Substance: Vector or Bitmap?

A friend told me last week about a TV segment he had seen where they showed an area one meter square and then went out in powers of ten so pretty soon you were looking at the whole galaxy. Then they went in by powers of ten into a water droplet. It never got less intricate or beautiful.

This morning I was reading this passage in Proverbs, where wisdom is speaking:
“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.”

As I read, the image from the TV program came to mind. At every level of observation and experience, the same law is present – the law that makes everything beautiful and delicate and harmonious – the same wisdom can be seen in the Creator’s hand. I thought, that makes sense, because the law of Love would always be operating in each reference point, in each center, at every here and now, no matter what the scale in time or space. With a shiver of awe, I felt the vectors of Spirit’s control, shaping me, shaping the galaxies, making all the streams of energy flow together in harmony – my life, my purpose, my limbs, the stars and planets, the surge of life.

And in the way that thoughts leap topics along the lines of thought vectors, I thought of vector objects in computer graphics. Since their shapes are established by code relating them to geometric shapes and relationships, they stay true no matter how much you zoom in on them. You can move them around and place them in relation to each other, and they don’t lose their identity. If they have a 3D component, you can change the viewing angle and see other sides.

Bitmapped images are very different. Since their code is just the color of each pixel on the screen at the time the images are created, when you zoom in on them you see jagged edges and little squares. The image only exists in the context of the pixels on the screen – you can’t move them around or see around them. If you do select an image and move it, it leaves a hole, which you then have to doctor up somehow. So I thought, we’re not bitmaps, we’re vector objects!

In other words, we’re not a collection of matter stacked together in a certain way. The pixels of our lives – our shape, our circumstances, our relationships – are not determined by the material code of location on the material plane of being. They’re not things that can get disarranged to our detriment, or things that lock us into a certain mode of being. They’re not things for us to manipulate around to improve or fix our identity. Instead, our pixels are determined by the vectors that give us our identity. These vectors allow us to move about freely, without being constrained by the circumstances around us. If one of our limbs is foreshortened due to a viewing angle, it doesn’t mean that we are deformed and will always have a shorter limb. A quick change in viewing angle will show us wholly symmetrical. This is the essence of healing: when we realize that we are vector objects – that is, spiritual, and we look to the truth of our vectors to show us our identity, we will find ourselves whole.

Keeping in right relation to Truth

There is a message in the Bible that God (and those who speak for him) keep trying to tell the people. God tells it to Moses, who tells it to the children of Israel. Most of the prophets also are found trying to make the people understand. Jesus tried through stories, his healing works and his explanations of them, to make the people understand. Most of the time they didn’t.

The message has to do with the relation of the power of God with the goings on of the world. God is found giving the message of being the great I AM – in other words, Life, The Event Going On, That Which Is Interesting, That Which Sustains – that upon which our attention is designed to be focused. The misinterpretation of the message is that God is the thing that sometimes has the power to make the things in our life go in a favorable way. In other words, instead of God being the event, the circumstances of the world – issues such as food, shelter, wealth and social position – are seen as the event. Then God is seen as a force that can manipulate those things.

In the Bible, whenever people get the message right – when they see God as The Event – then things also go right for them in terms of their circumstances. They get their needs met – for survival, security, and prosperity. But whenever they get it wrong – when they think their security and prosperity are based on their food, shelter, army strength, etc, then they lose those things. So God, and the prophets, keep telling them: it’s not the things. It’s God.

It’s still a hard message for us to get. I think this is because we struggle to grasp what God actually is. The Bible language makes it easy enough to visualize God as an authoritarian, jealous figure, who doesn’t want us to pay attention to anything but him, although there may be other interesting things that would vie for our attention. When I read it that way, especially if I imagine God to be represented by the voice of some church institutions, I naturally bridle at the implied lack of freedom and the possible boredom such obedience would require.

On the other hand, if I can make my thought of God big enough, the command to attend to God is transformed. If I grasp that God is Life, I hear Life saying: Life is The Event – pay attention to it, learn all about it, be true to it. Live with all the vibrancy that Life offers. Don’t be stopped by the limitations of what you thought before were essential material conditions for your existence. Trust Life to guide you beyond what you thought was possible.

Like the Children of Israel, I have had definitive experiences of the presence and power of God. In those moments, I feel Spirit as tangible substance, as aliveness, as regenerative power. I think, of course this is what we’re about. We’re about joy itself, not about the material conditions sold as prerequisites to joy. Then, like the Children of Israel, I let my focus shift. I think, for example, that the e-mail in which I received the message of joy is the source of joy, and start checking my e-mail obsessively, and feeling let down when another message hasn’t arrived. Then I have to try to get back in right relation to Truth.

And so it goes. The challenge is simple, but all-encompassing. The lesson is there to be studied, but it is the practice that brings the mastery.

A few angel thoughts for creativity

Who you are is vast, even infinite -

And wonderful beyond imagining.

God gives you what you need by giving you what you are.

It's not that you have one thing you need to give the world, if only you can find out what it is. It is that your being is a constant gift, and it's right for you to bring forth goodness continually.

All things that are alive are life-supporting, not only for their own species but for all life forms to come. You can tell that you are of Life because of your desire to bless.

"Be still, and know that I am God." - Psalms 46.

"To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings." -Mary Baker Eddy

The infinite is right here at all times. There is infinity between the span of your fingers.

Mind is Love. If you love something, you notice everything about it. It holds infinity - you feel you will never lose interest in it. This is why you do the best at the things you love.

Whether you choose to do what you love, or choose to love what you do, you do well.

It's not that it always comes easily, but when you work and work and work you discover that in the work is the joy -

And with the completion, a radiant rush of lightness.

The Ecosystem of Life and Love

From time to time I’ve come across writings of scientists who study life, where they’ve expressed their continuing awe about what they’re studying. It seems, the more they study, the greater the awe: how does life manage to do it? How does it form? How is it that the deeper we probe, the greater the intricacy? The explanations that gave rise to Social Darwinism, touting a fierce and predatory competition for resources, give way to more nuanced views in which cooperation and a delicate balance of interdependence govern every aspect of life. As we’re ready to see it, we get to behold exquisite interlacings between and among species, amazing adaptations that require intimate relations with every other member.

I marvel at what a leap of trust is entailed in single celled organisms choosing to come together to be a more complex organism. Or for a fungus and a root to form a relationship that benefits them both. (I know some would dismiss the above as hopeless anthropomorphism; in my defense let me say I’m using the word “choose” in the sense that every action is a choice, whether it’s “conscious” or not, and that every action that depends on another entails trust, whether it’s reasoned or not.)

