Having One God

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
- Exodus 20:3

If God were any less than All, this might be a problem. If there were God, and then some other things, not necessarily God but possibly good, the command would be asking us to choose. Asking us to give up some good things for what we might presume to be better things. Asking us, perhaps, to gamble, not knowing for sure if what we are giving up is worth what we’re giving it up for.

But if God is All, and God is good, then anywhere anything good is, it’s of God. There is no good anywhere that isn’t a result of God’s presence. In other words, and very basically, good is good. There is no bad good, no evil or forbidden good.

When God says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” it is a statement of utmost tenderness and conscientious care for us. It means, don’t go buying into the lie that there is ever a price in evil to pay for good - that in order to have good, you must suffer, or you must hurt someone, or you must sacrifice something that you love. Don’t believe that it is part of life to be sick, disappointed, miserable. False gods require human sacrifice. God is Love. Love always delivers good and not suffering.

So what of all the suffering in the world? It is from the tyranny of false gods. You can tell they are false because they speak with contempt in their voices. Moses told the Children of Israel to choose: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” He exhorted them to choose to know they were under the control of the God who is good, and that they never should settle for any other cause to control them.

Every one of us has the right to obey the first commandment, to have good be the only thing in our lives. The snapping jaws will respond with scorn that there is no way we can have that, that we have no right to ask for it, that we can’t have it because other people don’t have it. But the all-loving God is everpresent, and tells us that we, along with everyone else, can have all good.

Discussing Scriptures (thoughts on Isaac)

My friend Audrey was over the other day, telling me about her experience reading Torah at her little group’s Rosh Hashanah service. And how the tradition afterwards is to sit together and discuss, what does this mean? How does it apply to our lives now? She said often at Yom Kippur, which was coming up, the section read was the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. She said in one discussion group, someone had said, “Well, I think God was just wrong on this one.”

I’ve heard this before, in the context of, how could you worship a god who asked for human sacrifice, and especially of your own child. I said, check out what I’ve learned about this through my study of Christian Science. In the book of Genesis, the deity in the first chapter is called God, or Elohim. In the second chapter, it’s the Lord God, or Jehovah. (At this point we looked it up in the Hebrew, Audrey reminding me that they never spoke the name of Jehovah. We found it there, as I had said, starting with the 4th verse of Chapter 2. We found that Lord God in the Hebrew was actually Elohim Jehovah.)

Anyway, I said afterwards in Genesis the usage is mixed, but if you translate Lord God as the people’s idea of God, or their best understanding at the time of what God is, then a lot of things make more sense. If you know that God is Love, you would know that if Love said, “sacrifice your son to me,” it wouldn’t mean kill him. It would mean give up everything in your conception of him not based on love. Give up your ego, your human expectations, your material sense of paternity. Give this relationship to Love, and let love inform your entire understanding of your son and your relationship with him. But Abraham didn’t get it, because he didn’t fully understand the nature of God. So he thought God was telling him to kill his son.

I think the great hope in this story is that, because Abraham was willing to walk with God step by step, continually listening, he was able to understand enough about God in time to not do a terrible thing. I think if he had made an interpretation of what God meant and stopped listening at that time, it would not have gone well. But the nature of Abraham’s relationship with God was to do as God had said: “walk before me, and be thou perfect.” So this experience became for Abraham what it was intended to be, an occasion for him to learn more about the nature of God.

Another bout with the snapping jaws

I had a rough patch on a day last week, where a feeling of isolation and rudderlessness went down to tears. But even at the very depths of it, when my whole face was being pulled down - gravity suddenly inexorable, the wallow of tears and snot compelling - I found the inner voice to say, “This is the snapping jaws.” I felt, at that point, immediate release from the pull. I had to admonish myself a few more times, as further waves of sadness swept over me, and each time felt the same release.

My insides, it seems, were wound up in a story about neediness - needing others in my life to be strong so I could go blubbery, feeling that I couldn’t do so without the balance of the family falling around my ears. Noticing that I had not set up for myself, among family or friends, a safe place where I could dare to be needy. But the whole story belonged to the snapping jaws. I put it aside and helped my son set up his room, and I was fine.

Later I found myself thinking about a sentence from Mrs. Eddy’s message of 1902: “. . . conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can.” It feels very relevant to me at this time. (Here’s the whole quote: “Happiness consists in being and in doing good; only what God gives, and what we give ourselves and others through His tenure, confers happiness: conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can.”)

