuals and as a society. What have we just been establishing as our foundation? A spiritually expansive and inclusive sense of what God is. Without that foundation, we have nothing to support the superstructure of thinking and acting rightly. A scary God and a bunch of miserable sinners that Jonathan Edwards preached so terrifyingly about did not bring about the comprehensive change prophesied: the end of the world, Judgment Day, with a few selected for heaven, the rest to hell.

Mary Baker Eddy had heard plenty about this harsh God. Her dad, as a staunch Calvinist, viewed life in these darker religious terms. Her mom was touched by the more tender views of God as a shepherd, as a good Parent caring for His children, as a God of love. And when Mary herself struggled with this doctrine of predestination as she was about to join with the Congregational Church, she fell ill with an acute fever. Her mother urged her to feel more of God’s love, and as she did, there was a deep sense of joy in her heart. The fever broke, and she said: “… the ‘horrible decree’ of predestination — as John Calvin rightly called his own tenet — forever lost its power over me.” (Ret. 13:24 2nd the)

The outcome was that she indeed voiced her conscientious protest about this tenet of predestination, yet she did so in Biblical terms that touched the minister and congregation. And she was accepted into the fellowship of that Congregational church, holding her membership in it until she established her own church many decades later. As fully embracing the love of God that Christian Science does, it also retains the clarity of Calvinism that sin would separate us from God. But rather than being doomed forever, this Science establishes how we rediscover that, in reality, we’ve never been separated from God… and could never be. And then lays out how we prove that radical theological precept, step by step, by following the example of our Master, Christ Jesus, in our daily lives.

 

1. Ten, then two, then one

Jesus was Jewish. He was both prophesied and shaped by the Jewish prophets and Torah. Unlike the pagan religions all around them, the Jews had one God. And differentiating their religious practice from those others of many gods, they had Ten Commandments of what, primarily, you should not do. The no-no’s or the ‘don’ts’. The first four establish how we honor God: don’t have other gods, don’t bow down or worship them (especially as manmade idols), don’t carelessly or thoughtlessly refer to God, and don’t forget to cultivate regular time with God. The fifth transitions from honoring God to honoring our human parents and cherishing a deep sense of family. The last five establish how we do no harm to our wider human family. Don’t kill, don’t be unfaithful to your spouse, don’t steal, don’t tell lies about others, don’t covet what doesn’t belong to you.

One of the challenges of the ‘don’t’ approach is that there’s something inherent to mortal mind that wants to challenge it with … well, what happens if I do? A sign says: wet paint, don’t touch. And how many touch it just to be sure? This natural curiosity (and its consequences) frames the fallen man story of Genesis 2.

Curiosity, it turns out, is the province of mortal mind (or limited thinking), which is always looking for answers to the wrong questions. And generally looking in all the wrong places. Where did evil come from? Why does God let suffering happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? By the way, this is the Book of Job in a nutshell. Asking the wrong questions and then reasoning from the wrong starting points.

This is the opposite of divine Mind – or omniscience – who already knows all there is to know. If we’re yearning for answers to what we don’t know, we’re reasoning from mortal mind’s starting point. If we’re responding to the Bible’s guidance: “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10), we are able to quiet the turbulence of mortal thought and reflect the magnitude of what God knows. We find ourselves back in Genesis 1, where we are the image and likeness of the Divine. We reflect that likeness and express that image, and we are blessed. This has practical effect.

In a recent experience – a modest one that many of us have had – I felt the required shift in thought from the alarm of limited thinking about a vexing question to quiet reflection and the success of spiritual reflection.

I was scheduled to pick up our granddaughter, Ani, at her Montessori pre-school and had a window of 15 minutes to do so before financial penalties would start to be assessed … but even more punitive, the little one would be sitting alone on a bench in the office, wondering why she had been forgotten and where her family was. So on the days I’m on, I’m very conscientious about leaving early enough to be sure to get there on time. I’m also extremely careful about always putting the car keys in the drawer by the front door. In Texas, where we’ve been living during the past few winters, John and I have the one car between us, which is all we need. And if either should need to drive it, we know exactly where the keys are.

You can tell where I’m going with this. John was actually out of state at the time this happened. And the keys weren’t in the drawer when I needed to leave for the school. I was floored! How could that be? Did I mention that I am really particular about putting them back in their proper place each time they are used? And I couldn’t even blame John, because I had driven him to the airport and come home. I was the last one who used the keys.

I looked everywhere, wondering if coming back from the grocery with full bags I had inadvertently set them somewhere temporarily before putting them back in their drawer. I looked on the counters. Nothing. Could they have fallen on the floor? No. I went through the trash. Twice. On and on, getting more and more flustered because my window for picking up Ani was closing.

Even though I spend each day learning more and more about God, and the whole of my work is about acknowledging God’s presence and power, there I was feeling the anxiety increasing! In my head, it sounded like this: ‘those are all nice ideas you’ve been studying, but of what good are they for something practical?’ Well, after the humanly agitated retracing of steps for the 10^th time in our small home, I finally heard God’s: BE STILL!

This wasn’t impractical. It was the only way I was going to get the ideas I needed. “Be still and know that I am God.” And I did just that. The unexpected thought came from that stillness was a reminder that four months earlier, we had brought down with us from our Massachusetts house all kinds of extra keys for offices, boats, bikes, cars, and friends’ houses. This was because we had sold our home here, gotten rid of many things, and moved everything else into storage while we started a home building project in the next town over. With our belongings in three different storage locations on the Cape, plus what we had with us in Texas, much of what we have is betwixt and between … and it’s always a bit of a question of what’s where. But I had an immediate sense of where that one box of keys had been stashed. Found it. Found a duplicate to the car, which was still charged and operational (another small miracle, having sat so long without use), and picked up Ani just within the allotted time. Phew. God to the rescue!!

But when I got home, I was still agitated about the missing car keys, because they also had a house key and (very importantly) a discount tag for the local grocery store! I was mentally scolding myself for being so careless. Again the thought of stillness came to me. And as I stood still right there, I noticed that a narrow ceramic jar, about two feet tall, which sits on the floor next to the front table was slightly out of place. And the thought quietly came, “yes, go ahead and adjust it to its artful position.” (Askew, and at just the right angle.)

As I did, my eye caught something reflective deep within it. Hmm. And so I reached into the darkness of that tall pot – which required its own subset of courage, because who knew what Texas spiders and palmetto bugs (aka giant cockroaches with wings) might have ended up in it.

There at the bottom were the car keys.

I have no explanation for how they could have slid the three feet down and off the table and landed not on the floor but perfectly inside the nearby jar without me ever being aware of it. But there they were. I was somewhat awestruck at discovering them. As one of our Association members has taught us, “Mind knows, and Mind shows.”

A couple of weeks later when I picked Ani up, she climbed up and into her car seat with a heavy sigh. As I buckled her in, I asked what was wrong. And with utter disappointment she said, “No one in our family is magical.”

No indeed. No one is. But … who needs magic when we can lean on God’s omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience to meet our needs?

