Walking to the Mountains

I imagine this conversation with someone who watches out for my spiritual growth and progress. I say, “It reminds me of the story my grandmother used to tell about how she looked out from her house and saw the mountains so near, and suggested to her sister that they walk there that day. So they set out and walked, but even though they walked for a long time, and covered a lot of ground, they never seemed to get any closer to the mountains. I feel like that – I’m covering tremendous ground spiritually. I’m loving the things I’m seeing and learning. But I’m still not making it as a practitioner, and no one is calling me for healing. I thought I was ready but I guess I must not be.” He says, “It doesn’t have anything to do with your not being ready.”

I’m not sure what he says after that. But my sense is that the paradigm in which I could be ready or not ready puts too much weight on me as the center of things. Here’s a thing that Mrs. Eddy says about it: “God will heal the sick through man, whenever man is governed by God.” In the past, in what I believe is the false paradigm, I would have put my patient in the place of “the sick” in that sentence, and me in the place of “man.” Then I would ask myself what I needed to do to be sufficiently governed by God in order to heal the sick. However, the appropriate place to put my patient is in the place of “man.”

So then I ask myself, when does God govern man? Well, duh. God governs man all the time. So God heals the sick through man by talking directly to, emanating directly from, being the source of, everything that man – my patient – is. Which, of course, is exactly as God intends it to be. Which is, of course, perfect. “The sick” in that sentence turns out not to need an identity – it’s like a cloud of dust that just needs to dissipate. And there isn’t God and me and the patient, there’s just God and man – God making man perfect, and man enjoying it.

What I’m working on now is this moment. I told someone recently, faith is the habit of looking again to see God’s presence; holding out for a better answer if evidence seems to go against goodness. I’m holding out for a better answer, not for my future, but for right now. It’s clear to me that the better answer isn’t in the way human circumstances bend to be more favorable, but in the presence of Love that renders human circumstances irrelevant. The circumstances do, and must, align themselves with harmony, but they don’t carry the harmony any more than iron shavings define the shape of a magnet.

So maybe I’m walking to the mountains. But maybe I’m walking in the mountains, and maybe I can feel the fresh, fresh air every time I breathe in goodness. Maybe the view is right here, and I am looking right at it.

The Waters of Meribah

I had thought that I was finally through the bitter waters – that I had conquered the anxious edge that drags on consciousness, where the brightness of day or of someone’s smile seems obscured by dank mists of self doubt. I was surprised to find myself lost in the internal clouds again.

There is a singer whose music I love, who died, I believe, from despair. I never understood how she could have done that, when all her songs are so uplifting. They are not songs of one who’s never been in darkness, but of one who has been there and come out. I thought, here in these songs is the proof of healing. How is it that she still succumbed?

I had been in the brightness of Love for many months. I was buoyed by the practice of unconditional love, and saw many old constraints fall away. I told myself in wonder, there’s nothing people can say to me to make me unhappy. There are no conditions that can make me unhappy. Good is here now, and my only job is to notice it.

Then I encountered turbulence. It grew out of what felt like a competitive edge in some people I hoped were friends. Suddenly I found myself asking, What have I accomplished in my life? Where are the fruits of my labors? Where are my labors? Have I even found the “on” switch for productive activity? Has all my sense of OKness been delusional, hiding from myself the serious flaws that everyone else has obviously seen all along?

I grappled with these demons and won. I came out with the following conviction: No amount of personal achievement will ever make me immune from feeling terrible about myself. The voices may say, if only I would accomplish this; or if only I had developed that skill; or exercised the strength of character needed to actually complete that task, I would be worthy, and I could relax. But the voices offer false promise: those demons could still come to me no matter what peaks I scaled.

Conversely, no personal achievement or lack thereof can keep me from my innate worthiness as a child of God. I can be immune from feeling terrible about myself by leaning all of my being on the goodness of being itself – by trusting that the order of the universe, which keeps the planets in their right place, also keeps me in my right orbit, and I can relax in that.

