Christian Science and the shell of it – breaking free

Since the time in ninth grade when my faith came alive for me, I’ve wanted to share it with others. And sometimes as I’ve tried to do so, a certain brittleness has come up - a sense that this wasn’t an area of interest to my conversation partner. The response would bewilder me, though I came to expect it. I couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to hear about this great thing I had to offer. Lately I’m looking at it from a different perspective. I see several obvious reasons why these past communications were brittle and awkward.

First is the problem of trying to tell about something: As I’ve mentioned, feeling the lift of God’s presence is much like flying. All of my being is on a bright and moving edge; I am illumined; I feel myself at the cambium, the growing place where all things unfold in the fresh newness of being. But to share this with someone else, they have to feel it. They have to experience God’s love, with its assurance that nothing they’ve ever worried about has ever mattered, that they have always been beloved beyond imagining, which takes care of everything. Mere words, however inspired, don’t bring this about.

Second are the limits to my own life proof: Christian Scientists are taught to operate from a different paradigm from the one assumed by popular culture. It is a paradigm in which perfection is the starting point, goodness is substance, and bad things are considered insubstantial, and are expected to fall away. We operate from that standpoint when our experience corroborates that – when we live at the point of healing. But there is a question of how I am to be when I find myself waiting for understanding – waiting for the clarity which shows itself as healing. I think there is a need to be very humble and quiet in my faith. I need to be watchful that the starting point of perfection doesn’t devolve into perfectionism, in which, though I don’t feel myself perfect, I feel I should be, and expect others to be. This falls into the posturing and judging, the precarious maintaining of facades, so familiar to social-climbing America and so antithetical to Christ.

Related to that is a problem of language: When speaking of a different paradigm, it’s easy to convey the wrong impression. Perfection in Christ can sound like perfectionism; the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free can sound like a burdensome responsibility. This problem is even greater when I cease to know what I’m talking about – when my words get ahead of my experience and I speak from my notion of the theory instead of the understanding only found in love.

Finally, there’s the question of relationship: I guess I assumed that it would be good and helpful to others for me to impart inspiration, or at least information, in my communications. What I didn’t account for is that my desire to be the giver left others in the role of people who needed my help. Often, as it turns out, people don’t appreciate being cast in that role. So if I come along telling them that their lives will be much better if they only allow themselves to be moved by my insight and wisdom, or if they adopt aspects of my faith, I shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t respond with great enthusiasm.

So what does this all indicate? Even within my own faith I have felt the resistance to the things others resist. I, too, turn away from mere words and crave the authentic experience, the overwhelming sense of the God presence, that makes many words unnecessary, and makes the ones that are spoken perfect. It’s useful to start noticing what doesn’t work so I can stop trying to do it. It’s even more important to begin collecting the moments of perfect love that define everything I want to have and be. Recently, facing the need to comfort a loved one, I found myself choosing not to say thought after thought that came to mind. I felt that words of instruction, however insightful, would fall flat, and that even words of encouragement must not contradict his feelings. I needed to keep my own thought in the place of pure love. No words that strayed from this could be any use at all. What I shared was not important. What mattered was that the solid Love that holds the whole world together be felt by both of us. Listening in this way allowed the needed comfort to come in. It was conveyed in touch more than in words – touch guided by love.

Words about Christian Science are a mere shell of what I value. They are a shell that can be brittle, and that can keep the glorious essence from shining forth. By insisting to myself that I stay centered in truth, I can begin to break free of that shell. No longer do I feel the need to share the great truth that I have found with others. Instead, through my faith I can see the light that they are already shining. My sharing can be in appreciating what they are. Then it will be their words as much as mine that bring inspiration.

Feels like Flying

Ever since I was very little, I’ve had the sense that I know the feeling of free flight, and have longed for it. I have flown in dreams from time to time, and always awake from such dreams with a deep sense of well-being.

When my being grasps for a moment the wonderful law of goodness, it feels like flying. There’s the same sense of expansiveness, of filling with more joy than my lungs can hold, of hope soaring – a buoyancy behind my chest and beneath my throat. There is power, belonging, and coming home – a sense of the rightness of this, and that it has always been part of me. It also feels like a huge new world to explore. In those moments my questions are gone – questions of how I am to improve, what my course of growth should be, how I’ll ever get there (wherever “there” might be). For I am conscious of the rightness of here and now.