I remember in high school biology learning what were considered the properties that would make something qualify as life. They included growth, reproduction, metabolism, and adaptation. As a student of Whole Systems Design at Antioch University, I learned a few more: life is negentropic, cybernetic, autopoetic. I love these words. I sort of smugly love that I always have to define them to people:

Negentropic: working contrary to entropy. It is a law of thermodynamics that things always wear down – that they move from a greater level of complexity to a lesser one, that energy always moves to a less usable state. But life is negentropic – it always moves to a greater level of complexity, where more energy can be used. It creates conditions that make for more life, and not only within species. Trees make it possible for many more things to live – providing atmosphere, shelter, nutrition. I’ve read that in the early stages of evolution, the micro-organisms gave off gases that created an atmosphere wherein life forms such as ourselves could develop.

Cybernetic: equipped with a system for taking in information and, based on it, adapting behavior to optimize itself. In other words, it has a goal, a means of setting a course towards it, and a way of measuring its progress and using that information to steer its continued course towards that goal. Whether the mechanism for the system be a chemical one or a reasoned one, each living thing has this series of feedback loops which allow it to enhance and extend its life. Biologist Humberto Maturana made an eloquent case for intelligence to be redefined as present where goal seeking behavior is present.

Autopoetic: formed for its own purposes with a code contained within itself. Trees do not exist to be timber or even to be animal homes. They exist because of an imperative within themselves, and their being is for their own sake. This, of course, is also true for people, though we do seem to forget.

All of these properties have interesting implications for the understanding of life. Negentropy makes a compelling case for the existence of God, like this:

Clearly, life is a lot of work. Life is something that makes a lot of effort; in fact, you could say it defines effort. So the obvious question is, why does life bother? And the answer is, because it wants to. I am fond of quoting the biology teacher of one of my students, who said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” All the explanations for life’s continuance – the struggle for survival, the amazing efforts to procreate, the stunning adaptation – require as their engine life’s desire to be. Without that, there is no explanation for negentropy.

Well, desire is a property of love. The zest for life that gets us up in the morning is a kind of love. So is the absorbing interest that keeps us working hard at gaining a new skill even when the progress is slow. Though there is a predatory sense of the concept of desire, and though desire often filters into the dominant paradigm as something that keeps us from being present to the joy of the moment, in the simple sense of the desire of life to be, it doesn’t need to carry those connotations. Mary Baker Eddy says desire is prayer. This relates to the Biblical concept of being drawn by lovingkindness – being pulled forward by the power of a love that may feel to us to be our own.

The other thing I think is important is that desire can’t be expressed in material terms. Matter, by definition, can’t desire, as matter is defined as the inert building blocks from which things are made. Therefore desire is a spiritual property. What seems to me the obvious conclusion is that Spirit is a necessary component in the description of life.

And now I’ll stop pretending to be an authority on all this stuff. I’ll admit that I took a leap when I capitalized Spirit. I’ll admit that it could be another leap to say Spirit is God. And when I bring my faith into it and say God is Love, so Spirit is Love, and Love is the engine of Life, I have to abandon the voice of proof-through-argument. But these are things I hold to be true, and I find the contemplation of them deeply enlightening.

The cybernetic property of life gives evidence that Mind is Love, like this: Intelligence is defined by the presence and complexity of goal seeking behavior. The goal seeking behavior of life is always to make the best choice for itself. So intelligence is making the best choice. The act of always seeking the greatest good is a property of love, so Mind is Love. OK, that’s in shorthand, a little bit, but I find it interesting to think about it.

Autopoeisis is important to understand for the purpose of respect and the honoring of every living thing. Each thing has its own center. The center is the place of stillness around which things circulate. A tiny movement from the center can engender a great movement at the periphery. It takes much more effort to move something from the periphery, and there also is far less of a reference point for accuracy. It’s not surprising that each living thing would be designed to steer itself, from its center. Our society tends to operate on the assumption that it’s beneficial to have someone other than the individual determine what it will do. But the ecosystem of Life illustrates for us a better plan.

I think that whenever we study life with honesty and openness, we find great awe and inspiration. Similarly, when we explore our faith with honesty and openness, we approach truth. I find I do best in my inquiries when I’m not so much seeking to disprove other theories as to learn everything I can about the ecosystem of Life and Love. It seems to me that any explanation in words can only be a shadow – minus at least one dimension of the actual truth.

Banana Nature – an allegory

I came up with this analogy a few years back, and since then it has grown into a story that I find useful. I've told it to people but not written it - so I hope this account is able to convey the light-hearted nature in which it's intended:

Imagine that a large group of people were hypnotized into believing that they were bananas. As a result of this, they would spend much of their time sitting in groups of reclining chairs (their bowls) arranged so their heads were near each other, reaching their hands over their heads and clasping them together with each other. They would mostly occupy themselves by talking about the condition of their skin – their coloring, how their brown spots were coming along – and their insides – how soft they were, how much they were bruised.

Imagine then that after a while, a few of them started speculating that there must be more to them than this, their banana nature. Someone might suggest that, after all, if they were really bananas, they wouldn’t be able to talk. But most of them would not want to talk about that. They would say that talking was one of those things that couldn't be explained, and that its existence could be questionable – it could also be attributed to a chemical phenomenon in the skin. And the conversation would quickly go back to such things as the effects of bowl location on health, and the effect of bunch size and position on personality.

But there would be some of them who would keep thinking there had to be more to life, and maybe one or two of them would get up and walk around. They would say, see – bananas can’t do that, and we can. Some might reply, that’s not healthy – it’s bad for bananas to be alone. You need to stay with the group or you’ll get terribly bruised. Others might say, wow, that’s something to aspire to. And they might try getting up. But they might say, I try to escape it, but I just can’t get around my banana nature. It keeps pulling me back with the deep need I have to sit in the bunch and be connected at the top.

Eventually, some of them might wake all the way up, and it would be clear to them that they had never been bananas at all. Some of them might just walk away from the whole group and go have adventures and live normal lives. Others might come back and try to wake up the rest of the group. They might say: look, you’re not a banana. You’ve never been a banana. It doesn’t matter if you think you were badly bruised during transit or that you’ve gone too brown and soft and need to be thrown away. This truth about you, that you’re not a banana, can free you from all those difficulties. You can get up!