But I also noticed how effective it was, in the moments of deep tears, to tag the snapping jaws. The change it brought about was was physiological as well as mental. The overwhelming gravitational pull on my face was suddenly gone, as well as the compelling pull of the story that swept me into self-pity. I started thinking then, and have been thinking more, that it is like that for any disease - it can leave as quickly, when recognized as being merely the snapping jaws and nothing having to do with me. I begin to feel less incredulous about this. I start to remember that feeling of waking up from a dream, shaking myself into focus and being released from images I was sure were true. Yes, I recognize this. Healing works this way.

The Big Lie

In a radical departure from mainstream Christianity, Christian Science calls the story of Adam and Eve an allegory, the purpose of which is to help us tag faulty perceptions and correct false conclusions about cause and effect. When we buy into a faulty story about the nature of God (as a being which creates evil, or coexists with it) we get the Adam dream - a blighted view of life, a degraded sense of who we are. I call it The Big Lie.

 One thing the big lie says is, you have to till the soil.  To me this means always having to do something to make myself better.  Fix my body, fix my thought, improve myself, accomplish, achieve.  To try, through my efforts,  to go from a state of unworthiness to a state of worthiness.

But life isn’t about self-improvement. Nothing I do makes me better or worse. When I first considered this, I wondered how I would possibly be motivated to do anything good if it absolutely didn't matter.  Then I glimpsed that my motivation to be good comes from goodness itself - the nature of what I am.

Human thought tries to appropriate the I Am, and dress it in all kinds of garb of conditional worthiness.  When I saw Mrs. Eddy's instructions to throw out material thought, it used to sound to me like I was being asked to throw out all the goodness I see in nature, and people, and embrace some abstract concept.  But I now see that she is asking me to throw out the garb of conditions, the box of limitations that error tries to shove good into.

We all know what good is.  We know it by how we respond to it, resonate with it, desire it.  It is a huge thing to say that good is infinite, and in fact all that there is.

The big lie tries to say a couple of things:

* that if everything were good, we wouldn't appreciate it anymore - that we need evil or blandness to make good seem good to us.  Similarly, that if everything is good, goodness isn't such a great thing.  

* that good comes in limited packages, and you have to take very careful care of the packages or you will lose the good.  I had an image of goodness like all the sunshine that was pouring out, free to everything in the landscape, and evil saying, yes, that's very good.  Here, let me put it in this box for you so you can have it.  And then adding - make sure the box doesn't fall apart, and don't let anyone steal it, and be careful who you share it with, because you don't want to lose that good.

The big lie leads us to darkness and despair.

But there's no place for that.  Goodness really is the nature of the universe.  It includes each of us - what we think of as our insides as well as what we think of as our perception.  We can't own it or contain it or make it more or less by our presence.  But we are loved in it.  There's no contest between individuals to be the best or even to be reasonably accepted.  We are all of the One.

The Snapping Jaws

Now that I’ve heard the voice of God at least a few times, I’m finding it easier to not be fooled by other voices. The other voices, of course, say they are God, too - that is, they say they are important and of consequence - that I must listen to them and follow their chain of logic in order to get to some kind of goodness. But I can tell they are not God by their tone of voice. They tend to be scornful, indignant, belittling, angry. Or they are hurt, needy, betrayed. They want to make someone wrong - either me or someone else, or some “they”, or some system. They tempt me to argue with them, but if I argue with them, they have won, for to engage them is to say there’s a power apart from God.

So instead of arguing with them, I tag them. I call them “the snapping jaws.” (Mrs. Eddy calls them “animal magnetism.”) Then I can tell that, though they say otherwise, they are not God’s voice. They are not my voice; they are not someone else’s voice. They may snap and try to take bites out of me or others or our harmony, but they have no substance, so they can’t deplete me or anyone. They win for as long as I don’t recognize them as the snapping jaws. They win if I think someone else is being stupid or mean or insensitive. They win if I think I have to do something to fix someone or myself. But when I acknowledge God’s presence and the inherent perfection of being that comes from that fact, the snapping jaws shrivel up. Their tenacious grip on my attention falls away, and I no longer need to answer to them.

God is never disgusted or disappointed in me, or in any one of Her children. God doesn’t need to speak harshly to me to make me shape up. God is Love, and God’s voice is always loving. Love doesn’t need the manipulative tools of belittling words. Whether such words say they are my voice disapproving of others, or others’ voices disapproving of me, or me fed up with myself, they are not of God, so they have no life. They are the snapping jaws, and they can snap away at the air but they can’t touch me or anyone else. In the quiet that rises when they fall still, I can hear God’s lovely truth.