So how does this experience illustrate the need for us to abide by (and abide in) the Ten Commandments? Let’s just look at the first four that I found myself afoul of. Have no other gods. Well, instead of having one infinite God, who is good, I had begun worshipping chaos, and time, and frustration, and self-condemnation. Not just bowing down to them but groveling before them. I wasn’t honoring God’s name or nature by turning instantly to that divine care and guidance. All my spiritual study that day had been in vain. And rushing around in a mad search, I wasn’t setting aside Sabbath time with God to listen and praise and feel deeply connected to the Divine. Nope. I was sinning my way right into the hands of a … not-angry God. Instead, I found I was caught up in that divine embrace of infinite Love that never ends. And grace poured over me … and over Ani … and over our daughter, who was tied up across town with our other granddaughter and couldn’t pick up either.

If 10 Don’ts can seem hard to keep foremost in thought when we’re feeling under pressure, or are in pain, or in the midst of an adverse situation, we can reduce them down to two. Love God; love our neighbor as ourselves. Instead of being about what we don’t and shouldn’t do, these two great commandments state our obligations in the positive, giving us direction of what TO do. It’s not left as a don’t-void. As we do love God and our neighbor as ourselves, then it is only natural that those 10 specifics of what we shouldn’t do flow out of them. If we love God with all heart and mind and soul, we’ll not bow down to anything else; we will honor God’s name; we will consecrate time to be wholly present with God; and as we love our neighbor, we will honor our parents; we won’t be tempted to hurt or harm or cheat our neighbor, to steal from or lie about them or covet what they have. We will rejoice in them and with them in the abundance and grace of divine Love that encircles all of us.

The gospel versions of Jesus summarizing the 10 Commandments up into two are not found in the Sermon on the Mount. This concise summary of our 1-2 duty to God and each other takes place in a question/answer exchange with Jewish scholars of the Torah – the “lawyers” in a religious sense, not a secular one. Jesus’ succinct answer, pulled from Jewish Scripture, can’t be argued with. Instead, he reinforces the focus of his ministry on God’s love to us, and how our accepting that love, and reflecting that love back to God and to one another was the basis of a right relationship with our divine Parent and a right relationship with others and a right relationship with ourselves.

Where does the Sermon on the Mount fit into this? We could say that this entire Sermon flows out of the fulfilling of those two commandments. We are proactive with our love, even when rejected and reviled, even towards those who don’t appear to deserve it because we are as perfect in our love as our Father in heaven. The epistle of I John expresses it (accurately translated) as: “We love because he first loved us.” (I John 4:19) It’s God’s love that empowers us to transcend all the ugliness, meanness, and cruelty of the carnal mind, of the false sense of self. True selflessness cannot be held back by mortal selfishness. It endures the crucifixion to rise from it with unconquerable Life and Love.

There’s a healing completeness in this 2-fold instruction of love. True selflessness is not self-neglect. But if we’re not careful, we can slip into a false and personal sense of love. Then we give and give and give of our human affection with the best intentions … and can feel utterly exhausted. Well-intentioned caregiving of children or of parents or fellow church members or friends becomes a burden. Going the extra mile (or miles) at work for a project that most benefits others builds resentment. Taking up posts in branch church on top of an already over-committed schedule drains our joy. Then, instead of loving ourselves, we’re mired in a morass of self-pity, self-condemnation, and sometimes even self-loathing.

By understanding that DIVINE Love is infinite and inexhaustible, we begin to realize it is never depleted. In pouring out on us, and in us, and through us, it is a virtuous circle – “rising higher and higher from a boundless basis” (SH 258:13-15) The right kind of love – love reflecting divine Love – heals ourselves and others. Heals the world. The adamant of error dissolves, and universal, divine Love triumphs. (see SH 242:15)

Ten Commandments become two commandments which express the unity of God and man – oneness. That’s the purpose of these commandments – to reestablish in our own understanding that essential oneness of reality – our oneness with God and our unity with one another. God-with-us individually, and collectively as “one universal family, held in the gospel of Love.” (SH 576:31) Ten to two to one. Oneness.

1. Defending ourselves is part of our love for ourselves and others

Last year we spent a good amount of time with the metaphor of fencing our mental gardens to keep the destructive ‘rabbits’ of animal magnetism out of it. So, how well do you do with that this year? Did you have a better crop of spiritual harvest? Or did you still find situations that felt thwarted, incomplete, or unhealed? I know I did!

Doing more defensive work is the ongoing need for all of us. Reducing error to nothing becomes easier and easier when we are quicker to recognize what is true and what is counterfeiting truth. Again, it has been said that we live in a “post-truth” world, a world with deep fakes and big lies, and the increasing fear in society is that we won’t realize we’re being deceived.

There’s been a great deal of hope placed in artificial intelligence being able to catch these deceptions, but these computer programs are only as good as the human programming of them. I giggled at the failure of one particular algorithm that was being touted for its ability to screen out word-based scams and deep fakes … but it wasn’t quite so good with doctored photographs. In one picture testing the accuracy of the program, there was a sepia-colored photo that looked grainy, like it had been taken in the 1800’s. It was a portrait of a farmer and of what was probably his wife. Standing slightly behind them was a giant Sasquatch – yes, Big Foot – all three looking soberly but calmly at the camera as was typical of the day. One of the AI programs let this go by as authentic based on how the pixels in the grainy photo lined up. Just as they should in an old photo. It didn’t seem to mind the legendary biped crowding the frame. I started thinking of various captions for that photo: American Gothic, plus one. Or Thanksgiving with the Smiths – ALL are welcome. Or Big Foot photobombs. (It was an entertaining few minutes.)

If we’re leaning on human knowledge, human engineering, or human endeavors to save us from error, we’ll end up accepting a Sasquatch into our lives from time to time, if not multiple times a day. To be able to defend ourselves effectively from error, it’s neither complicated or overwhelming. We consciously and consistently turn to God for wisdom, direction, protection. If God’s guidance helped me find a set of car keys at the bottom of a large clay pot, it’s just one of innumerable examples we’ve all had where we’ve seen how infinite Mind is always present to help us with the needed details of daily life, and we can begin to take confidence in how magnificent the infinitude of eternal Mind is in separating truth from error in all aspects of our human experience. The smaller lies and errors begin to be resolved in healing, restoration, reformation until the whole deception of material life is exposed and overcome by life in and of Spirit, and the human yields to the divine.

This is the real fruit of overcoming sin, of whatever would suggest a separation from God. Through our daily study and prayer and love, we realize more and more consistently that we are – always have been and always will be – inseparable from God. It comes down to the three fundamental ideas we covered in class: allness; nothingness; oneness. And we’re back to our foundation of God’s goodness, which addresses all the discords of human experience. Our textbook sums it up beautifully with this single sentence:

One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture, “Love thy neighbor as thyself;” annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry, — whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes; equalizes the sexes; annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed.
(SH 340:23)

Unifies, constitutes, ends, fulfils, annihilates, equalizes, annuls, leaving only that which is eternal and good. It is not political. It is the opposite of divisive. It is infinitely more than human effort or goodness. One infinite God, good, is the foundation of all of that needs correction in human experience. And as we love God, we’re able to be the love that is instrumental in this corrective work. We’re not bystanders. We’re needed and essential participants.