If it’s anything like current life in our society, there would be some in the group who would be angry at that assertion. They would say, how can you say it doesn’t matter whether I was bruised? How can you assert that the inevitable process of becoming brown and mushy doesn’t govern us all?

Meanwhile, there might be some kind of a religion formed around this new teaching – it would be a gathering of the bananas who believed there was more to aspire to, and that it was reachable. There would be some among these who would sit in their place asserting the words, but not actually getting up. They might talk about how they were trying to have faith but they hadn’t gotten a clear sign yet. They might get in contests with each other about which of them was a deeper believer – which was best able to recite the words and carry on convincingly about how their nature was more than bananas.

The more these believing bananas would sit there and talk about it without doing anything, the less credence the words would have among the whole group. But occasionally, there would be a banana who would take the words to heart and actually get up and walk around. That banana would try to tell the others: you don’t have to be a banana – you can get up.

And in fact, any of the group who did choose to entertain the possibility that this was true, that they weren’t bananas, could get up and slowly prove it for themselves. Maybe at first they’d be drawn back to their banana natures, but after a while their actual selfhood would become clearer to them. They would find a huge world to live and move in, far beyond what they could have imagined. They would be free.

To be tiringly obvious in driving this point home: I believe that the gap between the hypnotized “bananas” and their true selfhood is not larger than the gap between what our societal norms tell us we are and our actual being. I believe we each not only have the power, but are already being much more than our societal constructs give us credit for. After all, we do have love as our engine. We do take soaring leaps of compassion and understanding. We have beautiful dreams. I believe that a close look at what we already are can help us see that we deserve to aspire to much more than we do.

Angels

How can angels be everywhere, or at least in the precise place where you need them, every time you look up?

Is it in the way the moon stays with you as you travel down a long dark road?

Is it the way your heart stays with you throughout the day and night, so you always have access to all that is within it?

Perhaps both - they are bigger than the path we think we travel on, and they are a part of our very being.

May you feel the presence of angels, comforting and inspiring you.
----------------------
Angels come:

Angels came to Sodom.
It was a terrible place - a place where people had given up
on any sense of individual dignity, for themselves or others,
a place where people preyed on each other.

Lot wasn't an especially virtuous man. He was upright, but he wasn't very strong. He wasn't a great servant of God like Abraham. But he was OK. The angels came. They came into that sordid place and lifted him out.

Angels don't just come to the pious. They don't just come into well-lit livingrooms and studios with oriental rugs on the floor. They don't just come when we've been cleaning house for them, mentally.

They also come when we are slimed, filthy, defeated, when we feel like no one would want to be seen with us. They come when we're feeling ragged, or ridiculous, out of place or out of sorts. They slip quietly in, in the places between our rantings, and at the point when we've run out of tears. They push in at the little flaws in our illusions, exposing the truth that has waited all along, just under the surface, to bless us.

Sometimes they do it by making us laugh at ourselves. Always they make us know that we are beloved -
In spite of ourselves,
Because of ourselves.

Angels come. They lift us out.

Praying for people, and being prayed for

I once had a young Muslim woman for a student in English as a second language. When I asked her about what she liked to do in her free time, she said, “I love to pray!” She said it with a sincerity that moved me, and I didn’t doubt that what she said was true.

I love to pray. Though I have at times felt like prayer was a duty or a burden, those times were when I wasn’t really succeeding at praying. It was more a thing with myself, a declaration of things I had been told that, if I knew were true, would heal me. But I didn’t know they were true, so my declaration didn’t have any effect.

Mary Baker Eddy says that the key to healing people is love. That is a thing I struggled for years to comprehend, mostly because I didn’t know how to make myself love more than I was already loving. Now I sometimes get it – it works when I don’t leave God out of prayer. I let myself feel loved by the divine presence of Love, and let that Love spill out in my love of others. So when I pray, I get to be lifted up in Love. I get to soar with it, and be in love, and have my thought lifted in love towards whoever I’m praying for.

What is amazing to me when I pray for someone is the love that endures afterwards. It is a spirit-bond, a sense of deep joy at the contemplation of the existence of the person. It is a gift to me – I get to keep it. And it feels just like love, the kind everyone wonders if they will ever find. And the more of that love I have, the more accessible the healing prayer.

Now here’s the really cool thing: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of you.” When people share the Christ presence, it generates for all of them more of that pure love that heals. And they get to keep it, and use it. I am part of an ecumenical spiritual formation group, and over a period of several months, we have prayed together, for each other, many times. At this point, I don’t even need to gather with them to reap the fruit of the Christ presence. I just invoke them in my thought, and there is the love. I can use it to get to the heart of prayer, where healing takes place.

Here is a description of my process of praying for someone. First, I “go into the closet.” In anticipation of the joy and peace that will arise, I retire from all of the trains of thought which say they need to be resolved first. Next, I let God “deliver me into the large place” – the place in consciousness in which I begin to grasp an inkling of the scope of the Infinite. Then I carry my thought of the person into the light of Truth and Love, and bear witness to what God reveals to me about that person. I get to experience the depth of God’s love for that person and the specific provisions of Love to meet the current need. I get to see God’s face in God’s image and likeness.

Also, when people have prayed for me, I have felt the same deliverance of love – They have gone into the closet and been delivered into the large place, and then the influx of love that they bring back floods to me, bringing something I couldn’t have generated by myself.

I think this is a taste of the Holy Ghost which the apostles gave to people when they traveled to see them. There’s a part in Acts where it tells about some of the faithful who have heard of the Holy Ghost but don’t know for sure if it exists. Then the Apostles come and give it to them, and then they have it. Prayer, Christ, faith – these things can be total enigmas to those who haven’t experienced them. But once we have, it is our duty and joy to share them as we can.

Cain and Ishmael

The Church of Christ, Scientist, provides weekly Bible lessons on a recurring series of 26 themes. These lessons include citations from the Bible and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. Below are thoughts that came to me one week when the Bible lesson included stories of both Cain and Ishmael.

Thoughts on Cain: I always felt sorry for Cain, and identified with him. What a terrible feeling to bring the offering of all you do to the one whose love you most desire, and have it rejected! The direction to humbly take instruction from the rejection and do better felt like a bitter and disempowered standpoint from which to work.

What I realized in this week’s lesson (and as a result of prayerful sharing with a friend) is that the Cain story illustrates the way Christian Science works with both the absolute and the relative to bring healing to whatever situation we may be in.

