Splash of Spirit

Contribution, The Snapping Jaws, and the Economy of Spirit

2011-03-03T16:06:00.001-08:00

Recent events have shown me a surprising truth: that which I hunger for, more than anything now, is to contribute. The objects of the verb are vague; contribute to my community, my world; contribute something, anything that makes a difference for good. II don’t think it even matters whether my contribution is acknowledged - just that I know that it is strong.

Another surprise to me is the conviction that this is what everyone wants. It’s so opposite to what we’re sometimes told - that we want to receive, to have; that giving is an obligation, something you do in order to get. Yet the desire for fame points to the urge to contribute - traditionally people receive fame because they are good at something, appreciated for something they have been able to give.

You might think that communities would welcome with joy the contributions offered by each of its members. Indeed, that is how I’ve always hoped to be received. But I found that there is another factor at work, which I recently realized is an effect of the Snapping Jaws (see my posts on Sept 9th and 16th, 2010).

Before I found the co-op preschool for my kids that I loved, the one which made me feel like I and my kids all had unique gifts, which were appreciated by the community, I joined another co-op preschool. In that preschool I got the feeling, after a while, that the teacher disliked me. It was a sense of slow-dawning coldness, a sense of impatience with anything I might have to say during the parent education sessions that she ran. Much later, I considered that it might have been because of how I filled out the registration form. There was a box for my interests, or what I might have to contribute, and I had jammed it full of different things, using tiny handwriting to fit it all in. I was eager to contribute. She probably felt I was showing off. My conclusion then was that I had been naive to assume people wanted to know what I had to offer - that what they really wanted was for me to know what they had to offer. But now I think the culprit was the snapping jaws.

Here’s the anatomy of it: We all want to contribute. We all want our contributions to be met with joy and appreciation. So far so good. But the snapping jaws say “your contribution isn’t good enough. Look, it’s not nearly as good as other people’s.” If I buy that, then it is suddenly in my interest that other people’s contribution not be as good as mine. So the snapping jaws, now speaking as my voice, say to me: “Their contribution is not as good as yours.” Which, if I buy it, makes me look at the contributions of others not with love, but with criticism. And I may be surprised also to find that my efforts to contribute are not met with the appreciation I had hoped for, because of the same snapping jaws. All these people - loving people, good people - people like myself, who would like to think good of everyone, are suddenly transmitters of unkindness.

Snapping jaws try to wind me up in an argument about who is being unkind or unfair in expectations and perceptions. But my rule is, don’t be drawn into the fight. Tag the snapping jaws, step back, and see what God knows about the situation. Which is the economy of Spirit.

The economy of Spirit is simple and clear: We are designed to contribute what each other need. We are designed to feel deep gratitude for what others give, and deep gratitude for the fact that our contribution meets their needs and evokes gratitude in them. There’s no place in the economy of Spirit for doubt about our gifts or criticism of others’. There’s no place in the economy of Spirit for bad economic times, or despair of not having a venue for our contribution, or not being provided with what we need. This truth is ours to prove, through prayer and through refusing to transmit the lies of the snapping jaws.

The Golden Rule

2011-02-01T22:31:00.000-08:00

At the end of our church meeting tonight, we repeated the Sixth Tenet: “And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us, which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.”

So I let myself mean it: This is a solemn promise.
OK. I’ll watch. I’ll watch each moment.
I’ll pray (along with all the others here) for the Mind of Christ (what must that be like?)

What would I want to have others do unto me? - Oh. I would want them to be really glad to have me here. I would want them to feel touched, moved, lifted by my presence. So can I do that to others? Can I allow myself to be touched, moved, lifted by them? By each one in particular? As I contemplate it, it feels like heaven.

The Gift of Now

2011-01-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

My sister (the bicycle lady) responded to my two last posts. I think the essence of her comments is: you have to work with what you have. If you don’t have the floating lift of joy, you have to power on anyway. If you’re not feeling completely holy about your family, you still need them, and they need you, and it is a comfort.

I think she’s right. She brings up a question that must trouble all seekers of a spiritual view: what to do with the messiness of now? So you know Spirit is the only thing that sustains - how does that wash the dishes and pay the bills? How does it intervene in an awkward conversation? How does it impart grace?

Here is what I think: although I may say that spiritual sustenance is not found in material things, it’s always true that spiritual sustenance is found right here. In every single right here, in the opportunity of every moment. Whatever I’m seeing right here and now, therefore, has the ability to provide me with deep spiritual sustenance. A kitchen full of dirty dishes? Check. There’s the symphony of sound, the clanks and pings, or there’s the music I put on to accompany my work, or simply the opportunity to move in grace. My son? Check. I can be delighted by Spirit revealing itself to me in his unique being.

I have an image of what this looks like. It’s of a bright light released, rising up from a person (like plasma in my picture), an unbelievable illumination. In my vision, every individual in every moment has the ability to be that node of illumination, that place of opening. The opening has the feeling of incredible richness. I have examples in mind: the way my father-in-law can, in a certain moment, feel deeply loved, uniquely appreciated, so his spirit floods with a sense of comfort and gratitude for the simple care provided him. That comfort is the light-release of that moment, similar to the looks of joy on the faces of the dying men suddenly cared for by Mother Teresa’s ministries, in the movie I saw about her. Another example is the spark between two young people (or people of any age) awaking the possibility of love.

Here’s the big secret: love is not proprietary. We may think it’s only released when all the stars are aligned and all the circumstances are perfect. But any moment, any person can release it. This is the source of spiritual sustenance - the release of those plasma flows of love. And though I make it sound exotic, it is something I have known throughout my life - in my love, as a teenager, of little kids; in my love of my own kids; in my attraction to music and moments of beauty. I’m just learning it’s more universal than I thought.

So for me there’s no asceticism, no denial of anything present. My practice instead is to look at each moment and ask to see the gift of now - the light-release that lifts me up in joy.

What Sustains Me

2011-01-24T22:45:00.000-08:00

Today I had my writing group at Angeline’s. (I show up at the homeless women’s day shelter and see if anyone wants to join me for writing, and we publish what they write in The Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women). My friend Janice joined me, and she had a suggested topic: What Sustains Me? So I wrote the following:

What sustains me? I was thinking about that this morning, wide awake at 5:30 when I needed to get up, aware of my husband’s weariness, the sheer inertia against which he pushed, after a restless night, to start another day. I could feel the weariness a little, but I waited for the buoyant hope to lift me, float up the sunken place behind my eyes, give me the lift to move me through my morning duties.

I don’t know what I’d do, I thought, if I didn’t have it. Don’t know how I’d function, day after day, if I just had to talk myself into moving. Mine is not the fortitude of great determination that powers my sister day after day, fighting off anxiety through bold activity. My movement is more of a floating, held up by a sense of life’s basic joy. I pray for this for my husband and for my sister, not because they need it to function, but because they have a right to joy and peace as they go through their days.

I am sustained by the fundamental joy of life. I am sustained by the sense of goodness - goodness as the law in which we all operate. And I am sustained by Spirit.

I see Spirit in the release of light and comfort that comes when anyone is seen for what she or he is - when their elemental divinity is recognized, or recognizes another. A single smile can unlock it, and the tiniest recognition of that divinity can sustain people for a long time. I try to imagine: what would it be like if we all got used to a lot more? What if we got used to loving and being loved as the baseline for interactions, instead of that rare thing to be occasionally obtained? I think we would save the world.