VII. Man/manifestation/expression/reflection

After establishing the nature of God, and that healing is the smallest part of Christian Science, Rudimental Divine Science takes a wrecking ball to the whole mesmeric suggestion that matter is real or has power. It demolishes the five material senses as being able to cognize anything accurately. It exposes the foundation of material existence as being a belief not a reality, for it is the opposite of eternal Spirit, who is boundless Soul. And it establishes the true identity of man – of all of us. It states:

If, as the Scriptures imply, God is All-in-all, then all must be Mind, since God is Mind. Therefore in divine Science there is no material mortal man, for man is spiritual and eternal, he being made in the image of Spirit, or God.
(Rud. 5:4)

This is a rudimental or fundamental point in Christian Science. We hear a version of it at the end of every Sunday service with the scientific statement of being. There’s just no room for matter or material limits in who we truly are. Matter does not reflect God. Matter cannot take up space where all space is filled with Spirit. Matter can only seem to exist as a belief or a misconception of who and what we are. And the ninth question of this short discourse includes:

Is not the basis of Mind-healing a destruction of the evidence of the material senses, and restoration of the true evidence of spiritual sense?
(Rud. 6:18)

The answer is emphatically yes, with a nuance – this can’t be a nice theory. It must be provable, practical, and tangible. And we can only prove what we understand. The smallest examples – like finding lost keys – begin to open the door of our understanding and faith to the possibilities of healing in all situations.

So it’s essential to answer the question, are we material or spiritual? Both? (… Neither?!) Mary Baker Eddy’s own deep dive into this question after her consequential healing from the effects of that accident on the ice found the answer was right in the first pages of the Bible. Man – the generic term for all of us – is the image and likeness of God. By challenging the traditional manlike view of God and seeing how the Bible more profoundly points to God as those seven comprehensive synonyms of Being, we establish what it is that we are the image and likeness of.

This is one of the essential and healing differences Christian Science brings to the persistently divisive issue (especially in the US) of abortion. The conservative religious view across several denominations is that a fertilized human egg is the beginning of a being in the image and likeness of God, again, because Jesus is God. And God’s incarnation as Jesus began in a womb. Thus a fertilized egg is life, and life is sacred at every human stage of existence, including when it is not viable outside the womb or beyond it. To destroy what is considered divinely conceived by God to be life, then, is murder, plain and simple. This is a very sincerely held belief by women as well as men. And it pits one group of sincere people against other groups of equally sincere people who fundamentally disagree with that premise on what life is and what constitutes sacred and what should be protected.

Isn’t that the essential nature of mortal mind? To keep us mesmerized – to divide and conquer?!

But – as our textbook affirms – “one infinite God, good, unifies….” The Science of the eternal Christ absolutely undercuts this whole human conundrum and the tragic suffering around it. God is Spirit. Therefore, the image and likeness of God is never, ever material. It is never in a material egg. It is never a material child. It is never a material adult. It is never a materially declining senior. That “burlesque of God’s man” (as Science and Health calls it, (SH 92;16)) is the material counterfeit of the spiritual actuality. It is a distorted and incomplete view of our true identity. True man – inclusive of all of us – is birthless, ageless, deathless. Is eternal. Is coexistent with God. There is no moment where man begins, nor a moment where man dies. Both birth and death are misperceptions of eternal Life, and what it means to be the image and likeness of God.

You see how important the rudimental ideas are here. First, we have to understand the “incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite” nature of God (SH 465:9). Upon that solid and deep foundation of who and what God is, we learn the nature of our own identity and life as Spirit-created, Spirit-based, Spirit-reflecting. Matter does not reflect Spirit. Mortal thinking does not reflect Mind. Material senses do not reflect Soul.

So. Where does that leave our human experience? We can say it is the apparent coincidence of material beliefs and spiritual facts – a field of tares and wheat – where we are learning to discern the deep fakes of beliefs (and how not to be deceived by them) and finding ourselves more and more conscious of the spiritual facts that truly define us – now and always.

Beyond tares and wheat – which look similar in their early stages and grow side by side until the differences are so blatant, so obvious it is easy to harvest and burn the one without damaging the good of the other – there are other analogies to describe this apparent coincidence of material beliefs and spiritual ideas, but not merging. From our textbook:

The manifestation of God through mortals is as light passing through the window-pane. The light and the glass never mingle, but as matter, the glass is less opaque than the walls. The mortal mind through which Truth appears most vividly is that one which has lost much materiality — much error — in order to become a better transparency for Truth.
(SH 295:16)

Our human experience can either let through a lot of the beautiful qualities of God (like a window lets light through it), or it can act like an impenetrable wall and leave a room filled with moral and spiritual darkness.  All that we truly are originates in God. If we think we possess life separate from God, we find we’re blocking out those spiritual qualities of our true identity and conscious only of that dark room of mortal experience, with no divine light in it.

Here’s another experience that was helpful as an illustration to me as to whether we’re matter-based or Spirit-created – that is, Spirit-manifesting, Spirit-reflecting, Spirit-expressing. As I mentioned, we’ve been in a building project this past year. As many of you know, Cape Cod is basically just a sandbar left by the retreating glaciers at the end of the ice age. Anywhere you go on the Cape, if you peel back the very thin layer of soil, you’ll get sand, sand, and more sand. A LOT of sand. So, before we’re able to restore the landscape around us when the building is complete, we’ve been living essentially on a giant ant hill for the past several months. Then a series of torrential rainstorms hit the Cape this summer, and the sand around the foundation of one of the structures was being redistributed down the hill in impressive ways.

To address this effectively, we needed a couple of retaining walls about 5 ½ feet high and 25 feet in total length. That seemed straightforward enough. However, anyone who does this for a living was booked many weeks out, and the cost was quite sobering. So John thought he’d take this on himself. His first foray was into a YouTube lecture with all kinds of lengthy and involved mathematical equations to determine how much water pressure would build up behind a retaining wall in order to design it properly.

You’ve got to be kidding, I said as I looked over his shoulder.

Thankfully, there were other YouTube presentations of Do-It-Yourself retaining walls that did not require a PhD in higher math. Just manmade stones with a small lip on the back for stacking, then a barrier of gravel, and finally more sand behind that, over and over and over again. Oh, and a lot of digging, lifting, stacking, and backfilling …. A lot.

So John ordered the stone and gravel, and valiantly announced he was going to do this enormous task himself over the weekend. To which I insisted on helping, and then dragooned our son in from Brooklyn to make it a family affair.

Now, as the 3 pallets of stones and the enormous mound of gravel were delivered, and I saw the magnitude of what we were about to embark on. Did I mention that each stone to be stacked weighed about 18 pounds, and we were going to need about 275 individual stones in the walls. That was a LOT of material to move by hand.

I realized there was a need for some serious proactive prayer. I hadn’t done anything remotely this demanding in terms of physical exertion in probably a decade or more. I don’t have time to workout at the gym, nor am I interested in those physical regimens. Even the tennis I played several times a week had fallen by the wayside as work demands precluded much free time at all. The extent of my regular exercise is daily walking the dog. So I realized I was rather tentative about my physical endurance. And I knew I could not be superficial in dismissing the deeply held human beliefs around fitness and physical endeavors.