First I realized that the bad guy in the story wasn’t so much Cain as the false premise embedded in the story – that man is made of something other than God, and that he could bring forth an offering that would not be of God, but would be of some other substance, such that God would reject it. This premise is never true about man. When I find myself in the feeling of Cain, in that sense of not being acceptable and having failed, I have the immediate solution of opting out of the whole story, of saying, wait a minute - this isn't what's true about God and man. This isn't what's true about me. I'm the enduring reflection of Soul, Life, intelligence. I have the divine Mind as my sustaining infinite, and can't be unworthy. My fruits must always be of what my substance is, which is of God. What I bring forth must be spiritual, and it must be a blessing.

Meanwhile, in the human scene, there is the ability to take the counsel that Cain is given and use it to make sure that my premises, and therefore my fruits, are spiritual, are of God.

To help me understand how this might work, I took an example that’s sort of far removed from me personally but not from world consciousness. I thought of someone who was brought up in a culture of vengeance and vindication - in a state of war. That person might come to think that there was virtue in killing others. So an act of killing might be one of that person's fruits. If that person brought that fruit to God - to good - that fruit would be rejected as not being of God. The person looking for a sense of holiness and benediction from his act of killing would not find it. In order to get the feeling of holiness and benediction, he would have to turn and do something else with his life - submit himself to be governed by a higher motivation - to be governed by good instead of evil. So he would have to change his course.

But let's say Christian Science was the agent for his change of course. He would realize that, since he was the reflection of good, there was no way he could be motivated by hatred. He would sense that this whole story he had been caught up in wasn't a part of himself. He would feel a glimmering of his own preciousness and holiness. He would also feel, because of that, a separation from everything he had identified himself as before. He might feel great remorse, and a deep desire to change his actions. So he would change them. In this way, he would be both following the divine truth (that the Cain story presents a lie about being and doesn't have to be lived in) and the human footsteps (reform) outlined in the story.

So if I’m feeling bad about myself, I have the opportunity to recognize that whole thing as the same lie of the Cain story. I can opt out of it. At the same time, I might be led to change something in my life. But it won't be because I am a bad or an unworthy person. It will be because I am the delightful child of God.

Thoughts on Ishmael: There’s a disconnect in this story - the image of Hagar having the child on her shoulder and casting him under a bush makes it seem like he’s a very small child, but according to the age that Abram was when he was born, he was probably somewhere from 16-18 years old. So perhaps because of this, I hadn’t stopped to think deeply about what was going on and what it would feel like for Ishmael. This time I did.

I imagined him mocking: “Oh, Isaac is weaned – what a great accomplishment!” I imagined that in that house he had a fair amount of security as the son of Abraham, and felt at home there, and felt he had a certain amount of stature. Then suddenly, because of one slip, it’s gone. Overnight. The next morning he’s out of there, and his mom too. So he’s leaning on her shoulder, probably with a deep sense of shock, betrayal, and the horrible feeling that he’s brought this upon his mom as well as himself.

So Mrs. Eddy, in the Science and Health part, says suffering is often the divine agent for our rising superior to materiality. So this must have been what happened with Ishmael under the bush. He turned to God. He glimpsed that his home, his heritage, and his birthright came from a spiritual source, from the Father ever at hand, rather than from his relationship with Abraham and his relative stature in that household. And it says in the Bible, God was with the lad. Which shows that he succeeded in rising above materiality. So suddenly this story came alive for me with a new sense of hope and promise.

Jacob, Jesus, and paradigm shifts

As a kid in Sunday School I was given to believe (through reading and discussing the Bible stories) that Jacob was the better brother. After all, God talked with him. It's been a good lesson to me, looking at this again, that what Jacob did in tricking his brother wasn't a good thing. But the question of "who was the better brother" was not the issue of the story, and neither Jacob nor Esau, nor Rebekah nor Isaac, was the bad guy.

The bad guy was the lie of mortal, material existence, the false paradigm that put everyone under a pall. Here are some elements of the false paradigm:
• That there is a limited amount of good - of blessing, birthright, and love to be given.
• That if one person gets it, the other one loses out
• That this limited blessing is not something that is freely given, but something that would rise spontaneously from the satisfaction of, say, eating savory meat. And that, once given, this blessing, or lack thereof, would determine the relative prospering of the individuals involved.

As long as he was living in that paradigm, it was perfectly reasonable for Jacob to act as he did. In fact, it was virtuous, seeing as how he was winning out over others. It wouldn't make sense, within that paradigm, to give up the upper hand. That's why it was such a struggle for Jacob - he had to shift his paradigm. He had to realize that the God who supported him also loved others, and so beating others out was neither a requirement for success nor a way to follow God. This enabled him to have the precious reunion with his brother in which he saw, in his brother's face, the face of God, and felt that God was pleased with him.

Christianity doesn't make sense when applied to an old paradigm. Jesus' message has been greatly misunderstood by people saying that by telling them to be meek, and to turn the other cheek, he is telling them to be doormats. And because people haven't known how to integrate his teachings into the old paradigm, they've just sort of squirmed with them, and tried to find a happy medium, or whatever.

As I understand it, the way to follow all of Jesus' teachings is to have a paradigm shift. The reason we can bless our enemies is that we dwell in the all-power of infinite goodness. It's not that we submit ourselves to their power to destroy us. It's that we see that since Love is the only power, no enemy has power over us. And it's natural for us, as the children of God, to help these poor deluded people to be free from the enslavement of being an oppressor (or a criminal).

I volunteer at the local jail, doing Christian Science services once a month and visiting people who ask us to come in to talk with them. From my exposure to this, I've come to see that, as a society, we pay a great price for our desire to be punitive. Besides the monetary costs, we pay by having a hole in the fabric of our society that people can fall out of. Because it's there, we all are more tense, because any one of us (or any one of our loved ones) could fall out of that hole. Or, if we say it wouldn't be possible for any one we loved to fall out, then we carry that self-righteousness around, which takes great bites out of our capacity to love. Lately it's become very clear to me that God is not punitive - that a punitive model is used only by someone with limited power. If I have a punitive model, I am saying: I want you to do what I want you to do. If you don't, I will punish you. The All-power doesn't need to manipulate anyone, for the All-power is the only will. The All-power doesn't need to punish anyone, because no one can even be present except that God is thinking them.

Is this too absolute for adaptation to present society? I don't think so. I don't think we can ever say anything we learn from Jesus, or anything we learn in Christian Science, is too absolute to be relevant. It is, after all, the absolute that we dwell in, and it is the absolute that heals.