The Network of Our Support

2011-01-20T21:55:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of this year I started to feel the urge to think big, comprehensive thoughts, to lay them out on great sheets of paper, and they would cover The Network of Our Support, That Which We Rely On. It came to me clearly the next morning while I was praying - a rolling list of networks, things we try to put in place to make our lives happy, safe, fulfilled. Church was an example. I don’t generally think of church that way - I usually think about it in spiritual terms - but at the Religious Leaders Lunch I started seeing how for many people it could function primarily as a network you could join for safety and support. If you’re in the hospital, a pastor will come visit you. If you’re a shut-in, church members might come sing you Christmas carols, and otherwise you might find purpose doing such things for others.

I realized that morning that each of the networks could be thought of in spiritual or material terms: marriage, as a spiritual connection or as a financial/social arrangement; career, as a calling in which your deepest being is fulfilled or as an agreement to do certain things in exchange for a name, a recognized place, an economic niche, etc; family, as a holy chord of deep love or as a set of people to count on for company and to keep you from falling through the cracks. I reflected that in each case (and I also considered friends, community, government) the spiritual sense was satisfying, and the material sense, though it might initially seem important, would ultimately feel like a death trap. So I realized, as I was praying, that it was pointless to put my weight into the material manifestations of all those things I feel we need (we being I, my children, my husband) because all the good of them is provided in the spiritual experience, which is already established, and which will, because it must, make itself tangibly manifest in our lives. So. No need for great sheets of paper. A simple clarity small enough to fold up and put in my pocket.

Or, to say the same thing in another way (from my Daily Sonnet discipline):

The focus of my early prayer revealed
A simple answer to an urgent query
What harbors me, what shelters, what will heal
All doubts about security and purpose.
While doubtless through each mortal net I’ll tumble
Not church, not home, not job can keep me safe
With Spirit’s strong support I’ll never stumble
Knowing my Principle will bring me sure relief
For everyone I’ve diligently cherished
In my persistent early morning prayer
And claimed for them a good that wouldn’t perish
Each need is met with Spirit’s constant care
One sweep of Truth enfolds us all in grace
The arms of Love, a radiant embrace.

Having One God

2010-10-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

“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)

2010-09-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-08T06:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-09-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

“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.

The First Commandment

2009-05-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

The first commandment is:

Love Life with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

I know what this looks like, and what it feels like. I know how it feels to love life, and to be around people who love life.

It doesn’t have anything to do with their belief systems, or their occupations, or their circumstances, or their activities. It is a saying-yes, open-hearted embrace of everything that’s here. It’s a habit of paying attention to the needs of the moment, of taking the time to care.

There may be many directions on how to live a good life, many different interpretations of what that means. But they shouldn’t even be looked at first.

The first commandment comes from Life itself, not from anyone else’s instructions. So I have resolved to not ask any other source about it first. I might ask second, to hone and clarify my loving of Life. But first I will pay attention to Life, and to keeping the first commandment.

The Hand of Love II

2009-04-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

It’s very important to me to feel the dimension in which Love holds everything. Holds it in precise harmony of time and space, moves it in ways which would seem impossible in fewer dimensions - so that everything moves freely and nothing collides. I know that the lines I have always drawn on things - my estimations of where things have been and where they are going, and why, and what should be done about it - are in fewer dimensions than the things exist in. Thus my estimations have always been wrong. They’ve seemed compelling and true, but they’ve led to conclusions short of the ones Love would make. They’ve led me to accept the inevitability of discord, the necessity of clashes over time, resources, and attention. I find great relief in letting Love do the defining.

Love makes room for everything, everyone. Love has time to hear every story. Love knows how to release every thought from the worry that says there is no way out of this one. Love gives us each our custom-made reassurance that we are what we’re supposed to be, and we can always have what we need.

In the dawning of the morning
Rays of light stream like combs through the trees
Freeing each branch from its background
Lifting sight
Inspiring the chorus of the birds

In the dawning of the morning
The fingers of Love reach every dreaming thought
Warming each molecule
Enlivening joy
Tuning the chorus of the Word

Musical Waves

2009-04-23T20:56:00.000-07:00

Eric and I were sitting at Matthew’s Beach and I said to him, listen to the waves lapping on the beach and against the wall - try to hear what music you can from them. Then I listened myself, and I found that they sounded musical, instead of random, as I laid their sounds on a rhythm that depicted the grid of waves out on the water. It was a 12-8 rhythm - or a pair of six-beat measures.

I’d tried before to hear music in the waves, and was brought up short because the waves didn’t break rhythmically - the pause between the breakings would always be unpredictable. My attempts to find melody would lurch and fall back like the waves, and slap against each other. Now with a rhythmic background underlying them, the waves brought interesting highlights of melody and rhythm - often coming in on the two- or three-count of the beat. And different waves could finish their pattern while others joined in, overlapping - I could imagine setting up an orchestration on Eric’s music composition software, where different instruments would follow the tune of different waves, and others would hold the grid pattern that I could see spreading out across the water.

I noticed again the next time that the fast cycle of threes - two or four three-beat pulses - was a pervasive part of the wave’s rhythm. I wondered if it was just me imposing that on them, so I tried to think of them in 4-4 time. They would accept a four pulse, but within each pulse there was still a three-pulse. I wondered if it was related to waves being made from circles, and circles being associated with the number six.

Riding home, the music stayed with me, and I thought about rhythm as the matrix upon which melody is laid out - matrix being the net upon which ideas can be hung, what stretches out the possible, upon which what is can then develop. I thought about how the word matrix comes from the word that means mother. But mostly I listened to the music, the memory of the wave music mixed with the bicycle’s rhythms.

Today when I rode to Matthew’s beach and sat up on the lifeguard’s seat, I heard the waves singing to me. I didn’t need to construct the music or think about its underlying rhythm - they just sang, and I listened and watched the dance of blues and almost-whites and dark green, the interlacing of transparency and sheen, on the water.

Riding home, accompanied by the music, I thought about resonance - how it feels to vibrate with the music - having it awaken places inside of me and define their chambers, feeling alerted from my core up through the place behind the roof of my mouth, feeling harmonized, aligned. And I thought about Love as the matrix - the rhythmic background that arranges everything in its proper place and time, so it can sing.

Changing time

2009-04-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

We saw an old star trek episode the other day, in which a star-ship fell through a rift in time and thereby altered the timeline of the Enterprise and everyone in it. Instead of having been at peace, they now had been at war for twenty-two years. One of the crew was able, faintly, to perceive that something had changed and was now not right, and based on her urgings, they sent the other star-ship back through the time rift, and things returned to how they had been.

I found myself thinking about this later. There wasn’t any need, after they returned to the “true” timeline, for them to rehabilitate their thought, to get used to the different way of thinking about things entailed in a peaceful mission. Only the one character, a mystical sort, had any inkling that things had ever been otherwise. I thought, this is often the way it is when healing takes place in human experience. It isn’t just a shift of experience within a timeline to something more favorable. Such a shift might hardly be called healing, since memory of the bad past and fear of its return would be the context of the present. On the other hand, a shift of the whole timeline would remove the bad past, the present flavor of it, and the sense that it is in the realm of proven possibility, and could happen again. I think it’s true that real healing moves not just the bad thing but the whole line of possibility that claimed to justify its presence.