What came to me was to think more spiritually about strength. For athletes, a lot of time and effort are given to making the human body stronger through repetitive exercises on a training regimen over an extensive period of time, from weeks to months.

I had an hour.

But I thought about how often the Bible attributes strength to God, and how wholeheartedly identifying with God led to victories and successes for those deemed weak. It was evident that strength was NOT a quality of matter but a quality of God – a spiritual quality. And, like that glass that let the light through, I could be a transparency for a spiritual quality to be expressed or manifested through me. I could reflect the strength of God. True strength was not in muscles or bones or sinews. True strength belonged to Spirit and was expressed through man and reflected as man.

I also acknowledged the truth of this affirmation in our textbook:

Constant toil, deprivations, exposures, and all untoward conditions, if without sin, can be experienced without suffering. Whatever it is your duty to do, you can do without harm to yourself.
(SH 385:15–18)

I saw how this spiritual provision of safety was inclusive of all three of us endeavoring to preserve the soil around the foundation of the building, securing it against future rainstorms that were predicted later in the week. It was about taking some normal human footsteps to protect the idea of home, and all of us were taking time away from other obligations to do so. I acknowledged a selflessness in all our motives. And with that, I pulled on my gloves and started lifting, moving, and stacking stones.

So there I was, shoulder to shoulder with my two guys in late-July with 85 degree heat with 90% humidity. I will concede that they could carry a stone in each hand from the pallet to the walls, while I carried just one at a time; and that my job was more of the lifting and stacking while theirs was more of the shoveling. Still, two retaining walls later, we were as finished as we could be without a rather large machine needed to help with the last of the backfill. In that one day, I’d done about five and a half hours of rigorous manual labor.
Now came the demand to rise in rebellion against all the commonly held ‘after’ beliefs – stress, strain, heat exhaustion, etc. I again affirmed that we could do these needed activities without harm to ourselves. And quite pleasantly the next day, I found that – except for a couple minor scrapes from the stones on an arm and an ankle that I hadn’t even noticed before – I didn’t feel any differently than I did any other morning. There just were no after-effects. Honestly, it was so normal on one hand to feel fine, but really quite a remarkable non-event on the other. Sometimes our best healing work is a non-event. Don’t underestimate the importance of preventive demonstrations, for it means that we’ll have a lot less of the curative.

This experience vividly underscored for me that man does not possess any good quality independent of God. We are the manifestation, the expression, the reflection of all that God is and does. This spiritual inseparability is core to our healing work – a rudimental element, a fundamental fact.

As the hymn has it:

Like a river that runs to the ocean, / Like a ray reaching out from the sun, / Like a branch and the tree, a drop and the sea, / I and my Father are one.
And may each of us claim it as truly / As Jesus, who came as God’s son, / And may each of us know in the depths of our soul, / I and my Father are one.
(Hymn. 524:1, 2)

This oneness underlies the answer to the question posed in Rudimental Divine Science – “Is man material or spiritual?”:

In Science, man is the manifest reflection of God, perfect and immortal Mind. He is the likeness of God….
(Rud. 7:9)

“Manifest” is defined in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary as “plain, open, clearly visible to the eye or obvious to the understanding… not obscure or difficult to be seen or understood.” In other words, we make clear and plain what immortal Mind is and does. And manifestation is “the act of disclosing what is secret, unseen or obscure….” Which is to say that man and the universe make plain the nature and power of Spirit, of Truth, of Life, Love, Soul, Mind, and Principle – make plain all that remains unseen to material sense but is tangible and evident to spiritual sense.

Paul says this so beautifully about God in Romans (made clearer by Mounce’s translation):

Ever since the creation of the world, · his invisible attributes, · that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made. (Rom 1:20)

Again and again, we have the generic family of man described as God’s reflection, God’s manifestation, God’s expression. What’s the practical impact of this definition? It’s that each healing, each resolution, each reformation of character, every restoration of abilities and capabilities is making plain – giving evidence of – the nature of reality, of the kingdom of heaven at hand and within us. Healing is the progressive revelation in our own experiences of “the enduring, the good, and the true.” (SH 261:4)

As a postscript to the retaining wall triumph, about a week later, we had a once-in-a-generation torrential downfall of rain – nearly 5 inches in 90 minutes, collapsing one of the walls we’d worked so hard on and eroding most everything behind the other. It was quite a disappointment, and an illustration of what I know a number of us have experienced in the past few years as students of this Science. It can be so tempting to be discouraged when we feel we’ve given our all to a situation, seen good evidence of progress and healing along the way, and then feel it’s all washed away. And we wonder, what did we do wrong? How did we fail to achieve the worthwhile human goal? How did a business venture fall apart? How did a relationship unravel? How did a physical discord end up with medical care? How come I’m feeling so disconnected from hope and joy?

There’s no one easy answer to the “enigma” that constitutes “mortal existence,” however much the heart yearns for it. (SH 70:1) But we’re building on a foundation that is grounded deep in reality, and it gives us the resilience to face adversity with the spiritual resources to rebuild, restart, revise, reimagine, and renew our efforts with that understanding that we’re working out our salvation, not just working out a human problem. Everything we go through humanly, however hard or discouraging or difficult, is actually impelling our “growth in grace.”  So whenever we feel separated from God by our setbacks, let’s go back to the rudimental idea that the true man is not separate and alone, but is the constant manifestation, expression, reflection of all that God is and does. This shift gives us the grace we need to go forward. John steadfastly rebuilt those retaining walls, and they’ve stood firm under many more rains.

*** Sixty Second Stretch ***

 

VII. Healing – part 1: the moral demand

We’ve been spending the morning reviewing the basics – God’s nature as entirely good, infinite, and all-inclusive – Allness; that the Ten Commandments (summarized by the two great commandments) and the Sermon on the Mount outline how we express a right relationship with God and with each other; that defending ourselves from being deceived by what isn’t of God (matter and all material misconceptions about life – nothingness) preserves out right relationship with God and our fellow beings; and that this right relationship is based on our inseparability from God, our oneness with God. Allness, nothingness, oneness. [Repeat this with me.] Over and over again, we have these fundamental ideas with infinite expression and application.

Now we’re ready for the more expansive response to the 11^th question in Rudimental:

How should I undertake to demonstrate Christian Science in healing the sick?

First of all, I love how this is phrased. Not “this is how you should demonstrate this Science.” It’s formed as a question, and one that begins with our own inquiry, our own delving, our own discovery and then taking ownership of the ideas. This question is answered by each of us … not just those here today, but by every single individual expression of man. We’re not bound by the constraints of time; we have all of eternity. Which is why we genuinely believe in universal salvation. Not one of us is left out of the spiritual equation where man is the image and likeness of God. It can be hard to accept this statement (or want to accept it) if we’re looking at headlines and shaking our head about the inhumanity, selfishness, cruelty of certain individuals or feeling overwhelmed by the collective problems that confront our communities and world.