Communion

I’ve recently been involved in some ecumenical groups, which have brought me into a contact I didn’t have before with the whole notion of the Eucharist. As to communion, the word itself – communing, “with oneness” with God seems to be what we are about, what we most deeply desire, and what all our prayers seek for. Having been raised in Christian Science, it’s been natural for me to look at communion from a spiritual standpoint. Here are some of Mrs. Eddy's clear words on the subject:

“The efficacy of Jesus' spiritual offering is infinitely greater than can be expressed by our sense of human blood. The material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious to cleanse from sin when it was shed upon "the accursed tree," than when it was flowing in his veins as he went daily about his Father's business. His true flesh and blood were his Life; and they truly eat his flesh and drink his blood, who partake of that divine Life.” –p 26.

To me this speaks of blood as life-force – volition, motivation. So when Jesus says, This is my blood, drink ye all of it, I think of him as commending us to be motivated by the same thing that motivated him – to have the same source of animation and holy purpose. Mrs. Eddy points out that the disciples were already eating when he shared the bread and wine with them. So it wasn’t a case of them getting material nourishment. I think (based on what she says) that this is what they experienced at the Last Supper – that, as they ate the bread and drank the wine, they simultaneously got a sense of what he was spiritually imparting to them – what would sustain them and what would inspire them.

Again, as one raised in Christian Science, my tendency has been to be suspicious of ritual. After all, Mrs. Eddy says, “Whatever materializes worship hinders man's spiritual growth and keeps him from demonstrating his power over error.” – p 5. But through interactions with my ecumenical friends, I’ve come to see something of why they do it. It is like a gate for them, a reminder to center their thoughts and think about holy things. Or like a prop: When I was in a freshman in college, I practiced riding my unicycle down the halls of the music building while my roommate practiced her flute. I found that, at first, I needed to rest my hand on something while mounting. But later I found that I could just rest my hand on nothing, imagining something there, and it would steady me so I could start. Just as it was my balance that kept me up, and the real or imaginary thing to put my hand on was a prop, so ritual, among Christians who use it, can be a prop, but it is still their faith which brings them closer to God. So the bread and wine can’t bring Christ into their thought, but they can do that. As can we, at any time, even without the ritual. As Mrs. Eddy says, “Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love--be it song, sermon, or Science--blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ's table, feeding the hungry and giving living waters to the thirsty.” –p.234.

Being a Christian Scientist

I’ve been doing an ecumenical discussion group using a video series called Living the Questions. The first segment we did was on the subject, “Thinking Theologically.” Among the people there, there was at first an amount of the obligatory hand-wringing about the state of the world, but I think as we progressed, a sense of the Spirit entered the room. The joy we had in our experience of God, and the value we placed on it, was something we could share and feel together.

The next two sessions were on “The lives of Jesus.” In the first of those sessions, I found that others in the group shared the same perspective we have in Christian Science, that Jesus was not God, but a man, and that the Christ is the everpresent truth of grace for man – our way of sensing God’s presence. There was one woman who seemed to hold a more deified perception of Jesus, but the rest of them seemed to embrace the Jesus/Christ distinction, and to agree that Jesus was not God. Again, what we all had in common was the experience of the inspiration that comes to us from the Christ presence, the sense of the divinity of all God’s children, and our ability to access the Christ here and now. It seemed clear to me that Christ was real to these people, and at hand.

In the next session, I discovered that many of those people didn’t believe that Jesus had actually been resurrected, or that he had raised Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. They believed that what the disciples had experienced after the crucifixion was “visions of Jesus”. They would say that those visions were real and true, just not a physical presence of Jesus. And they say the accounts of miracles performed by Jesus were things people made up to help convey the importance of what Jesus was and how life-altering it was to follow him.

One of the women relayed how her husband, as a young minister, had come to the place where he felt he couldn’t believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, and that his senior pastor had told him that, if he couldn’t believe that, he wasn’t a Christian. My heart went out to this woman and her husband. I agreed with her standpoint that you could be a Christian without believing in the literal resurrection. After all, you can’t just decide to believe something, and it is crucial to be as honest as possible about what you actually believe. Later, you might become convinced. Meanwhile, it seems right to affiliate yourself with that which resonates as deeply important, and to follow, as much as you’re able, the example of the one your heart is called to follow.

As a Christian Scientist, I have been taught to pay attention to all of Jesus’ words. He himself said that his works were what testified of him. So it makes sense to me to follow him in healing as well as in love for our fellow beings. I had wondered, before, how other Christian denominations managed to get around that clear directive from Jesus. I knew that some of them got around it by declaring that he was God incarnate, and that was why he could do the works. We as mere sinners shouldn’t expect to come anywhere near that. This, of course, contradicts what Jesus said about himself and his healings, and about the sinless nature of man.

So it turns out the other way to get around it is to say that he didn’t really do the works. To say that he modeled authentic living, and that that model is compelling, and that is why everyone followed Jesus. To me this subordinates the message of God’s kingdom to the kingdom of our society and current technology. It’s not unreasonable to do so – we can only believe what our world view allows as possible. It was not so long ago that people were saying that supersonic flight was impossible, or that it would kill anyone trying to accomplish it. This is what they believed, based on what they understood of scientific principles at the time. And you can’t just choose to believe something that is outside of what you think is possible. In order to believe in supersonic flight, someone had to have a change in paradigm so they could consider it possible. Then they would be able to go ahead and prove it. And then other people could become convinced.

We don’t get any points as Christian Scientists just for having a textbook that declares that healing is not only possible, but to be expected. We don’t get any points for adopting that as a belief because Mrs. Eddy says so. But as we experience healing, and as our world view shifts such that healing seems possible to us, we do really believe in it. And then we are in a position to convince others in a way that no doctrinal points can do – by having them see for themselves. Then we are in a position to be a bridge between people who believe Jesus did the works and people who believe that Jesus was not God. “The works that I do shall ye do also.”

A deeper understanding of God – and time and space

I had a healing last fall. There was a time of struggle and despair. I prayed deeply, and what I learned brought moments of light but no relief. Then the healing came, and ever since, I have felt the understanding of something that is very important to me. It is the fact that God owns the whole show – God is the whole Mind, the only perceiving and thinking that goes on, not just what is here but presence itself; not just a power but power itself; not just something that acts, but action itself.