For example, one time when I had an immediate healing of tonsillitis (after quite a time of suffering) it came with the flooding thought: “you can’t be incompetent - you’re a perfect child of Christ!” The healing of the physical condition didn’t involve the diagnosis of the tonsillitis as an outgrowth of feeling incompetent and a regime to try to change that thought and thus relieve the pain. It was much more like a shift in the whole timeline - I couldn’t be incompetent because my source held me in perfection, and I had never been otherwise, either in thought or in body. With that realization the whole condition changed - my body became well and my sense of myself was improved at the same time.

I was recently praying about addiction. I contemplated how all desire belongs to God - that we can’t be made to desire something that’s not good for us, and that our being is perfect, unfallen, innocent. I repudiated the notion of a fallen man, or one whose timeline included, in a past however distant or apocryphal, an ancester tempted to do something that wasn’t good for her. There never was a timeline (or set of conditions) in which anyone could become separated from the pure leadings of what’s good, which are part of our rightful connection with God.

When I woke up the next morning, it felt like the world had shifted a little. The sweet innocence I had perceived in my prayers seemed to have sifted into everything. It was as if, at least a little bit, the timeline had changed. Not that things had become more innocent, but that they were found to have always been so. Even in myself I felt free of the compulsion to grab my computer and check my email first thing. I thought of how the whole notion of addiction, regardless of particular substance, regardless of how pervasive it may seem to be, really didn’t make sense for the possessors of the one Mind.

It occurs to me that many such shifts have happened in my lifetime. I think we parent better - people understand positive discipline more, and the behaviorist, punitive model that I grew up with is not assumed to be the only way of looking at things. I think we work together better - there is an understanding, at least in some places, of the benefits of cooperation and mutual appreciation over competition and jealousy. So I think it’s possible for the world to continue to change in this way - not through revolution but through quiet leavening of thought; not by taking a major turn of behavior but by having the whole timeline - the whole set of assumptions of what always has been - shift underneath us.

Cast Party

2009-04-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

As I was riding my bike yesterday, I noticed a change in feeling towards people I encountered, especially people who might be around my age. I noticed that I feel towards them as I might feel towards fellow members of the cast after a show was over, when we were relaxing in some festive room, celebrating. Whatever role we each had had to play, we had taken off our costumes now, and were simply together, in the commonality of our collective effort and abiding humanity.

So I no longer cared if this was a high powered executive, or a humble worker, or someone with a successful family, or someone who felt all alone in the world. Whatever things had gone on in each of our lives, I sensed that we had had high points and falls, deep loves and deep lessons, things we cared a lot about and things we had let slip. Probably none of us felt totally content with our performances, but now we were beginning to glimpse that it didn’t matter anyway. We could celebrate life, accept each other in the room of those who had finished playing the game.

Not to say we weren’t still living, not to say the intensity and beauty of our lives were passed, or that we were coasting rapidly towards a finish. It’s not life, but the game, that’s over - the game of trying to measure up, to be good enough, to have a plausible story that we could tell. We now knew that no one was worse, and no one was better, that it was good to help each other, and to strive for honesty in all things. That we didn’t need a story as much as a willingness to listen, and we didn’t need things or accomplishments to define who we were.

As I said, all of this was just a feeling in my mind as I rode by and looked at the other people on the trail. But I found it made me feel easier among them, just as I’ve felt easier, lately, in other venues. And I thought, I can invite anyone into this room of celebration. They don’t even have to be old enough. If they are young, or their career is, maybe there’s something that I, or someone else in the room, can give them to help them on their way. And if they need to be celebrated, they will have come to the right place.

Serenity Dog

2009-04-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I see signs from too far away to quite read them, interesting suggestions come to mind. The other day as I walking home from the bus stop I saw a sign on someone’s gate and it said (as my mind suggested to me) “Serenity Dog.” It was only two steps before I could tell that it actually said “Security Dog,” but in those moments I got an image that I liked enough to keep thinking about it as I walked home.

A serenity dog would make sure that everyone who set foot on the property was at peace. It would guard the state of peace with a kingly authority, an unassailable dignity. People who walked in would find their anxieties melting away, and people who lived there would find their lives unfolding in a delightful, unhurried order.

I told my husband about this thought, and he said it was sort of like a few places in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, like the home of Tom Bombadil or the place of Beorn, or even the elves’ kingdom, where the travelers would feel, at least for a time, that their troubles were left on the outside, and they were safe within.

It is a quality that every home should have, and a being that could ensure it would be much more valuable than a security dog. Come to think of it, serenity could be ensured by a dog about as well as security could.

Which reminds me of something that happened today. My daughter is traveling in a foreign country, and early this morning went, with two other girls - her cousin and friend - to a very remote area, renowned for its beauty and biological diversity. Last night I started to get a niggling concern about their plans, in terms of three girls traveling on their own to a place where there would be little, if any, cell phone contact, etc. Though I told myself that for certain my worry was unfounded, I still felt the need to pray. It occurred to me that safety could not be based on location, and that if I had the fear that any place or any person could be unsafe, this needed my prayers.

So I thought about the fact that there was no place that, by virtue of being where it was, could guarantee anyone feeling safe. If I had demons in my mind, even a place as benign as my suburban back yard could be terrifying. From this I concluded that the one place of safety is Mind - that Mind proclaims safety in every place. Then, since Mind is the center at every place, safety in every place is as certain as it is here, and I can be free of fear for myself and for my daughter at the same time.

I kept thinking about this to strengthen my conviction of the safety of my daughter and of every one of God’s ideas. I considered that the power of good is always unfolding, and there is no contrary power that can stand up against it. I considered that God wouldn’t make any of Her ideas vulnerable, but would supply each one with everything needed to be safe.

We eventually got an email from my daughter saying that all is perfect. But I continue to hold to my new insight about the safety of everyone, provided by Mind, Love, the maker of all of us. So maybe I don’t need a serenity dog. Maybe instead I will contemplate the non-location-based imperative for serenity everywhere (and security, too, for that matter), based on the fact that Mind, Love, is the center in every place.

Why I am a Christian Scientist

2009-03-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

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.

Taking thought

2009-02-21T13:02:00.001-08:00

I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. Jesus’ query in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:27) “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?”

A cubit is about a foot, so the answer to this would be obvious: of course I can’t decide to make myself a foot taller. The implied conclusion is startling. If I can’t make myself taller by thinking about it, why should I think I have the responsibility for doing anything else about myself? Why would I think I would be created - out of the whole cloth of thought, an expression of the infinite Mind, and then be left with the responsibility of finishing myself? If Mind could make me with this much intricacy, why leave it up to me to determine how strong, how fit, how beautiful I am? Why would Mind make me weak in the midsection, tight in the hamstrings, stiff in movement, or awkward in social situations? Why should there be a battery of things I need to work on in myself to make myself better?

It was a concept that was hard for me to give up - that my life was a daily challenge to improve myself - mentally, socially, physically. I found myself confronted with the concern of what would happen if I didn’t mind these things: I would become a slob, less and less able to move as I wanted to. I would be uninteresting, unattractive. My life would be empty. I confronted the same concern in raising my kids: if I didn’t keep on them to eat well, exercise well, and learn new things all the time, I would be consigning them to inferior lives.

I’ve been trying on a new approach. It is to find the centered stillness that opens up to the vastness of being, to dwell in “the secret place” - the consciousness of the One, and how it controls everything through love. I let myself feel the central order, and the lovely dance that unfolds in all living things - each in itself and intertwining with all others. I realize that God (good) governs the whole thing, giving us each our movement and our power to move, our grace and our graciousness. I let go of thinking I can do anything to orchestrate events, and instead give myself over to the movement of Spirit in me.