It has always felt that way. Paul wrote his letters to the various churches with the expectation that Jesus would return to earth and usher in the last days of human history within his lifetime or near enough. Thirteen centuries later, during the Middle Ages, in an era of the recurrent plague known as Black Death and endless wars and crusades, the religious writers of that period also felt the Second Coming of Christ and the final Judgment Day was just around the corner. And whenever one century rolled over into a new one, and especially one millennia into another, there’d be a burgeoning of doomsday cults. But human history would continue to be the ongoing cycles of war and disease, devastation and poverty, punctuated with periods of peace and prosperity. The fearful final Apocalypse wasn’t happening, and in the 20^th century, more and more people began to question the traditional Christian expectation of end times and express their skepticism that it would ever happen.

So here’s the problem: without the return of Christ to judge us, and a heaven to reward the good and a hell to punish the bad, what would keep humanity from the abyss of self-indulgent sin that leads to the excesses of dictators and their hierarchies, the ongoing oppression of one group or another, or the profligate use of resources that benefit some and impoverish others?

Well, that’s a good question. “My noble students, who are loyal to Christ, Truth, and human obligations,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy, “will not be disheartened in the midst of this seething sea of sin. They build for time and eternity.”(Mis. 264:3–6) This is sober but encouraging counsel.

Our individual – and ultimately collective – progress does not coincide with human calendars or newspaper headlines. It goes on irrespective of them. This question in Rudimental on how do I undertake to demonstrate healing gives us the path up and out of the morass of contemporary doubt and skepticism. Those looking for an external righting of the world from an outside force may find themselves waiting indefinitely, like the two characters in Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot”. But salvation, as Jesus taught us, is an inward experience of transformation that is expressed outwardly. It’s what we’re thinking, how we’re living, what we’re mentally taking ownership of that gives us the kingdom of heaven here and now.

Each one of us, by practicing these fundamental ideas we’ve been covering, is awakening from the mesmeric dream (or illusion) of life defined and confined by matter AND experiencing more and more of our true and expansive life in and of Spirit. And we’ll be helping others awaken too. But it must start within our own life, and the answer to this question on how to undertake healing begins with our moral fitness to engage with the power of spiritual facts.

What is covered here in Rudimental acknowledges it’s just an outline of practice, but it touches on essential or rudimental ideas. We could say that to practice Christian healing, it helps enormously to first be a Christian. That’s where the Sermon on the Mount guides us with the power of proactive love (blessing those who curse us, turning the other cheek, offering a magnanimous settlement for a court case against us far beyond what is asked). In these examples, Jesus is pulling us above the standard of merely what is fair – for that action/reaction has colored human history without enough to shift it out of its ruts (an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth). Divine Love is radical. It moves beyond fairness to completeness – to infinite Love that is Life itself, that cannot be measured, that cannot be limited, that cannot be lost.

This sermon is also about individual integrity – about holding ourselves accountable to ourselves – examining our motives, fulfilling what we’ve promised to others, and not just avoiding the don’ts of the Ten Commandments, but eliminating the thoughts behind the erring actions. And taking a shockingly radical stand if our eye or our hand or our foot – that is, our outward actions – stray from what is right and true. What are we really willing to let go of in order to be able to grab hold of the kingdom of heaven? Resentments? Bitterness? Injustices? What about self-indulgences? Excesses? Hidden desires? How about the other extreme? Self-condemnation? Discouragement? Doubt? Victimization?

The Sermon on the Mount is an invitation to walk away from all the things that would keep us feeling disconnected to the kingdom of heaven. I love that Science and Health broadens our understanding of this kingdom being here and now by defining it in terms of spiritual qualities. In one passage, the list of heaven’s qualities includes: unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love. (SH 248:29) Justice – or fairness and rightness – is not left out of the kingdom. But because the kingdom is so much more, justice takes its place within these other expansive and inclusive qualities. And health is not a physical quality but a spiritual one. Nor will we get to the kingdom of heaven simply through physical wellness.

Let’s review these heavenly qualities again and really see why Jesus said the kingdom is within us and at hand. Unselfishness. Goodness. Mercy. Justice. Health. Holiness. Love. These are not far away in the future. The more we take ownership of them and live them, the more we are experiencing God’s kingdom on earth – right here, right now. These are linked with healing and restoration, for the whole sentence reads:

Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love — the kingdom of heaven — reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear.
(SH 248:29)

The moral and spiritual is inextricably linked with healing, redeeming, and restoring our lives.

In the first paragraph that answers the question on demonstrating healing in Rudimental, Mary Baker Eddy summarizes the moral outline as: “Be honest, be true to thyself and true to others; then it follows thou wilt be strong in God, the eternal good. Heal through Truth and Love; there is no other healer.”

Many of you will recognize be true to thyself language as familiar beyond her writings. While she’s paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is Biblically-based counsel, for it’s about individual integrity, about not succumbing to peer pressure or contemporary standards that undermine one’s own sense of what’s right.

This was something the Jewish people knew well, as they had to adhere to one God when all the cultures around them, including those which had conquered them, had many gods and many pagan practices. Being true to one’s own spiritual sense of goodness takes courage and persistence and a willingness not to be popular. Just ask the three men who were thrown into the fiery furnace! But because integrity aligns us with Truth, it has Christ-power to heal. And selfless love is the heart and soul of Christianity. This first paragraph on how to demonstrate healing affirms that it is only divine Truth and divine Love that brings healing – that is manifested, reflected, and expressed by man from God. The moral is the gateway for the spiritual to reach us.

And one more essential distinction here on healing in Christian Science. ‘Be true to yourself’ has morphed into a whole spectrum of New Age practices and platitudes that veer significantly from this Christian foundation. It can include ‘self-actualization’ and envisioning what’s good for you … and forgets what’s good for your neighbor. It doesn’t start with God or generally invite God in at all. Without that spiritual foundation of selfless Love, we’ll never have what truly satisfies. We’ll keep looking to matter for health, happiness, safety, security, only to find we’re building on sand instead of rock … which is how the Sermon on the Mount ends. Building a deep foundation in God is to have a foundation more solid than rock, and everything that rests upon it is built to withstand the most aggressive forms of adversity.

VII. Healing, part 2 – the spiritual inspiration meeting the human need

There are several strong statements in the next part of the answer to the question on healing in Rudimental that I want to highlight. The first is the sentence that transitions from the moral demands on the individual praying for healing (for themselves or another). It is this:

The spiritual power of a scientific, right thought, without a direct effort, an audible or even a mental argument, has oftentimes healed inveterate diseases.
(Rud. 9:21)

A habit of scientific, right thinking and acting prepares us for the immediate influx of right thoughts that bring healing. This is the gold standard we talked about in class – the Gabriel treatment that is immediately and simply aware of what is true. It doesn’t require the process of argument. The reality of all that is true and all that is of Love simply washes over us. Becoming so aware of what God is and does, and how we are enfolded in that divine perfection, we lose sight of whatever isn’t of God and doesn’t define us. Even longstanding issues yield in the light of such pure revelation.