To continue along this line of thought: God does not exist in space, but space exists in God. Space is a concept that God created – it is the idea of every creation of God having room to move, to develop, to interact. It provides for harmonious and intricate interweavings of motions on every scale, from cosmic to microcosmic, and at all levels between. The law of God regarding space is that everything has the right amount of it in which to move and grow, and everything with it in that space in order for Life and Love to be made splendidly manifest. Space wasn’t something that existed first, and God needed to fill it. Space belongs totally to God. Therefore, there are no spatial constraints that have any relevance to God. And for man, there can be no properties of space which hinder man’s relations with God. There’s no such thing as not enough space, as being cramped or stunted or imprisoned. There’s no such thing as too much space, as being lost or isolated or without needed resources and companions. When we think there are space related constraints, it’s just a story. Understanding that space belongs to God and is used only for God’s purpose frees us to move freely in space as God intends us to.

It’s the same thing with time. God does not exist in time, but time exists in God. Time is an idea which God thought up, which allows for various aspects of Creation’s expression. Time is the idea which allows for unfoldment and growth, for an identity to display a sequence of development while still being itself. It allows for rhythm and harmony, and periodic pattern. Time and space, as ideas of God, work together to allow the arena for music and dance, and for Life and Love. Since time is an idea of God, there is no time before God, and there is no time in which God is not being expressed. Since man is God’s expression, man must have the same dominion over time that God does. There’s never not enough time. God uses time to make room for every needed thing to happen. There’s never too much time – no time in which good is not unfolding, no emptiness or boredom. When we think we are under the crunch of time, we are believing a story - that time exists independently of God – perhaps that God might be able to help us, if we pray right, but that it is a hard problem even for Him. When we understand that time is God’s idea, we can see that we need never fear that it will give us a bad turn.

Credit Where It's Due

I have gotten my understanding of life from the study of the Bible and of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. Every truth I come to goes back to there, and I find it said there, such that I suppose I could use all words from those books, instead of my own. But that would fail to illumine the process of my thought – that I’ve come to feel these things are true not by adopting them from the books but by finding them out on my own. In fact, this is the clear directive of both Jesus and Mrs. Eddy. Jesus told his followers to do as he did. Mrs. Eddy enjoins her readers, “see for yourself.” The ideas you see here are me thinking and striving to live the truth, working to understand myself and the world, getting dirt under my fingernails and juice down my elbows, reading and experiencing all kinds of things and attempting to pull them all in to the unity of thought that I feel exists here.

I will say you can find everything about Truth in those books, but not just by reading them. You have to have an intense personal quest to know what is true. You have to follow that. You have to be willing to think it through on your own, using your daily experience as a laboratory and testing things out for yourself. Then you will get it.

Being a person of faith

I’ve had wonderful interactions with the folks of the University District Interfaith Alliance, which have led me to reflect on what it means to be a person of faith:

As people of faith, we have grasped at some time in our lives the presence of an all-loving power for good. We have felt the power as something that reframes the meaning of our lives. We have sensed something deeper, more important to us, than the smorgasbord of offerings on the secular plane. So we can’t go back to living as if that power did not exist. Sometimes we struggle with how to access it again. But we know it’s there and we keep trying to find it. I go to the lunches of the Interfaith Alliance and see this in the faces of the lovely people around the table.

Being a Christian
Other sincere people of faith probably share the “defining qualities” of Christian-ness:
• The notion that life is precious, that all people are God’s children, and therefore sacred and holy, that all nature proclaims the glory of universal good.
• That it is the awesome responsibility of all those that feel the touch of God’s love to give that love to others.
• That the Christ demands that we live true to our identity and heal the world.

Christians are followers of Jesus. Jesus is very clear about what he asks his followers to do:
• love each other
• love their enemies
• heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, raise the dead
• do the works he did, and greater works
Also, in studying the people that Jesus commended, it’s clear that he approved of boldness, or proactive compassion that doesn’t care what others think, of fearless willingness to step forward into the scary place of action and self-transformation.

Christian Living

How I live:
The “straight and narrow way” is not defined by a list of prohibitions. Rather, it is the exquisite precision of Life – how the bee and the flower, the root and the rhizobia, exactly meet one another’s needs. It is the perfect tuning of a chord, the exact slap of a polyrhythmic beat, the supple balance of a gymnast. It is that alive feeling of something cleaner than fear that steps, with a catch in the breath, out onto the living edge.

To walk the straight and narrow way is to be continually committed to being as true as possible, in every moment, to the inner compass that shows me when I am most alive. Jesus says, “strait is the gate, and narrow the way, that leads to life.” The way that leads to life is defined by aliveness – that vigorous force that defines itself. My practice of the straight and narrow way is to stay on the fresh growing tip of being – to do things based on who I am, not on what I fear. In other words, to be based on Spirit, not on the trajectory of expectations from birth to death.

What does it mean to be spiritual?
The first mention of Spirit in the Bible is Genesis 1; 2: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” To me, this identifies Spirit with volition – with that which moves according to its own desire. So being spiritual means being governed entirely by volition, instead of by outside influences. As a Christian Scientist, I identify Spirit with God, and man as God’s image and likeness (as stated in Gen 1; 26, 27). So my practice of being spiritual is to feel Spirit as the present, governing force of my life – to be guided by it, to be defined by it. To do so is a continual act of courage, in which no blaming is permitted or even possible. There is no resting on definitions of myself based on past activities or behaviors, no lazy projecting of the future as being set in motion by the past. There is an ongoing release of what I have, up till this moment, considered myself to be.

What does it feel like?
I often feel washed clean like a bright morning after a rain. I often feel like a water droplet trembled by the wind. I often feel a central stillness, with a sphere of open space around me. I feel that my life is precious to God, that the Cause of the universe includes what I am, that the unfolding of all I am is something God is delighted to give me. I feel the power of home. At other times, I feel like the page upon which was written all that I thought I was keeps being ripped off, scrumpled up, and thrown away, and I have to remind myself that I am not that page, I am still here. And I have to wait, again, for the writing on my page to come clear to me, revealed, once again, by the eternal Mind.

Spirit and Matter

In the Scientific Statement of Being, Mary Baker Eddy says that matter doesn’t exist. I have found it crucial to understand what this means and doesn’t mean. If you define matter as that which you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears, touch, etc, then it doesn’t make sense to say that matter doesn’t exist. After all, you can see beauty and love and harmony, you can observe incredible intricacy and order. If you say that what you can observe is matter, and then say matter doesn’t exist, you miss out on all the myriad, specific, splendid acts of love that are manifested in all forms of life, from the minute to the cosmic. It would close you off from all the color, texture, symmetry, pattern and grace of being, and leave you trying to construct a shadow world out of abstracts. Clearly, that’s not a good way to start.