Spirit is not inert, so reflecting Spirit, I will be active. Love is not isolated, so reflecting Love, I will be in warm and dynamic interaction. Soul is not ungainly, so reflecting Soul, I will be enough, in my being. I don’t need to take thought for myself. And I don’t need to take thought for my kids, or train them to take thought for themselves. I can let go and notice how Mind is gently putting us all in our perfect place.

I’m seeing good results from this approach. My family is more harmonious, our lives together happier and more graceful. I find myself able to move with a new ease - in walking, in dancing, in interacting with people. And I’ve found a fountain of energy - relaxed, powerful, and full of joy - in surrender to the action of Life.

2009-02-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

In the last two days I felt the Christ leading me.
I.
I started off on my bike ride, feeling a little unsettled at the aborted get together I was now not going to have with my friend. My erstwhile friend, I thought. She had reserved the right to cancel if she got too busy, but she hadn’t called me, and I hadn’t been able to reach her. So I decided to just take a bike ride, and was happy about that, because it was a good day for it. I came back just after I’d started because I’d forgotten my cell phone, and decided to check my email one more time. There was the message from her, saying, sorry, I just can’t. Maybe things will slow down next quarter. I hope all is well. Take care.

As I rode off, I contemplated my response. Delete. Just delete - no response. I tried to reestablish connection, but it’s simply not a priority for her. Let it go. And I thought of responding: Whatever. Just that. Then she would know I was hurt, which would be incomprehensible to her, and stupid of me. Bridge burning. Then I collected myself, I reminded myself that I’m willing to be led by the Christ, willing to let go of my own interpretation and see things in whatever way made sense. And the word came to me - I am in charge of your life. I am the source of all that you need. I arrange all relationships, and you don’t have to worry about it.

As I thought further, it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t the right time for that get together. Not because of dates or schedules, but because my thought wasn’t right for it. The day before I had walked with another friend, who had asked me about this relationship. I had accounted some of the things that I had learned from it, some of the way I had let myself be hurt by it, and the time it had taken me to get over it. I realized that, though I may have had a clear thought when I tried to arrange the get together, I was now at a different place, a kind of a tentative, vulnerable but guarded state, hoping for acceptance.

So I let my thought be lifted. I let myself feel the enveloping care of Spirit, wrapping me up, giving me power and light. I let myself feel the gentle infusing of the Christ, like soft, sweet rain, aligning all relationships. Showing that love is the only thing that ever makes sense, and that in love, there’s no tally about whose turn it is to give, or what an outside observer would see as just. In every case, there’s one opportunity for me, and that’s to bring forth whatever Love creates in this moment. Sometimes it will seem miraculous; sometimes it will just seem like the right touch. Always it will make me feel impossibly blessed, awed and grateful, alive in a way I hadn’t thought could be.

Then I knew the right response to the email: OK. Maybe we’ll reconnect at some point when the time is right. love, Wendy. No need for me to outline how that connection would be established, or if it would. Just to let it be, with everything else, under the sweet alignment of that which gives us all everything we need.

II.
My daughter was running late. She had been up late the night before, making preparations for the student literary evening at her school - practicing her piece, making cookies. Now she was trying to get it all together. I was taking up some of the slack, making her sandwich, making a snack for her to eat after school while they prepared. My son came down a little early and flopped in the chair. It was my daughter’s day to put the rabbit out, and I thought it would be really helpful if he would do it for her that once. He wouldn’t.

I reminded myself what I was learning, that there are always two sides to human opinions but neither of them can provide what the people yearn for. So I didn’t press my son about the rabbit, and I encouraged my daughter not to do so either. But I didn’t quite reach the place of understanding - I found myself feeling a bit annoyed with my son, and even speaking to him a little shortly when he asked me to do a last thing for him in the moments when I was trying to get everyone out the door. After they left I remembered.

The only thing anyone ever wants is love. They may learn that the way to reap the greatest feeling of love is to do kind things for others. But there are some times when we all just want to be loved. If my son wasn’t feeling compelled to be kind to his sister, the remedy was for him to feel more loved. There wasn’t any need for me to go down the path about whether I was neglecting his training not to try to make him be kind. It’s impossible to make someone be kind, anyway. The only thing he could learn from was my example, and shrill demands that he be nicer were at the least hypocritical. I saw how, once again, the Christ comes down between all human opinions and stances, neutralizing them, diffusing them, and giving that which everyone really wants but no one, without that touch of unjudging love, knows how to get.

III.
I was praying about the Middle East, Israel and Palestine particularly. There is so much screaming about who is wrong and what the other side needs to do so that things can move forward. I may have my strong human opinions about it, but human opinions are useless. The Christ is the only thing that can solve the problem. The Christ, defined as “the true idea voicing good, . . . speaking to the human consciousness,”* is an impulse to individual thought which takes the quantum leap beyond all the human prerequisites for peace (things the other party needs to change) and shows each person, right where they are, how to love. The result may be an act of miraculous courage or wisdom. It may be a very simple step. It may come from one person, or another. It may be a quiet uprising that sees a way through that no-one ever thought of. It won’t be because one person is better than another, and the ones who make the difference won’t hold themselves up as virtuous. No one will be asked to pay for the good that comes. It will simply be what makes sense. When human opinions are set aside and the Christ is allowed to speak, the result is peace.

*Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 332.

Lesson on Love

2009-01-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

There’s a man I visit in jail each Monday. I go and read the Christian Science Bible Lesson* to him. We usually have very little small talk, and he doesn’t tend to have anything he wants to discuss with me. I just come in and read the lesson, and he listens.

This Monday when I read the lesson, feeling how it might feel to him, it seemed, to me, the most tender message I could possibly deliver. It is a lesson that makes it very clear that we can be forgiven, and spells out how it happens, and how comprehensive a forgiveness it can be.

It’s not a thing I’ve thought about that often, not having committed a heinous crime - the tremendous hope that comes with the prospect of forgiveness, the tremendous lifting and redemption it can bring. But I thought of it this time as something that made all the difference - to me, to everyone I know and love, and to everyone I don’t yet know. Imagine being forgiven! - the slate wiped clean from all the things that niggle as regrets - times I’ve said something stupid, times I’ve failed to understand someone else, acts of arrogance. Also from all suspicions of being unworthy - clumsy, weird, ungainly, ungraceful, uncool, unlovable. Being totally forgiven would mean that any of the things I’ve ever done or been that I have regretted, and also any things I was unaware of but which other people held against me - would have no more weight - no ability to pull me down, no ability to determine anything about who I am and how I will act. Being forgiven means being able to define myself anew, as the beloved of God.

I then thought about what it means to be able to forgive others the same way. It means to let go of anything I’ve held against them - all my annoyance, impatience, indignation, all my feeling that I need to find some way to change them, any hindrance to my simply loving them purely. What a freedom for me! No obligation to judge or hold back my affection to “encourage” better behavior. No need to decide how I’m going to feel about them. The fact that they are forgiven lets me merely love them - so easy! - and see what God has given me to see in the moment of our interaction.