Having won the fight, I emerged triumphantly into the sunshine. But a week or so later, I found myself back in the clouds again. The sunshine seemed as fleeting as actual sunshine in Seattle, instead of being the burning rock core that I needed it to be. And that’s where the waters of Meribah came in.

I found this quote in an address Mrs. Eddy gave in 1899: “The Christian Scientist knows that spiritual faith and understanding pass through the waters of Meribah here – bitter waters; but he also knows they embark for infinity and anchor in omnipotence.” On reading it, I immediately identified the bitter waters as the waves of despair that seemed to want to engulf me again. What I sensed from the passage was that the suggestion of despair may come with the territory, but that I don’t have to indulge in it. I can recognize it as a reminder to draw close to God – to cuddle close in consciousness to the wonder of being that is always there; to put aside my sense of needing to control or achieve, and draw my sense of who I am from what Life is.

When I looked up the waters of Meribah in the Bible, I found that they were waters that Moses struck from the rock for the Children of Israel, while they were complaining that God didn’t provide what they needed. The waters nourished them, but they were bitter because they showed that the Children of Israel hadn’t yet learned to trust God, and in that state of non-trust they wouldn’t be capable of perceiving, and therefore entering, the promised land.

So I see that from time to time I may again fail to see the ways in which my sustenance is provided, especially as I learn to crave that higher level of sustenance that is fed by healing Love. But I have this promise - that as long as I look to infinity for my understanding, I will pass through the waters safely.

Casting out the beam

Jesus taught, “first cast the beam out of your own eye so you can see clearly to cast the mote out of your brother’s eye.”

I’ve come to see that this is more than just a figure of speech telling me to pay attention to my own problems before criticizing others. It turns out it isn’t literally impossible for me to have a beam in my eye, and it is with great enthusiasm that I report that I have found out what the beam is, so now I can cast it out.

A beam is a structural member that holds up the floor and the roof of a building. The relevant structure here is my paradigm – my construct of the system of laws that govern my world. Everything I see is dependent on this construct – every deduction I make regarding cause and effect, every conclusion I make regarding what happened and why. And if a part of my construct is faulty, it will distort my vision, hampering my ability to see what’s what. It will be a “beam in my eye.”

So I found out what the beam in my eye is. It’s the notion that it’s possible for one person to be better than another, or for me to be a better or worse person based on my choices. I cast out the beam by realizing that this isn’t true.

There is nothing I can do to make myself a better person. There’s nothing I can do to make myself a worse person. There’s no way for me to be better than anyone else, or worse than anyone else. How does that make me feel? What does it mean?

It means there’s no need for me to ever criticize myself. There’s no need for me to make resolutions to be better. There’s no need for me to look to others to see if they’re doing better or worse than I am. There’s no need to feel anxious because maybe I haven’t done enough, or I haven’t done it well enough.

It is a big structural plank. Lots of things rest on it. Lots of things threaten to fall if I remove it. How can I get myself to be good if my behavior doesn’t matter? What motivation will I have to achieve anything? If I give up that plank, what makes me be good?

God makes me be good, just because God makes me that way. My being good is in gratitude, in joy, in delight – it is what I want. It’s not in trying to measure up, to be worthy, to earn God’s approval. God approves of me because God made me that way.

This was Job’s lesson: he thought God would be good to him if he was good. He needed to learn that God is good anyway, and that he was good because God made him that way; there was no way he could be otherwise. After he learned this lesson, he was healed.

The beam I get to cast out functions like a teeter-totter – giving the sense that one person can be up and another one down. In fact, no matter what we do, we are all of the same quality. We are each here in our nakedness, with all of our mistakes and failures, and all of our beauty, and all of our desire to be redeemed. We are all here with our love, and our loneliness, and our desire to be loved, and our desire to be holy. We are each the child of God.

One theological view says, “God loves you even though you are unlovable. This shows you how great God is.” Another says, “God loves you when you are good. Do well to be worthy of God’s love.” Both of those are just shadows of the truth, that God makes us lovable and good, and loves us that way.

If I can cast this beam out of my eye – this false paradigm that leads to comparison, then I will be able to see clearly to cast the mote out of my brother’s eye, for I will see him with compassion, and with oneness, and with love.


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