Here is my understanding of matter: Matter is not a thing, but a construct. It’s not just something there, which we observe. It’s a set of assumptions about the nature and behavior of what we observe. Specifically, it is the notion that things are constructed of a substance that is independent of their identity. So a living thing is said to be composed of chemical substances. The substances are supposed to exist independent of the presence of life, and to operate according to a set of laws that have no necessary relation to those said to govern life. So every living thing is considered to be subject to two forces – one; whatever it is that holds it all together and causes it to organize as it does, and two; the matter, which is presumed to operate according to the tendencies inherent within it. So the life-force (whatever that is) is set as being in opposition to the forces of matter, which are said to tend toward entropy and inertia. Then, in many discussions, the life-force is hardly considered at all. All the discussion is about the somehow organized building blocks and how they may go awry.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to construct a theory of life without a life-force component. The theories I would call most material are those that posit existence to be a series of reactions of different forces on each other. Their proponents want to be clear that there is no grand design, no intent. They believe that random forces account for every development of life. Yet even these theories have a spiritual engine: the desire of life to perpetuate itself. Without that you can’t have natural selection, you can’t have survival of the fittest, you can’t have DNA and RNA working to keep life continuing. I’m not sure why it is considered anti-scientific to notice a required, fundamental element of one’s construct. Yet biology, as taught in schools, rarely mentions the spiritual force without which none of the explanations of life could float. A student of mine once told me that her biology teacher said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” But no further examination was made of what would constitute such a desire. It seems to me that such a desire can’t accounted for as a material force, since matter is the construct of something that doesn’t have volition. I understand volition to be a property of Spirit. Therefore I state that the engine of these theories is spiritual.

Once the spiritual engine of life processes is acknowledged, it begins to seem less obvious why we should think that Spirit needs a mindless component as a medium for its self-expression. And it seems more possible that an interplay between a spiritual force and a passive substance is not the only way to think about things. In fact, the word mythological comes to mind. A myth is a story which is used to explain a possible cause for something observed. People’s mythology then tends to color what they look for – hence what they see to be the driving causes in their lives. So we develop the expectation that the body, if not assiduously tended to, will fall apart (and will sometimes fall apart despite all tendings).

How would it change what we observe if we started out from the standpoint that things that are alive are comprised of the force of life itself? The properties of life are observable and very interesting. What if these properties are the organizing principle and the substance of life? For my own part, the more I am clear that my being is spiritual, the better my health, and the more lovely are the unfolding of things in my life.

So to get back to the question of Spirit vs. matter, I find that Spirit is something we observe with all of our being, including our sight, hearing, etc. It really is everywhere, so we experience it everywhere. Matter is a story about how things are put together, which says that existence is passive, and determined by various forces that act on it.

God and gods

My mind has been circling around a comprehensive discussion of religion-as-phenomenon. It could be framed as “why people choose to believe what they believe”, or “what is the basis of faith?”

I’m thinking about why the children of Israel wanted to make a golden calf, and what they did with it. (Background: They had been led by Moses, who was following God, out of slavery to the Egyptians. But Moses had been gone for more than a month – he was up in the mountain getting the commandments from God. So the children of Israel felt rudderless, and asked Aaron to make a god for them to worship.)

To me this points to the power of projection of the human mind, and man’s habit of externalizing the forces he believes to be governing him. If the Children of Israel were in a habit of looking to external forces to guide them – kings to rule them, war commanders to send them to battle – they might have closed off access to the notion that they, themselves, could determine the course of their lives. So in the absence of Moses to command them, they wanted something to project their allegiance to, so they could follow it. So they gave Aaron their jewelry to melt and make a calf. Symbolically, they put things they owned into it – they projected their own ideas, intentions, and motivations onto the calf.

The Bible’s main premise is that there is a God who is more than just the projection of the human mind. The Bible presents the appearing in consciousness of a creative force that teaches man the power of truth over treachery, the presence of a life-force beyond manipulation and might-makes-right. The Bible delineates a God who would always win in a contest between truth and illusion. And, as it comes clearer as the Bible history unfolds, it acquaints us with a God who is good.

In thinking about the gods of these times, there are many things to which people give away a sense of their own sovereignty. Genetics and chemical makeup get a lot of press, as do brain development, personality, diet, exercise, and economic background. People, in their efforts to define themselves, choose a whole raft of limitations, such that you would think they were defined by their constraints instead of their life-force. People in this culture don’t think of these limitations as gods, but they think of them as forces which control them, and which they can’t control, but which, through certain carefully performed actions, they may be able to appease.

What would be thought of one who said she doesn’t believe in these gods? She would be considered foolish, ignorant, in denial. But that is what people always encounter when they deny the prevailing gods. To deny the prevailing gods is a courageous stance, and a wilderness experience. It is to choose to be alone – to be outside the comfortable boxes. It is also to choose to be free.

Maybe when people choose not to believe in God, it is from this same desire for freedom – the desire to throw off anything that is a projection of power to something other than themselves. They put God into the category of all the other projections of the human mind, and they refuse to bow down to a force external to themselves.

I applaud this. I think it is a necessary step towards truth. But I think the next step is learning the nature of the power that remains – the power within one’s self. And on examination, I have found the power within myself to have discernable characteristics, and to be an unfailing fountain of strength, and to be something I can lean on for guidance. I find its characteristics to coincide with what in the Bible is called God. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.”

Religion and Science - God as Cause

In ancient times, there was not a distinction between science and religion. People’s inquiry then as now was about cause – what makes things happen as they do, and how can they make things come out better for them. God was a concept that meant cause. Some people’s inquiry led them to posit many causes – the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, the earth. Where people’s lives were more urban, and power of people over each other became an overwhelming component of life, this became another realm for the inquiry into cause. The gods were the impulses giving power to some, and making others submit.

The Bible chronicles a people’s explorations into the nature of cause. At certain points, they found themselves in possession of a power with which they overwhelmingly won, in conflicts with rivals and when up against challenges in nature and circumstance. They called this power God [cause]. Various prophets gave insight as to the nature of this cause called God, and as time in the Bible progresses, this understanding grows clearer and more accessible to more people. Earlier senses of fearsomeness, vengefulness, and exclusiveness give way to love, support, and universal inclusion. Worship (doing whatever is needed to have the cause work the desired effect) goes from burnt sacrifice, to living mercifully, to embodying a love that embraces all mankind and nature in universal harmony.

