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.