Why I am a Christian Scientist

I’m a Christian Scientist, not because it’s a beautiful theory. There are lots of beautiful theories, but life doesn’t take place in that ethereal ground.

I’m a Christian Scientist, not because it’s gotten me the good things in life. My life has had its good things and its struggles, like anyone’s.

I’m a Christian Scientist because, as I have come to see, the pure fulfillment and joy found in the presence of God, and in our relationship to God, is the only thing I ever want, the only thing that satisfies me.

God has infinite ways of making good known. God fills our days with joy in ways we can understand. The beauty of nature, of friendship, of strength, grace and health, are all expressions of the presence of God. If viewed materially, all these things can fail, but they are kept perfect by the knowledge that God is the law that holds them.

The material view is that these things - nature, friendship, strength, grace and health - are made up of complex balancings of forces - each of which is essentially mindless and self serving, but which somehow come together in a rare harmony. In this view, any shift in balance - in number or in circumstance, in mass, timing or force - can throw the whole thing off. So then great care must be taken to make sure everything is balanced, and the expectation is that perfection will only be glimpsed as a possibility, will never come fully forth. Also, when holding this view, I find it easy to end up at the place where I’m not even sure what the point of it all is.

Christian Science teaches me the spiritual view. It focuses my sight so that, as I practice, I can learn to perceive the law of God. I can feel myself and my world held in loving, all powerful arms, guided along vectors of harmony, danced together in perfect order and grace. I can experience the law of goodness in all aspects of my life - my health, my family, my occupation, my world.

I also find that Christian Science gives me a way to understand Christ. All of Christ’s teachings make sense and harmonize the Bible. Christ’s presence is a real thing that I can lean on. Why am I a Christian Scientist? What else could I be? Or, as Peter said to Jesus when he asked if they also would go away, ” Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.”

Prayer beyond words

It’s clearer to me these days that prayer is not words - that if I am trying to find words, or asserting words, even ones I know have truth in them - I’m not getting anywhere. I need to stop. I need to let the whole field of words clear out.

Sometimes I ask a question, like, “what does God know about this?” and then let myself be quiet and still, listening for the answer instead of trying to construct it from my own theory base. Theory is useless. It is the actual fact of the presence of Truth that can tell me what I need to understand.

I build on my experience of what Truth feels like - the fresh, open-air invigoration, the solid and calm reassurance, the unmovable strength of fact. I enter into the wide chamber of light, and let the light burn away all the dust on the edges. I know I’m really praying if I feel the “peace, be still” of Love, dissolving the anxious shoulder-set of feared inadequacy, gathering and bundling me, and whoever I’m thinking of, in the resolution of acceptance and approbation.

At our last spiritual formation gathering, Joyce led us in a reflection on the Lord’s Prayer. After having us listen to it sung, and sharing with us some prayers others had written following its structure, she gave us a piece of paper with each phrase of the prayer on a separate line, and space next to it for us to write our reflections. First I turned the paper over and wrote: no words. I wanted to avoid the much-trodden territory of intellectual thought on the prayer. I wanted anything I wrote to be the result of listening.

Then I turned the paper over and started in the middle, proceeding down and up, just when I heard something. She ended the exercise before I was done, but I still felt what I had was worth sharing. It went like this:

Perfect One
Determiner of everything
- really everything -
You are the Mind, the pattern, the One
And you choose to be - and make everything be - Love
In this warm chamber of light where all things move and love,
Your will is done.

Heaven over earth. Heaven gets to decide what is. Earth must reflect heaven.
You’re the one that knows everything, and You establish it.

You know what I need. You amply supply it. Let me not be so tied up in what I think I need that I can’t move forward. Let me listen and hear what You provide.

You know who I am. You have always known. Let me not presume to assert anything about myself. Let me let You do the talking. Let You speak for me.

Let me offer to each heart a forgiveness bigger than I have a right to give alone, but which I can give because it is Your truth. You love them. You always have. That’s all that matters. This comfort is Yours to give each of them. Let me just reflect this to them, whenever I can.

It’s not a prayer to say the words, but the words that came up expressed my prayer. Still, I need to be sure to insist upon the real thing. Words can be so seductive, especially when they’re pretty. Words can invoke an attractive drama, one in which I get to play the emotional role they assign - whether it is one of foundness or lostness, triumph or despair. Any emotion is a false floor. Communion lies deep beneath emotion, where the circuit connects silently, with unarguable brightness and authority.

Quiet thought

I’m learning to spend less time in the paper-surface layer of thought, where all the words are, and the reasons and justifications, the weavings of stories as to why people do this and that, and what they should do, and my opinion about things going on, and why I am right, and what this has to do with Universal Truth. I’m learning that there’s little to communicate to others from this layer - little that can help them, little that will lift us to communion with each other or the universe. Humor can be good from here, but that’s about it. Nothing serious.

Underneath that layer is the place of slow moving liquid, like magma, where bolts of bright light emerge from the heat of hope and desire for goodness. When that warmth can come up through my thoughts, it gives me genuine sustenance. It changes things, forming channels of conviction and strength, creating new structures, a place for the development of new soil which supports tender green growth.

If this warmth expresses itself in words, the words have weight and the power to solidly support. If these words bubble with mirth, the humor is sweet and unifying. If the words seek to comfort, the comfort is felt. And the words are for the here and now of their expressing - they can’t be cut and pasted into other uses and retain their power. If I want to be effective, if I want to be myself, I must let myself go back down to the magma layer, to be reheated and, once again, moved.

My friend Laurie and I connected on that level. We called it twii (initially from That Which Is Important, but later relying on the bright explosion of sound in the word twii itself). It was our practice to still ourselves and take the time, and allow the twii to emerge. We would look for the glow of the deep warmth in each other, and through its recognition, bring it out. We found that later, this work - the making of this connection - demanded of us deeper integrity in the way we thought about everything, and in the way we saw everyone.

More and more I’m finding that this is the only place to know anything, and that all petty and tragic discords are solved on this level. When I was first doing this work with Laurie, I wrote: not by will, but by willingness; not by figuring out, but by faith; not by expertise, but by grace. I’m still learning what this means. Right now I’m thinking: willingness takes me down to the magma, faith lets me dwell there, grace brings it up where it can heal the present moment. The word’s aren’t important. These ones work for me, right now. The meaning is in the deep layer underneath the words, where the inexorable light and heat of what we really are stills all cacophony and smoothes thought into shining peace.