The answer goes on to emphasize what we are striving to become more conscious of:

The thoughts of the practitioner should be imbued with a clear conviction of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God; that He is All, and that there can be none beside Him; that God is good, and the producer only of good; …
(Rud. 9:24–27 (to 2nd ;))

The Allness of God, good. Fundamental and foundational. But the paragraph continues by reminding us that if we’re entertaining any reality in error, in whatever is unlike God, good, we undermine our ability to heal:

Note this, that if you have power in error, you forfeit the power that Truth bestows, and its salutary influence on yourself and others.
(Rud. 10:2)

Ok, so how do we make sure we aren’t seesawing back and forth on God’s goodness versus evil’s aggressive claims? There’s a sentence in our textbook that I return to again and again for its simple guidance on how we gain more of God and lose all sense of a power opposed to God:

If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit.
(SH 239:18–20)

This is a classic if/then statement – a scientific relationship. IF Love is becoming nearer and dearer and more real to us THEN matter submits. There are no two ways about it. I want us to commit this sentence to memory, and so we’re going to repeat it a few times together. [Pause between repetitions.]

If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit.
(SH 239:18–20)

We can see that “matter” is just an umbrella term for anything that would oppose the supremacy of God, who is Spirit, who is Love. So that as Love becomes nearer, dearer, more real, … [X, or Y, or Z] then submits to Spirit. Love becomes nearer and dearer, and a lump submits to Spirit; pain submits to Spirit; disease submits to Spirit; aging submits to Spirit; addiction submits to Spirit; resentment submits to Spirit; doubt submits to Spirit. We can supply the reasons why to each one.

• A lump is the nothingness of matter claiming to be something, but right in that place Spirit – all that is good, true, holy, pure – is All-in-all. We see and feel this as we know more of the reality of Spirit as Love, as what God is and does.
• Pain submits to Spirit as we realize nerves are only an expression of unintelligent matter and have no intelligence or ability to speak, because Love is the intelligence of the universe and the source of all communication. If it isn’t speaking with Love, it isn’t speaking at all.
• Disease submits to Spirit because it requires the medium of matter – nothingness – and all space is filled with Love. Dis-ease submits to Spirit because Love soothes, enriches, uplifts, purifies until calm and joy are recognized as all and only what our creator imparts.
• Aging submits to Spirit because Love is eternal and unchanging, and like the wind, or like each breath (also words included in the Greek and Hebrew words for “Spirit”) Spirit is perpetually fresh.
• Resentments submit to Spirit as our increasing sense of Love’s all presence completely fills in the mental space they occupied.
• Doubt submits to Spirit, because we come to know clearly and confidently that Love is steadfast and omnipotent.

And so on. The key is letting God become more real, more present to us, and the synonym Love is one of the easiest to open our hearts to.

This is what Rudimental next emphasizes in this question. That knowing God is not an intellectual experience, not just getting the words right. It states: “You must feel and know that God alone governs man; that His government is harmonious; …” (Rud. 10:5–6 (to ;)). Feel. Feel and know. Head prayers coincide with heart prayers as “divine Love becomes nearer, dearer, and more real to us….”

The more solid our rudimental understanding of God’s goodness, the more natural the conclusion that all discord is a belief, not a reality – simply a limited, distorted misperception of what is actual and factual. This distortion is mental – originating in a limited way of thinking we call mortal mind – and projecting itself as matter. But it has no substance to it. It doesn’t mean it isn’t mesmeric. It certainly can be, and its most powerful tool to hold our thought on what isn’t true is fear.

Rudimental continues:

Disease is a thing of thought manifested on the body; and fear is the procurator of the thought which causes sickness and suffering. Remove this fear by the true sense that God is Love, …
(Rud. 10:15–18 (to ,))

Here we are again – If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real….fear is then submitting to Spirit.

As we continue to eliminate fear through Love – and every ill through a beautiful sense of God’s allness and goodness – we see how important the foundation of knowing God and knowing our relation to God (as reflection, as manifestation, as expression) is to healing. We are inseparable from God’s goodness. Healing is the natural byproduct of our understanding the nothingness of evil in any form – it has no place, no power, no history, no cause, no law. It has nothing of God, good. As this answer affirms: “Therefore good is one and All.” (Rud 11:8) Logically and practically, there is nothing else.

This question and answer continue with a compassion and kindness as we work to know this better. For while these pervasive adversities of human experience – “disease, vice, and mortality” – seem so real, they are revealed as deceptive illusions of human thought, with nothing behind them. In a succinct statement of how treatment works, we read “Health is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else.” (Rud 11:13-14)

Let’s take a moment with the last half of statement. “Health is the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else.” This is the effect of Christian Science treatment. We are becoming more and more conscious of what is true – either by a sweet awareness of God’s allness that flows out of our ongoing efforts to live in the kingdom of heaven here and now, or by a consecrated effort by mental argument to reason through the unreality of evil, that it has no substance called matter, no origin called mortal mind, no law of cause or effect. And we stick with it until the human objections have yielded to the divine, where peace and calm prevail, and we gain that “sweet and certain sense that God is Love”, as our textbook describes “the proof of healing.” (SH 569:11-14)

An experience I had this last year in the practice underscored the demand to keep praying until we have that spiritual consciousness of health and that deep sense of God as Love.

I had been working with a woman who would be considered humanly of quite senior years. She had been widowed for a long time, her son had immigrated to the US, but she continued to live alone in her house in her home country. At present, there is no Journal-listed practitioner in that country. This dear one spoke English fairly fluently, as well as a couple other languages besides her own. She reached out to me perhaps because I had visited that country as part of my prior work for the Church. And she let me know right off the bat that she had already worked with a couple of other practitioners outside her country, each for a couple of months, without being healed, and she had paid them good money too. She had been a longtime, class-taught Christian Scientist, but it was clear she fallen into an expectation for the practitioner to do all the healing work.

The problem she found so frightening was an irregularity and pain involving her heart. It was right that she wanted to see this healed. And, if she wasn’t finding her own prayerful work meeting the need, it was right for her to call someone for help in seeing the truth with her.

For us to communicate, she could call me on a prepaid phone connection, but it was difficult for me to call her back. Nor was she able to use email. Texting was out of the question. And her limited vocabulary in English precluded her from being able to write down page numbers in Science and Health or a chapter and verse from the Bible.

Well, I took her case even though I wouldn’t be able to share with her the ideas I’m praying with the same way I do for my other cases. Instead, I’d have fairly basic ideas – given my inability to speak her language and hers to understand me in any nuanced way – that I would share with her when she called daily or every other day. There were good days, and she was grateful, and some not so good days where she was quite agitated. After about a month, she exploded at me that she still hadn’t been healed. I was not a very good practitioner, she informed me at some length mostly in English, but when other languages slipped in, I still got the message. She felt my encouraging her to see that this as an opportunity for her to grow spiritually and get to know God better was a cop out. “That’s what the other practitioners said,” she snapped. “If this is all mine to do, then what good are you?”

Well, it’s pretty dispiriting to have someone chew you out like that in several languages. I had been flat out with a number of other cases, plus had some projects looming with deadlines for The Mother Church. After that harsh exchange, I really thought hard about telling her I would no longer be available – as The Church Manual counsels practitioners to use their wisdom in accepting cases. But as much as I wanted to do so for my own ease, I did not feel God’s blessing on that. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ kept ringing in my ears.