My sister said this morning, “We’re taught that our thoughts determine our experience, right?” I said, “We’re taught that, but I’m not sure it’s right.” I told her of a book I had been looking at, on the Sermon on the Mount, which said it would bring out the Science of Christianity by explicating the meaning of those teachings. But it didn’t mention Mrs. Eddy anywhere, or even Christian Science. I soon determined that what it said may have been along the lines of what I was taught as a child, but also that those lines would never get one to the flying place, never bring healing, and so would lead seekers awry.

The problem is that it shares the underlying world view of the great body of self-help instruction to be found in our society. It assumes that there is something wrong with us, or at least something that can be improved upon, and that if we adopt this course of discipline and work hard at it, we can make ourselves better.

In this paradigm, God is not the moving and shaping force in our lives, our creator and determiner, the law which governs us. At best, God in this scenario is a judge, someone whose favor we might eventually earn if we are good enough. This is not the God that Jesus taught when he said “the kingdom of God is within you”, “I and my Father are one”, and “Our Father, which art in heaven.”

When I have been in the self-help paradigm, I’ve found it hard to love, much as I wanted to, much as I thought it would make me a better person to do so. I was too busy being anxious about myself, how I was doing, how I was progressing in my self-help program. The love that Love teaches is a celebration of universal oneness. It is a joy that springs forth in the contemplation of others, an exaltation at their presence and all the unique qualities of their being. It rides in the deep confidence of being well-loved, of belonging, of being home. It feels like flying.

It is an interesting project to steadily untangle myself from the self-help view of life and to embrace, more and more, the love that is the law of Life. The benefit is opening up those soaring spaces, where the fabric of my world view rips open and my whole vision fills with light.

Saying Yes

Last weekend I went to Ocean Shores with my husband, who was hired to do a drum circle for participants in a motorcycle rally, the Harley Davidson Surf and Sun Run. As we drove south and west we saw more and more motorcycles. Black leather vests and chaps, hair sheaths, tattoos. Shortly after we got there, we went to a place for pizza. The two couples that were sitting together in the back room where we went might not have been part of the rally, but they were sympathetic to it. One woman referred to the rush she got from feeling the rumble of the motors. What they said to us was, “Are you sure you want to be in this room with us? There are twelve of us, and the kids greatly outnumber the grown-ups.”

I was sure I did. This was the room where you could see the sky, and besides, I found myself looking forward to the experience of sharing the room with this group. I soon discerned that most of the kids were occupied in the video arcade room. The little ones, aged maybe 4-7, kept coming back in a steady trickle for quarters, which several of the adults were benevolently dispensing. Then they were ordering pizza, and pop by the pitcherfull. Though soda pop and video games would not have topped my list as things that were wholesome for kids, my sense here was that they would do no harm. I felt that whatever the items were, the substantial thing was the saying yes. I could feel those yeses going deep into the being of those kids, giving them depth and confidence, providing a foundation from which they could grow tall and strong. Later there was an incident in which one of the kids had to be disciplined. The discipline was measured, loving, and offered a clear path back to acceptance in the group, with hugs all around.

It was a new clarification of substance for me. In my efforts to be a good mom, I have tried to steer my kids towards what’s good. Here I saw a clear indication that in steering kids towards what I think is good in terms of activities and things to consume, I might be missing the key point – the need to say yes to their being, regardless of the material trappings. Just as my whole being said yes to this group of families at the pizza place, just as it said yes to all the black-leather clad people at the Harley Davidson rally, I began to feel that my whole purpose, with all my interactions, must be to say yes.

I was telling this story to my sister, and she said that she and her daughter had been talking about the same thing. She said saying no was like trying to back up over the spikes at the rental car place. It doesn’t achieve what you want – you have to go around another way. Her daughter corroborated by pointing out that in improv theater, one of the cardinal rules is that you can’t say no. You always say yes to whatever idea someone else presents, and then you can try to turn it in whatever way comes to mind.

Three of my entries in this blog so far have had titles beginning with “Christ says yes.” It makes sense to me that, in following Christ, I find more and more ways in my own life to do the same.