When I was reading the lesson in the jail, the man I was visiting would often be looking down, so I couldn’t see his face. But sometimes he would look up, and sometimes I saw moisture in his eyes. Whether that was from deep feeling or sleepiness, I can’t say. But I had the deep feeling, and still do. I feel deeply loved from the reading of this lesson, miraculously forgiven, and greatly uplifted from the forgiveness of others.

*to read this week’s lesson on the subject of Love, visit a Christian Science Reading Room or see the ebiblelesson at spirituality.com.

Waves

2009-01-06T14:56:00.000-08:00

I saw a squirrel running through the back yard a few weeks back. I noticed that it moved in a wave - its tail undulated with the same movement its body made while leaping from front feet to back feet, curling and springing. It was as if it were moving through an invisible standing wave that extended forward and back from its track.

I started thinking about other things that move in waves - herds of animals I’ve seen in videos, snakes (though their wave is sideways), wondering what law of grace it is that makes them move that way, and wondering if humans, with our cross-lateral gait, also move in waves.

Some time later I was swing dancing. I had the opportunity to dance with many different partners, and several of them were quite good dancers. It pleased me that I was able to hang with them, that my skill as a follow was such that I was able to move as one with them, though (in most cases) we had never danced together before. It occurred to me later that it was a kind of a wave function - being enough in tune with the music and the particular way my partner had of holding me and moving, that it was natural to follow in the instant grace with which a wave moves.

Today I saw, on another blog, a video of Stacy Westfall riding her horse with no bridle or saddle. The blog writer, Sandi Justad, http://newcloth.blogspot.com/ talked about how it illustrated oneness of horse and rider, and how this could reflect our oneness with God. I agree with her, and I also saw the action of waves.

My experiences on horseback are few, and for the most part, unsatisfying. I remember my tendency to bounce as soon as the horse started to move any faster than a walk. I’ve found it mystifying how people could stay seated firmly in the saddle. Here, this woman, without even a saddle, was able to move as if she and the horse were one. And I could see the ripple of movement, from the horse’s gait up through her body. that embodied the grace of moving in waves. I felt an echo of love from the time I heard of how the Native Americans rode their horses, not with domination but with mutual understanding and joy. I felt that this young woman was claiming back for us something that we should never have lost.

When I find grace in my interactions with people, it’s when I’ve tuned into the same wavelength with them, so that the smiles and movements flow together as one. I think I get on the same wavelength by loving them - by approaching them with an accepting openness and no particular desire to push an agenda of my own. The wave pattern of their internal atomic clock - well, of their rock-solid identity that reverberates with the harmony of the universe - harmonizes with mine. I find that we really are one. Our love is one, our primal motivating impulse is one, regardless of all the trappings of societal labels or personal lifestyle choices. We are of God. Our being moves in the wave that God impels. Our grace together is not of two separate beings trying to coordinate externally, but it is the harmonic humming of the one tone of being, sending out its infinite waves.

Splash of Spirit

2008-11-28T22:43:00.000-08:00

When I visit my parents each summer, my sister and I take a daily morning bike ride. We have a twenty mile loop that includes beach side, meadows, and woods, with some edges of towns at the corners. When it has rained the night before, there are puddles on the road and the trail - sometimes covering the whole road surface. My sister generally plows right through them, lifting her feet high off the peddles. I tend to go around them if I can, and if I can’t, I go through gingerly, hoping to avoid the wet, sandy track of splashed water up my back.

My sister rides all year round. Once, she told me, she had ridden right after a heavy rain, and pretty much the whole trail was a big puddle. The sky had cleared, and the puddles were vividly reflective. She said she had almost a feeling of vertigo, seeing the reflection of the trees and sky deep below her. She said, maybe we’ll get a ride like that while you’re here.

A few days later, we had a ride that had some puddles. I approached them in my usual way. Another feature of our rides is conversation - we call ourselves the biking philosophers, solving the world’s problems each morning at six, except on Fridays, when we take out the trash first. So the conversation was going along on that day - I was trying to explain some metaphysical point to her, and getting the feeling that I shouldn’t have tried. My words were just creating a sense of separation, and I didn’t feel I had any way of expressing it that could pull it together. Then we came to a puddle.

It was a bright puddle, full of sunshine and yellow-green from sun-drenched trees, with blue and white from the sky. It was on Jennifer’s side of the trail, and she rode right through it with great delight. She exclaimed at how the vivid picture was splashed into an abstraction of colors as her tires plowed through.

I was ready to just let that be the end of my efforts to explain my point. But Jennifer urged me to continue, so I said,

When you just rode through that puddle, it was this marvelous connection with another world - with the depth of the sky beneath you and the play of the colors. And when you went through it you felt a thrill, because of the sensation and your connection to it. That was an experience of being alive. Now I went through a puddle a little while back, and I didn’t see the reflection at all, because I was thinking of the sand that would go up my back, and trying not to get my feet too wet. Whereas, for you, the puddle was a great experience. But you couldn’t really prescribe your experience in terms of riding through mud puddles - “for your well-being, ride through at least five mud puddles a day.” It somehow wouldn’t get a handle on what you were trying to recommend. But you did have an alive experience riding through the mud puddle. It just can’t be prescribed in material terms. That’s what I mean by saying life is entirely spiritual. You can’t get a handle on what’s important, substantial, valuable, by pursuing material experience. Because it can’t capture the quality that makes you love it.

That made sense to Jennifer. The actual presence of the alive moment worked in a way that none of my philosophical words could do. The splash of Spirit came and united us in understanding - bright yellows and greens and blues exploded into clarity - the abstract colors forming a concrete connection.

My neighbor as myself

2008-11-28T21:31:00.000-08:00

I had a dream early Monday morning in which I felt deep emotions - strong love for the characters in the dream, a sense of the importance of the things in their lives going in the right way for them.

On the bus Monday, a woman didn’t want to move her backpack off the chair next to her to give me a seat. She asked me to ask another person, who was also taking up two seats, to move. While I was hesitating, the young woman across the aisle offered me her seat. I hesitated there, too, unwilling to have her stand in my stead, but she indicated a vacant seat farther back which I hadn’t seen, and moved to it.

Sitting in the seat she left, I felt a little discomfited by the exchange - happy enough to have a seat but uncomfortable that someone else had moved for me; wondering if the young man in the seat next to me was her partner and I was causing them to be separated, wondering about the woman with the backpack. I had noticed the helmet on her pack when I still thought she was going to move it, as I expected, for me to sit down, so I surmised she had her bike on the bus. I then noticed that there was also a fold-up bike inside the bus, taking the space of three seats that fold up for a wheel chair to be accommodated. I wondered if it was hers (it turned out to be). I had been more comfortable asking her to move her backpack than asking the other person - a rather flamboyant person of dubious sex who was deeply involved with something with a large antenna - to stop lounging diagonally over two seats.

Then I had a thought: what if all the people I see on the bus are characters in my own dream? Because the emotions from my morning dream were still lingering, this was not a dismissive thought. It had two accompanying parts - one, an opening of my ability to feel love for them; and two, a sense that they were all part of me, all with messages to teach me, all opportunities, tests, as it were, of my ability to love. I considered that perhaps the woman with the backpack was feeling strong in a newfound ability to stand up for herself, to take enough space for herself. I didn’t really think specifically about anyone else on the bus, but as I got off the bus, I found myself thinking of her as someone who had just taught me a great lesson.