I thought, ‘ok, God, if this global neighbor calls me tomorrow – and that’s a big if, given how unhappy she was with me – I’ll respond with whatever You want me to say or do.’ And, somewhat to my surprise, she did call and ask for continued help, making no mention of having scolded me so severely the day before. While I had been addressing the fear of the physical claim in our work together, what came to me so clearly in that moment was her fear that she would deplete her finances by paying practitioners for what would be conceded by those in the medical profession as inevitable issues of aging without expectation of healing. I felt such an immediate sense of compassion. And when she concluded by saying that because of the difficulty with currency exchanges, she’d have her son in the US wire me a payment, I found these God-given words coming out of my mouth: “I don’t want anything from your son … or from you.”

She was clearly stunned … and frankly so was I. This is, after all, my work and career, and it’s one that should be valued. And compensation for what a practitioner offers is right and normal. But in this case, I understood why full benevolence was the response I had been impelled to give. You could almost hear the sigh of relief from her end. The whole tone of her voice changed, and she wanted to be sure I was still willing to work for her. I promised that I was.

From that day, things started to improve, and each time she called, she was always effusive in her gratitude for me sticking with her. She started doing more of her own work, sharing with me what she was reading or praying with as well as small demonstrations of finding her keys and getting a stove fixed and drains repaired, all of which encouraged her. There were many good days where the need was not the health challenge she had originally called for, but for difficulties with paying her bills in a new system or mourning the passing of a sibling or a dental issue.

But one night she called very late – very unusual for her as it was even later in her time zone. It was her heart. She’d been praying since we talked earlier that day, but things had become much more aggressive. She told me she was truly afraid she wouldn’t make it through the night.

I assured her she was loved and safe, and I immediately took up the work to support her. I don’t recall all of what I stayed with and prayed with that night for several hours, but it had the effect of divine Love becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to me, and knowing Love was becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to her too. That Love alone was her Life. That she wasn’t separated from Love by the passing of a husband or a sibling or the long distance from her son and his family, but that eternal Love was ever present, and Love was all. There was no disease, no lack, no interruption in Love. Just Love, and a life safe in Spirit. I felt a deep peace that everything I was praying was absolutely true, whatever the human outcome.

Well, I didn’t hear anything from her the next day. And mortal mind whispered its ugly whispers that she hadn’t made it. But I didn’t give in to that line of thought. Love alone is Life, and that Life is eternal. And I thanked God for that clear assurance.

The day after that, she did call me as if nothing had happened, and she wanted treatment to address a problem with her new dentist. I didn’t ask about the other night. I was just grateful she seemed at peace and ready to focus on this particular need. And so things went on for a couple more months. No more mention of any of the chronic heart symptoms from before.

While working together, it had become clear that she no longer had a branch church near her, had no capacity to join anything remotely, and so was unable to participate in a regular church experience as she had in prior years. She continued to study and love Christian Science, but there was no community around her to share it with. And it became clearer and clearer that I wasn’t a practitioner so much as a fellow church member, though we were thousands of miles apart and hardly spoke the same language. Yet the Bible tells us, “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matt 18:20) We had moved from a practitioner-patient engagement to a church experience, one that I knew was blessing both of us.

She’d generally check in briefly at the same time every other day or so with one thing to share or another, but so often acknowledging how she had felt God’s guidance or presence. One day as she was recounting something like this, there was a pause, and she said simply, “You know, I think I owe you my life for that one night when I called you for help.”

It was a very precious moment. And I could honestly say to her that together we saw that God – as Truth and Love – was the only healer. Not person, but Principle. And perhaps I could also say that Church was where we experienced that beautiful healing together.

1. The fundamental role of Church in our demonstration of healing

What’s been making the headlines for many months now are the statistics on church attendance. In the last 25 years, 40 million Americans stopped attending church. That represents about 12% of the population. The reasons for this drop in attendance are many, but overarching is how society itself has transformed from a collective activity to an individual approach to life. The seminal book “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam, originally published in 2000 and updated in 2020, looks at this shift in interacting with each other. The most recent US census also saw a surge in more individuals living alone than ever before. This trend away from community, especially those bound together by moral and spiritual values, is of societal concern. The Atlantic magazine stated:

Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency. (“The misunderstood reasons millions of Americans stopped going to church” by Jake Meador, July 29, 2023)

One related article even called religion “the miracle drug.” Not the “opium of the people” that Karl Marx decried, but the deeply restorative, regenerative influence on humanity that big Pharma is endlessly chasing after, thinking it can be found in matter instead of Spirit.

While the individual and collective benefits from churchgoing are well-recognized, those of us who’ve been active in church for any period of time also know that church isn’t always easy. In fact, there are times that it can be everything from inconvenient to exhausting to downright frustrating. But if that’s what we’ve been feeling, it’s because we’re caught up in the second part of the definition of Church in Science and Health without the foundation and superstructure of the first part. If we get the whole of it right, we have a whole new sense that the kingdom of heaven isn’t a private retreat. It’s an expansive and inclusive congregation of God’s children.

Let’s just review that well known and well-loved definition from our textbook:

CHURCH. The structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle.
The Church is that institution, which affords proof of its utility and is found elevating the race, rousing the dormant understanding from material beliefs to the apprehension of spiritual ideas and the demonstration of divine Science, thereby casting out devils, or error, and healing the sick.
(SH 583:12–19)

Many years ago, when I had volunteered for decorating the window of the local Reading Room in the branch I belonged to then, I had written out that definition and decorated it on a big colorful posterboard. The following Sunday, the Reading Room Librarian pulled me aside and said that the minister from the large Congregational church down the street had been walking past our window, stopped, and read the definition. He came in to say that it was one of the best descriptions of Church he’d ever seen. I love how this definition resonates in the hearts of those beyond denominational boundaries. It’s not meant to exclude but include.

And what a brilliant use of the metaphor of building – the structure of it isn’t material bricks and mortar but the bricks of Truth and the mortar of Love. The solid, deep foundation of it – what everything rests upon it and is activated by– is Principle, not person. In fact, this spiritual translation of Church as an idea of Truth, of Love, and of Principle where all are welcome to congregate allows us to experience it whenever we’re caught up in the Spirit with someone else. Church isn’t confined to a place or a time but is walking with the Christ in all our interactions. We’re not just Sunday and Wednesday Christian Scientists in designated buildings. Wherever we are and whomever we are talking with, we are representing Christian Science in our communities. We’re showing it’s a Life science – one that requires constant study and practice.

An African American spiritual puts it simply and powerfully in one of the hymns in our newer hymnal:

I’m gonna live so / God can use me any time, and anywhere. / I’m gonna live so / God can use me any time, and anywhere. (Hymn 507)

The following verses expand upon this with: I’m gonna work so God can use me any time and anywhere; I’m gonna pray so God can use me; I’m going to sing so God can use me.
If this hymn – one that came out of the long adversity faced by the Black community in the US – lifts up what we are able to do individually, then we can see how Church takes all of our lives, work, prayer, and singing together and forms a battering ram to take down the entrenched beliefs of life in matter and mortal thinking.