The separation of science from religion came, it seems to me, as politics, rather than inquiry, became the basis of what people were led to believe. As long as the study of cause is pure inquiry, science and religion are one. When politics gets wrapped up in religion, manipulation is mixed with inquiry. People are told things are true not because this is someone’s best understanding, but because it will make them do what those in power want. And once people are relying on others to tell them what is true, instead of inquiring on their own, they can be deceived.

I believe the same happens with science. The pure inquiry of science is also susceptible to manipulation by powers that want people to behave in a certain way. We have heard outcries about this regarding the way the current administration has dealt with issues of global warming and other environmental degradation. Less decried, but more pervasive, is what we are told daily by those in support of pharmaceutical giants regarding the nature of health and disease.

In the debates about science and religion over issues such as intelligent design, I keep thinking all the arguments are muddled. Instead of being so concerned with what students will be concluding, I think the focus should be on how they are coming to those conclusions. Are they just being told to believe what’s in the textbook? I know the field of science prides itself in not being susceptible to manipulations. But does the structure of science education protect students from it when it does happen? Does it give students the tools to inquire for themselves?

If students inquire as to the nature of cause and discover God as a palpable force in their lives, what should they do with that? Is it right to make them compartmentalize their inquiry based on subject matter? Is it right to say their attending to the cause that they find governing them (by prayer and worship) is less permitted than for someone else to attend to the cause they find governing them (such as diet and chemicals)?

Well, but is it right for students or parents to shut down a whole area of inquiry because they don’t believe in it? And is it right for students or parents to impose their beliefs on others? What kind of an enlightenment would it take for us to get to the place where none of us felt the need to impose any beliefs about cause on others, but to encourage and trust us all to find out on our own? Then no science education would be repugnant to people of faith, and no faith inquiry would be repugnant to people of science. We would all present our findings as the sharing of our best inquiry to date, knowing that we may or may not be able to express them in a way that resonates with someone else, but trusting (as I do) that all honest inquiry leads to truth.

What if the religion that people are getting is not about inquiry, but is about being told something, with great persuasive manipulation or with threats of damnation? Religion has the sanction that people can believe whatever they want, and a group of people can collectively believe what they want, and they can use whatever means they want to make people agree with them. It is valuable to have this sanction, as there are many ways of knowing that are not universally understood, and there is truth that mainline science doesn’t know how to get to at all. But in this necessary safe haven for religion, there can also bloom various bizarre enslavements. The best protection against this is to have a healthy amount of unmuddled truth readily available to all who seek it. And that is one of the reasons I have chosen to write all this down.
------

On Being a Christian

Two things Jesus said would characterize Christians were that they loved each other and that they loved even their enemies. He described this love as something people would be able to see and feel, and as something that would heal them. I’ve found this kind of love to be incompatible with judging people.

For many years I felt that I could love people if they met certain criteria. The criteria would change, but I was always in the role of gatekeeper – the one who decided whether or not there was a love match. Often I deemed myself unworthy of loving another – probably at least as often as I felt others unworthy of my love. Both of these conclusions made me miss out on countless opportunities to love. Although I’ve known and championed Jesus’ injunction “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” I guess I didn’t get the scope to which it applies to my life. I guess I didn’t get that I couldn’t be a gatekeeper and love at the same time.

It is a challenge for people of faith who try to uphold strong moral values, to not judge. What I’m coming to now is that my sense of right and wrong can’t be based on constraints. If my rightness is defined by my not doing a certain thing, it contains an implied judgment of those who do that thing. But if my rightness is defined by who I am, and this is true for everyone else, there is no judgment required in order for us to accept each other.

I’m starting to grasp that morality can’t be based on fear. It can’t be based on fear that I might do something that would cut me off from goodness. My faith must be that who I am on the inside – my own best sense of goodness – is a reliable guide for what is good and real. It doesn’t work to say I shouldn’t explore any direction of thought because I might get myself in trouble by doing it. Mary Baker Eddy says that creeds and doctrines are not a benefit to man, but that the time for thinkers has come. Jesus says the kingdom of God is within. So I feel it is my call to explore this kingdom. I am confident that my very makeup, as the image and likeness of God, gives me the ability to know what’s true. This must be the basis of my morality – not what I’m told not to do but what leads me in the focused harmony where I feel that crystal zing of love.

This coincides with the teachings about love in the Bible. It’s natural to love when I consider that each of us possesses the kingdom of God as our core. No choice of lifestyle or path of inquiry changes that. Any person, any time, can look within and see this kingdom of God. Meanwhile, it’s not my job to steer anyone’s ship. The whole attention of all my being must be in keeping myself in tune with the great symphony of being. This will enable me to make the decision to love in every interaction of my day. And I can love knowing that I don’t need to wait for permission to love, and there is no gate of worthiness that either I or the other must pass through – that deep awe at the wonder of each of God’s children is really our natural state of being. Mary Baker Eddy says, “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings.”

The Practice of Holiness

God is not an absence, so God is not worshipped through abstinence. God is worshipped through active embrace of everything that is alive, everything that is honest and true and life-affirming. Life as Love, as pure goodness, is a reliable power – if embraced in honesty, it always leads to itself. Temptations of the senses have nothing on Life – they are not to be feared, and they don’t need to be fled from. They don’t have the power to enslave or to hide the all-encompassing delight of Life.

God is not a feeble voice. We don’t have to be afraid we won’t hear it. Really we only fail to hear it when we embrace fear instead – fear that we won’t have enough if we don’t fight others for it, or that we won’t be enough if we’re not better than others; fear that false voices will overpower us so that we can’t be reached by God.

People who embrace Life may be found to abstain from certain things, such as obsessing about physical appearances or engaging in perpetual sensual gratification. But it is not their abstinence that makes them holy – it is their commitment to Life, their surrender to Love, which catches up their lives and guides them in the perfect unfolding of grace.

Just as it is much harder to balance a still bicycle than a moving one, it is harder to hear God’s direction when not actively engaging in Life. There is no precedent anywhere for people who hem their lives in with constraints ending up holier than those who don’t. People who go overboard with sensuality may find it unsatisfying sooner than those who restrain themselves. There’s no place in God’s world for “holier than thou.”