I’ve been trying this out, when I think of it, in the days since. My husband will say something to me, and I’ll think, here is a character in my dream. He is mine to love. He is here as an opportunity for me to test my love. And then I’ll respond. My responses then tend to be kinder, because I’m not thinking he should be a certain way. And there’s no place, in thinking of other people, for things like envy, because everything I see is part of my world, and no one else’s.

I’m not saying that I’m the only one that exists. I’m just saying that I’m the only one that exists in my dream. Every other individual is also a perfect reflection of God. But I don’t have the ability to see them that way from within my dream. How I see them in my dream is up to me. And the more I consider my interactions with them as opportunities to love, the more closely, in my dream, I’ll see them as they really are.

Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” I’ve been considering, in the last few years, that this can imply that my neighbor is myself. This odd fiction of thinking of everyone I see as a character in my dream, a part of me, can be a working exercise of loving my neighbor as myself. I didn’t think this up and then work on having it happen. It started to happen, and so I started to think about it.

Correcting Thought

2008-11-22T18:34:00.000-08:00

Some years back when my kids were small, I took great comfort in a group of friends whose kids were around the same ages. We would hang out in each other’s kitchens and family rooms, talking while our children played, picking up conversation threads dropped in the frequent interruptions. At one point one of them commented on a gesture I had - a kind of a short movement of my head from center a little to the right, mouth closed. She said it signified I wasn’t buying into something that had been said. I hadn’t been aware of the gesture, but my other friends recognized it, and also agreed about what they felt it meant.

As I thought about it, I wasn’t surprised to find I had such a gesture. After all, what was I going to say when discussion turned to things medical, or theories about behavior that I didn’t think were true? I had my own sense of what was true, and I had to hold to it. After all, a Christian Scientist is supposed to correct thought, right?

Lately I’ve come to think about this differently. A fundamental question is, how is thought corrected? If thought is theory, all that would be needed would be the construction of a system of explanation and support that is believable - that is, internally consistent. Correcting a theory would just be pointing out false premises or conclusions - examining evidence, considering possible interpretations, looking at things in new ways. This is the kind of thing I have long loved to do - I still find it interesting, exciting. But thought is more than theory. If thought comprises the total of our substance, then it includes everything that we are - what we call body, what we call spirit, what we call heart and soul. We’re told in Christian Science that correcting thought brings healing. But I’ve never found holding to a theory, however beautiful, to do anything to heal my body, or my heart.

So correcting thought must be something much deeper than developing a theoretical construct, a way to think about something that has a consistent story, putting my chosen protagonists in the right place. Any story, any way to choose to think about a set of people or circumstances, is just a story. It can do no more for me, in terms of healing, than (as Mrs. Eddy says) moonbeams can melt a river of ice. To correct thought in a way that would bring healing requires going beneath the story. Mrs. Eddy says, “Divine Love corrects and governs man.”

So the only way I can correct my own thought is by opening myself to divine Love - allowing my self to be lifted by the flood tides (as Mrs. Eddy says, “The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in Truth through flood tides of Love"). In a rising flood tide of Love, there is too much power for me to cling to the little rocks of my theories of right and wrong - too much moving force of goodness for me to account for how everyone’s behavior should be arranged. My egocentric sense of order is washed out, turned and tumbled, and made impossible to reference. I am compelled to allow myself to be floated up and held in the new order of Love.

As for correcting other people’s thoughts, there’s no correctness in telling people how I think they’re wrong and what I think they should do to think or do better. Thinking such thoughts at them without saying anything is even more ludicrous. The only way that I might correct thought is if there is some way I can reach to the underlying knot of fear and doubt about their worth, and somehow loosen it.

If I can correct a thought in myself or someone else, it won’t be to change a theoretical construct or a story. It won’t be to say that a certain thing is wrong and some other thing would be right. I will be successful if I have enough love to dissolve the thought that says we’re in this state of separation from the divine Mind, that makes us feel cut off, lonely, in need of improving ourselves. The only thing that can correct that thought is something deeper than the internal judge that tells me what’s wrong with myself or others. That deeper thing is the truth about our perfect being, the truth about how much we are loved.

The hand of Love

2008-11-15T16:50:00.000-08:00

In the middle of the night
the mother comes and strokes the child’s hair
running her fingers through
gently smoothing the strands

In the middle of the night
the currents of dreams softly realign thought
disentangling the questions
deftly smoothing the strands

Soft as water
strong as currents
lifting the mermaid hair up from the rocks
smoothing it and holding it in disentangled ripples
The hand of Love lifts all tangled things
smoothes them
sets them right and holds them in shimmering order.

I’ve had this image for a while of the hand of Love - how it solves all conflicts without having to engage in them, how it sidesteps the question of who or what is wrong, and lets each of us know that what we always wanted to believe, is true. We are loved, we are held in our perfect purpose, none of the things we feared can hurt us. We were not wrong, but we were not right either - not in the way that puts us on one side or another of a conflict. There is nothing we need to prove. Love is unfolding our being, and holds us with the same certainty that the current holds the mermaid hair.

I’ve felt this hand of Love lifting and settling my thoughts, taking away my sense of conflict with others - any feeling of needing to confront a problem, to be wrong or right or to view others that way. I feel it lifting our country, our world, rendering irrelevant the perennial considerations of blame, giving us a new sense about how all needs can be met together, instead of some being chosen over others. When Love guides me, I know what to say in my family, so I don’t create tangles, but allow Love to smooth us all and hold us up together.

Sea Change

2008-11-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

I meant to look up what the phrase meant, before I packed up my computer. But I was out of time, so I came anyway, with this feeling of sea change washing over me, surprising me continually, like waves lapping at the shore of my thought.

So surprising to feel so different. So strange to consider that perhaps I can’t describe the difference in words that are any different from ones I’ve used before. Sea change to me means that the whole sand scape of my world has been wiped casually clean, as by a wave. It means the closing of the water over the surface quickly becomes smooth, as if there were never an exposed sandbar. The waves calmly say, I didn’t see anything - yet everything has changed.

Sea change - a new weather that comes in over the sea and brings a new atmosphere, a new set of smells, a new texture in the air.

I was reading articles in the Penn Alumni magazine - featuring people who went to my school, who are now doing impressive things -a man who has used his savvy to start up multi-million dollar enterprises, a woman who has carved out a career as a novelist and promoter of her books. I found myself delighting in the logic of their approaches, and when I was done, I noticed that something had shifted in my thought. When I was in college, I shunned business - the word, the people studying it. Though it was slightly under the surface of consciousness, I think the two components of my thought were belief that business is associated with selling out, with selling one’s soul and one’s friends; and fear that I could never understand it or be successful at it. Mostly the notion of business made me want to sleep.

Now I realized that my thought, over all these years, had closed out as undesirable a vast field in which people might interact with each other with intelligence and effectiveness, might bring ideas to fruition, might stretch their capabilities, express their identities, give to the world. It seemed unsurprising to me then, that I hadn’t gone forward with any of my ideas for accomplishing good in the world. Not that I hadn’t tried a few times, not that I hadn’t wondered why I didn’t seem to have what I needed to actually pull it off. I had had, buried beneath the surface, something that worked against myself with every effort I made.

Now it feels like that’s gone. It doesn’t mean, as my husband may wish it did, that I will forthwith go out and start a money-making business venture. But it seems it’s important for my business of being in the practice.