There is still a need for Church today … more than ever, even if it seems like just a handful of folks are sticking with it. Just remember, it doesn’t take much yeast to transform the whole lump of dough. And that’s what we’re in the business of doing: leavening human consciousness – changing thought, challenging thought, breaking through thought boundaries and limitations. This is the utility part of the definition of Church. It is elevating, rousing, demonstrating, casting out whatever isn’t of God, and healing. And it does so with God as eternal Truth, boundless Love, and unchanging Principle – supporting, sheltering, embracing, unifying our efforts.

The last couple of questions in Rudimental Divine Science are about keeping the practice of Christian Science pure, valuing practitioners, and not deviating from the discovery of this fulfilment of prophecy. Remember, this was written in 1888, while those practicing Christian Science were still working through traditional ideas of a church with personal preachers. The current structure of branches being democratic and self-governed with a center in Boston to publish and distribute the resources needed for local churches wasn’t established firmly until the following decade. Then The Church Manual was published, and the Bible and Science and Health were ordained as the Pastor of the Church. But the Manual is still a very slim volume, with only a few what you MUST do and a few what you MUST NOT do. Overall, it is a straightforward, light structure that focuses on Christian activity, and not buildings or places – with the singular exception of the two edifices of The Mother Church in Boston (the Original and Extension) that are the responsibility of the Board of Directors to steward and maintain.

Given that simplicity of organizational design at the local level, many established branch churches around the world are recognizing the shift in church attendance as well as the persistent hunger for the deep peace, joy, and community that church has always promised through the ages (even if it hasn’t always delivered). A number Christian Science churches are realizing that the edifices built for a society of churchgoers a hundred years ago no longer meets the needs of a present population that has drifted away from church attendance. The Hyannis branch is one of them. These various memberships are not giving up on Church. Time and again, they’re looking at how the core activities outlined in the Church Manual don’t need a traditional church edifice to be an active, healing, relevant force in their community.

Take Reading Rooms. They are meant to be open to the public in well located areas where the ideas of the Science of Christ can be seen in and through the windows, touching all those who walk past – whether they come in to browse, scan a QR for more information, or simply take an inspired thought with them as they head to their destinations.

In a similar way, lectures don’t require a particular place but are simply designed to connect with the community in a public space, breaking down the mental resistance to exploring these healing ideas. With Reading Rooms and lectures, no one visiting is pressured to sign up to be part of a church. These activities graciously offer the public the manna from heaven that can touch hearts and heal lives. If like the ten lepers healed by Jesus, one comes back to give thanks, we may well find that one looking for a community to support their spiritual discoveries and growth in grace. And coming together on Wednesday and Sundays for meetings, services and Sunday School continue to offer that in-person, heart-to-heart connection that so many people are yearning for today.

Yes, true Church is based on the incorporeal, divine Principle, God, but it also offers human community. It is the coincidence of Christian love with the truth of Science, and the outcome is healing, redeeming, restoring individuals and the communities they live in. It will take spiritually fortified communities to address the needs of today – the toxicity of politics, the corruption of regimes, the magnitude of global migration, the adversity of climate change, the brutality of international criminal gangs, the disregard of individual rights, and the devaluing of human life in general. One courageous voice taking a stand against all this adversity might appear to be the proverbial candle in the wind. But as all of us lift up our voices in God’s song of Soul, we’ll silence the noisy discord of mortal mind with the beautiful and lasting harmonies of “infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation” – often one life at a time. And it always starts with our own life. Love God; love our neighbor as ourselves. This is truly transformative.

To her church members struggling to find a new sense of Church, Mary Baker Eddy offered this counsel:

A little more grace, a motive made pure, a few truths tenderly told, a heart softened, a character subdued, a life consecrated, would restore the right action of the mental mechanism, and make manifest the movement of body and soul in accord with God.
(Mis. 354:15)

Progress individually and collectively is made in these modest increments of spiritual growth. And when we feel like we’re failing, or falling short, or alone, or afraid, we can find companionship and kindness and often unexpected generosity from our fellow church members as we also offer it to them.

As Paul closes his letter to the Christians in Rome, he salutes the Church. He doesn’t talk about a building on such and such street that’s open X number of times a week for Y number of hours or services. He’s giving a shout out to the members who are the Church. After first acknowledging Phebe, who carried the letter to the believers, he says to the women and men who have committed themselves to living and sharing the gospel message:

Greet Priscilla and Aquila my helpers in Christ …
Likewise greet the church that is in their house. Salute my well-beloved Epænetus, …
Greet Mary, who bestowed much labour on us. Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow-prisoners, …
Greet Amplias my beloved in the Lord. Salute Urbane, our helper in Christ, and Stachys my beloved. Salute Apelles …
Salute Herodion … Greet them that be of the household of Narcissus, which are in the Lord. Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour in the Lord. Salute the beloved Persis, which laboured much in the Lord. Salute Rufus chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine. Salute Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, and the brethren which are with them. Salute Philologus, and Julia, Nereus, and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints which are with them. Salute one another with an holy kiss. The churches of Christ salute you.
(Rom. 16:3 (to Christ), 5 (to ,), 6, 7 (to 3rd ,), 8–10 (to approved), 11 (to Herodion), 11–16 Greet)

These churches of Christ are small churches. A handful of folks in each group, gathering where they can, working together, finding community in their common mission. True Church is the eternal structure of Truth and Love, resting on and proceeding from divine Principle … and manifesting itself in the lives of these individuals. Their story connects with our story.

Most of Christian history has missed the true power of Church – it has thought in terms of giant cathedrals that take centuries to build and of congregations in the thousands. But outward expression doesn’t guarantee any depth of impact on humanity. Rather, the massive shifts of thought in human history flow out of small moments that seem of little consequence to the wider world – keys found, strength demonstrated, hearts healed, relationships restored.

It is our turn to live Church individually and collectively in such a way that we help carry forward the power of Truth, Love, and Principle into our communities so that individual lives experience the healing and renewal they need, and so that the wider society feels the leaven of Truth at work against the mass of lies that constitutes mortal mind that would limit the true potential of humanity.

CONCLUSION

Our Association is one more expression of Church. As we’ve seen this year, it doesn’t need to be in the same place, or (as we’ve also demonstrated in prior years) on the same weekend. We’ve come together face-to-face as Christians have done since they broke bread with Jesus. And we’ve connected via technology when we’ve not been able to be present in person. We’ll keep changing and adapting the externals, staying true to the Church Manual and to the revelation of the Science of Christ, as taught by its discoverer – Mary Baker Eddy.  We come together to grow individually and to find comfort and reassurance collectively.

This Science? It’s not complicated. It rests on time-tested fundamentals that we’ve been exploring today. God as ever present, all-knowing, and all true power; as universal and inclusive; as our Father-Mother, as Principle not person. Then our knowing and loving God wholeheartedly. Loving our neighbor as ourselves, and letting our lives imbibe the Sermon on the Mount. Love becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us. Matter yielding to Spirit. Living this individually, and coming together collectively. Allness, nothingness, oneness. Healing flows out of this. Its deep foundation is grounded on the rock, and its superstructure reaches to heaven.

Let’s let this next year be one where we find getting back to these basics strengthens our confidence that we have the promised Comforter and that we can expect to see more evidence of God’s presence and power in our lives.

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