A little lower than the angels

Today, and last week, and a few other times in recent memory, I’ve been dazzled by bright glimpses of God’s love for me. I see it in this: God really wants me to do what it is I most deeply desire. He’s given me this thing that satisfies me deeply to do, and He guides me in its unfolding. I’m not on my own, and it’s not impossible. It’s not daunting, not something I might wish for but never be able to obtain. He gives me both the drive and the satisfaction, and He will give me the fruition as well.

It’s hard to describe how exciting this is, how it feels like flying, how it fills in every ancient anxiety with the ease of water shifting wet sand to fill a hole dug at the beach. All those years of feeling I just didn’t have motivation to do the things I thought I should be doing, and secretly fearing I didn’t have the foundational knowledge to make good on things I believed I had talent in, simply answered by this: a thing I’ve always loved to do, now with all the caveats erased, so I can experience the pure joy of striving to perfect it.

A little lower than the angels - I often wondered at this. Why is this said, what does it mean?
(“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.” Ps 8:2-5)

In the context of these new glimpses I think I have an idea about it. Angels, I suppose, in their totally un-selfed identity, don’t have a need for any particular personal fulfillment. Their office is to bless, and any blessing will do - will give them the satisfaction they need to continue to thrive. I, though I may have deluded myself otherwise, am not like that. I have a particular identity which includes a set of custom-made loves - patterns that must be met for my fulfillment. They include the need to love particular people and to do particular things. I needed to be married and to have children. Now I need to write.

Thinking back on my life (rising at 2:30 AM to write, finding myself unable to sleep) I find other imperative needs that drove me with similar joy: the need to teach; the desire, in its time, to work at Antioch University; the impulsion, in high school and college, to draw, and to learn languages. Even these drives, though I have mourned those which, like lost children, never matured to mastery, were gifts to me. Gifts from the Father, who created me with these nodes of need wherein I could experience a deep and very individualized love. God’s love for me is not just a general one, poured indifferently like rain or sunshine. It is precise and infinitely tailored, with utmost care, for me specifically.

Which leads me to understand the nature of love, that it is like that for every person, every bird, every being. I used to wonder what was the advantage of being made lower than something else. Now I’m beginning to learn. Humility allows me to accept this great gift of love. Awe floods In as I begin to understand it.

Divine Love

“Divine Love always has met, and always will meet, every human need.”
-Mary Baker Eddy

I learned to recite this as a childhood table grace, in sing-song voice, with no thought of meaning. Later I tried to put more understanding into my thought of the sentence. I knew divine Love was a name for God. “God always has met, and always will meet, every human need.” Really? I hadn’t seen it yet. I tried to conjure faith to understand, sought miracles as proof. But it was hard to keep the sing-song out of the sentence, and God, though I knew the seven synonyms, one of which is “Love,” seemed like a name for someone I didn’t know very well.

Then I came to know more of love. How love fills me, sounds me, makes me ring like crystal, sea-changes me. All previous substances removed, replaced by the substance of love. How love is the fulfillment of all my desire, the sure source of boundless joy, my full sense of purpose, my sufficient reward. Everything. Through the experience of love, I came to know more of Love. Love as the only cause of all being. Love as Life itself. Love as the only reason anything would ever have for springing into existence and continuing to be.

So it came to make more sense. Of course divine Love meets my needs: it is what I need. If I have it, I have everything. There’s nothing I crave besides it. And if it is also the causative law of being, it will be sure, because it loves me, to see that I feel the meeting of every perceived need - that I have ample sustenance and shelter and purpose and fulfillment. That I get to give what my heart knows I need to give in this world, and that it will be received and valued. The only way for me to understand the sentence is to feel the present touch of divine Love. Then it’s obvious. Divine Love does meet every human need.

Desire is Prayer

“Desire is prayer, . . “
-Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p.1.

I see it - all these people, here at Matthews Beach, are full of prayer. That very large man with the very large sandwich, opening his mouth wide to receive - in prayer. That woman stretching herself out in the sun. The little girl, running down to the beach with every step pushing more upward than forward, a clear desire to fly - in prayer. The young men posturing, playing frisbee and talking in tones designed to carry to nearby females; the young families shepherding their children; the girls on the swimming platform - all full of desire, all in prayer.

Desire is prayer, and prayer is the soul’s flight toward goodness, the homing urge that draws us through our days. Desire is the engine of our motion, what gets us up in the morning and makes us keep doing our daily tasks. Or sends us off in a new direction. All of us are full of desire, and so, full of prayer.

Divine Life answers prayers. Everything we most deeply wish for is just our longing for what we know we are - beloved, accepted, perfect children of our creator. Reflections of Love. We may chase after our desire with a hamburger, or mark it with a cigarette, or pine for it as a love of our own. In the end the place we’re trying to satisfy is the same for all of us. We all deserve it, and we all will find it.