I started thinking about this in September - studied business plans and wrote one for myself - translating all of the concepts, as I understood them, to spiritual terms. I wrote a plan for increasing the market share Truth had in my thought and in my view of the world. I guess what has happened here is a palpable gain in market share for Truth. Suddenly I can see God’s hand in all the field of business, and have a basis for affirming that God can guide business to be universally beneficial, principled, sound. It feels like a better basis of prayer to see God guiding business than to imagine business as an evil thing that should go away. Also I felt my thought opening up towards all the people who have embraced the pursuit of business - and because that is such a lot of people, it feels like an opening towards people in general.

There is another part to this as well. It is that I don’t succeed in life by defining it - people, pursuits, ways of thinking, etc - as being comprised of some good and some bad, with my task being to choose out what’s good, at least for me. Instead, I succeed in life by knowing that all is good, that God is in control of everything, and that by standing up for this truth, I bring it into my experience.

I got home and looked up sea change. It turns out, I had the feeling of it right, though the reference, from Shakespeare, is to bones changing to corals over time, under the sea. But it still has that transformational feeling - everything is here but everything is different. I asked for this, and I am happy to see it come, time and again, as many times as needed, till I come home to myself.

Hearing the Word

2008-10-21T21:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at the jail, Bill (not his real name) and I continued our conversation about the Scriptures. I said, you have to just interpret the Scripture for yourself - you can’t try to apply it to what anyone else should do at any given moment. And you can listen to what other people say it means to them, but you have to go by what it means to you. And you have to be really honest with yourself about it. You can’t do it for show - to seem better to others or even to yourself.

This all was woven in to specific discussion of passages of Scripture, such as Paul’s injunctions in I Corinthians regarding whether to marry or not and how to make judgement in the case of disputes between people (these were what he was bringing up). I also brought in parts like Jesus’ instruction not to judge, and his definition of Christians as people who love each other - people who see others while standing in the place of love towards them.

Eventually he was ready to have me read him two sections of the Bible Lesson, which I did, with him interjecting, with enthusiasm, things that he knew about some of the passages. And we talked more about what things meant - but he tended to think the stuff in Science and Health just made sense as it stood. At a certain point he said, I really like to study the Scripture myself, but sometimes it really helps to hear someone else’s perspective on it. And he said, “you’re good!” I didn’t take this personally, as I hadn’t really cherished the things I was saying as my own view, nor was looking for a way to convince him of anything, but was just sharing the inspiration of the Word as it came to me.

The whole experience is teaching me how it is that the Word speaks to each of us - and that we all need to be encouraged to look for ourselves and see what it means to us right now. It may mean something different at a different time. It may mean something completely different to someone else. It is never God’s plan to put me in the position of someone enlightened to pass the knowledge of God through my filter of wisdom so some lesser person is able to receive from me what they couldn’t directly receive from God. God’s plan for me is much simpler than that, much more flexible, much more beautiful. God allows me to see His wonderful creation - all His amazing children - and to be, as my role, one of them. That is enough.

Musings

2008-07-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

I said to my sister, “you know how in most of the testimonies of healing in the Christian Science periodicals, people say, ‘I had had many healings before in Christian Science, so I had every expectation that I would be healed this time’ - well, I want to get to the place where I say, I had very little hope of healing, in that I have had long years in the wilderness where it seemed my prayers for healing had no success. But for some reason the experiences of God that I had made me hold on for that much time, until I came to the understanding of what life really is, and experienced this healing.”

Writing this, I recall that my life has mostly not been without the experience of God. Through God I have had enduring comfort, a life compass, and a life characterized by true happiness and quite a bit of light. I have relationships that are continuing to grow more beautiful and dear. I shouldn’t let this be obscured by the fact that I have had several bouts with illness that didn’t seem to respond to my or to anyone else’s prayers, as have other members of my family. And I am grateful for the sense that these trials are simply pointing me, constantly, to an understanding of life that is the great prize, that obliterates any sense of having been in the wilderness for a long and weary time.

I had two contrasting feelings when I went to church Sunday. As the service started, I had a sort of a sad feeling - there weren’t that many people in the church, and they were, for the most part, the same people who had been there each year I’ve come visiting here, only some were missing, having died, and others had grown older. And I thought, what are they getting from this? What makes them come here year after year? And what makes so many other people not stay?

The answer to the second question seemed clear. People would not stay because, in the experience of their lives, the promises they had heard given in church had not been delivered to them. The services and the people who went to them had not been characterized by an overwhelming love that put to rest their anxieties and guided them in courageous standing for truth. Instead, people felt that the church held up an impossible standard and then judged all those, within and without, who failed to meet it. We would still hear of great healings and life transformations through Christian Science, but they were somewhere in the distance - read about in the periodicals, remembered from 40 years ago, belonging to some other place, people, or time.

At the same time, as the service began and we sang Mrs. Eddy’s hymn Christ my Refuge, and I sang it with my eyes closed, letting the words be a prayer, I felt the compelling power of the Word. It continued that way through the whole service - all the words spoke to me, and I started seeing unfold, as a visual image in my mind, the underlying sense of the whole thing. I felt if I could only sit awhile with this image, all the questions that had been unresolved would find their answers, and I would have something I could use to guide me through the moments of my life. I felt that everything I heard was true.

So I know why I stay, and I guess I can assume that the other people stay for the same reason.

Later that day, I went for a long walk on the beach with a friend from church. She told me of struggles she had with the care of her mother in the last days of her life - how the people at the care place for Christian Scientists had recommended that she not come back because they weren’t well equipped with the things someone would need in order to manage after the fracture of a hip. So my friend had ended up putting her mother in a hospital, which turned out to be a nightmare of treatments that produced by-products worse than the original ailment.

It seemed that, within the community of Christian Scientists, there should be a full hammock of practical care - an embrace that didn’t forsake people when they were in the most difficult challenges of their lives. And more important than an institutional network of care would be a strong community of love - not an exclusive, reclusive group, but something whose warmth would embrace everyone and radiate the practical comfort of relying on Christian Science for life care. Indeed, the institutional structure has been established with the provision of Christian Science nurses. But, like church, that structure’s success is in proportion to how much it is infused with the breath of love -love being its substance and filling out its shape.

I used to think (not long ago) that my voice might provide a needed wake up call for the church - a way of looking at things that would help people get beyond rigid structures to the essential essence. Now I think that there is only one thing for me to do - one thing I can do, and which perhaps many others are doing - and that is to be that love. Breathe it into my days and my church connections. Not say anything about what people would need to do to revitalize the cause, not bemoan or even hold a thought of what may be lost or missing. The thought that came to me was, “I’m not going to let Christian Science die.” But it wasn’t because I was going to launch some kind of a crusade - just that I would be true to myself and my love. I got a calm feeling then, that there is some kind of a niche for me here, that my particular efforts are needed - not because others are doing it wrong, but because everyone, including me, has a perfect part to play.

The meaning of “the”

2008-06-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

“Don’t mess with your Mom,” said my husband to our son. “She knows all about words.” My son said, “Oh yeah? Then what does ‘the’ mean?”

I said, “It means God.” And I went on to point out the word “Theos”, and the Spanish and Arabic for “the” - “el” and “al” respectively, and how they are like the Arabic “Allah” and the Hebrew “El”, which is also found in words like ”element”. Not that I had learned this anywhere - it had just come to mind and it seemed true enough to repeat.

I’ve been visiting Carlos (not his real name) in jail. Carlos has brown skin, two fore and aft creases on each side of his bald head, a Cuban accent, and a ready smile which, though showing true light, also illumines a sense of having lived in a faithless world long enough not to be taken in by much. We had been reading the Bible Lesson, and he had asked me about a passage in Science and Health that referred to “Elohim.” So I had started talking to him about “El” - God in Hebrew, “the” in Spanish; and “Al” and Allah, “The” and “God”, respectively, in Arabic. He showed me how, if you put your hands together in a certain way, the lines on it spell “Allah” in Arabic.

The next time I saw Carlos, he had just spent eight days “in the hole” - solitary confinement - because he had gotten into a fight with another inmate. He felt that the other guy had started the fight, but things in jail often go that way. After we did some reading in the Bible and Science and Health, he said, in a weary sort of a way, “well, maybe I’ll be saved.” He said that although he had been trying to pray, he didn’t have any confidence that it was doing any good.

So I told him about “the”. I told him “the” is the existential article, which means it is the sign that something is. And God is the only thing that is, and the only evidence of existence. I said, you can tell that God exists because you exist. And God is good, and you can tell that because inside, you desire goodness, and you know you are good. So you don’t have to wonder if God is here - you can tell God is here. I said, that knowledge inside that you are good gives you the map of how to be good. It is also a basis for your prayer for justice - since you can tell God is here, you can also be confident that God is in charge of everything, so nothing unjust gets to stand - it has to be wiped out by the understanding of Truth.

When I left the jail, out to the cool wind and the overcast day in downtown Seattle, the aliveness of the air caught me with a desperate poignancy. I thought, it’s not right for people to put other people in jail. It’s not right to deprive them of this air, and this ability to move down the hill and around the courthouse under the sycamore trees, with people and pigeons moving around, and seagulls in the distance. I know there is a need for some basis of rule by law, but I think many of the laws that put people in prison, and many of the allocations that provide for prisons, were made for political purposes. Let’s get tough on crime. Let’s make our streets safe. Things people can’t disagree with, but I think the laws that get passed and the facilities provided don’t actually fulfill the purpose for which they were ostensibly established, nor do they meet the needs of the people in there.

The following week I was back at the jail, waiting (in one of the many inevitable waits) for my next visitee to come out. I remembered the way the air felt the last time I left, and I suddenly had the sense that what I had felt was essential goodness, in other words, the presence of God. In that instant it became clear to me that no structure, however imposing, could keep God out. And in that instant, I felt the same enlivening, joy catching uplift that I associate with being outside when the air is fresh. I thought, no unjust systems get to stay. God is the establisher of all being. God’s present good is here and is the only thing that determines what is. No structures can stay if they’re not built according to the pattern of Truth, because Truth establishes everything.

Even if it looks as if many things are broken - people’s lives and the laws that try to regulate them, social and economic systems and the people trying to live in them - the truth that God is what is, as present and everpresent as “the”, can course through all experience and show goodness to be the necessary law for everything.

Heart to heart

2008-05-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my daughter during her bedtime cuddle the other night. She was trying to figure out a way to more quickly decompress after school so she could get all her work done. I said, you know, I’ve been realizing lately that there’s a flaw in the way I’ve been raising you. I’ve had the tendency to always ask, what do you need in order to be able to do it - prompting you to look for conditions to be met so that all will be well. What I need to do is be aware that you are the creation of God - you have everything you need, and you don’t need any conditions to be met. Your capability, resourcefulness, readiness, and motivation are intact - they’re given to you by virtue of your being God’s child.

She said, yes, and the flaw is bigger than that. You know, you really haven’t raised us as Christian Scientists. I said, I know. I didn’t get it.

She said, I noticed it because we met some other kids who have been being raised as Christian Scientists, and I’ve read about some other ones. I asked who, and she told me. I said, I know. I didn’t get it. And my parents - they tried to raise us in a Christian Science home, and I don’t think they got it either. I’m only starting to get it now.

She said, you have a ways to go, too, because when you talk about it, I sometimes find it annoying. I said, that’s OK, because I’m not the one that’s in charge of raising you anyway. Your Father Mother is God, and God knows how to tell you everything you need to know. And it’s not too late, either, because God has always been your Father Mother and is always telling you what to do.

Later, after sharing this with my husband, I said, I want to be a Christian Scientist in this family.

What this means to me is to put aside all the tendencies to think that there’s something not quite right - that there are things to worry about, things to try to correct. Instead, I must notice when I’m being presented with a lie, and refuse to believe it. But this doesn’t really get at the heart of the matter.

What’s necessary is for me to be in a state of noticing how lovely all of God’s creation is - how wonderful it is that Love is the fundamental creative force, the operating Principle, in everything there is, and that Love chooses loveliness as our state of being. Love delights in setting up perfect experiences, perfect relationships, perfect paths of learning and growth. I shouldn’t be surprised to see that perfection working out, and I shouldn’t accept it as true when it doesn’t seem to be. I don’t have to figure out what would be perfect and then try to attain it. I just have to hold out for the truth that Love sets it up perfect, and refuse to settle for anything less.

There’s more. The one thing that I need to do is to prove the existence of radical Love by loving - by shining that light forth. Short of that, explanations about what is are just stories. People can arrange their lives around stories, but stories can’t heal them. I sometimes get glimpses of what radical love is. I think as these glimpses become longer and more frequent, they will communicate their own logic. Their power and reliability will totally displace any fear or belief that a flawed existence is our lot.

That’s how I’ll be a Christian Scientist in this family. Step by step, in each moment, listening and following in awe and humility.

Answering by Fire

2008-04-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

There’s a story in the Bible where the prophet Elijah goes head to head with the prophets of Baal. He challenges them to make an offering to their gods, while he makes an offering to God. He says, the one who answers by fire, let him be God.

So the prophets of Baal do their offering first, and though they pray all day, they get no answer. Then Elijah prays to God and, even though he’s had the people pour twelve barrels full of water all over the offering and the wood, fire comes down and consumes the whole thing. So all the people fall on their faces and say, “The Lord, he is the God, the Lord, he is the God.”

In the past I’ve been somewhat incredulous about this story, even to the point of wondering if Elijah could have tricked the people somehow (like maybe it was mineral spirits instead of water they poured on the fire). But when I was reading the story last week I realized - this was then, and still is, a very accurate measure of the presence of God, and it’s a test that I do all the time. I look for the god that answers by fire. I look for what it is in my life that ignites me and makes me feel alive.

God is everywhere, so it’s not surprising that there are so many ways to get the feeling of aliveness. And feeling alive comes so often that I don’t always remember that it is how I know the presence of God. But from the perspective of darker times I’ve noticed that this answer by fire is even more essential and convincing than physical fire. It is impossible to conjure it up or construct it from any materials other than itself. It is the quality that makes me want to live, the desire without which it would be impossible to explain the presence of life.

Preparing the soil (more)

2008-04-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Jesus tells a parable about a sower, casting seed. Some of it falls by the wayside, and it gets walked on and the crows eat it; some falls on rocky ground, where it springs up quickly but soon dies; some falls among thorns, where it’s choked by them; and some falls on good ground, where it springs up and bears fruit. Jesus explains that the soil is the Word of God. Those by the wayside are the ones who hear the Word but the devil comes and takes it out of their hearts. Those on rocky ground receive the Word with joy, but have no root within themselves, and soon are offended. Those among the thorns have the Word choked by the “cares and riches and pleasures of this life.” Those on good soil bring forth fruit.

One way I’ve looked at this is to sort of hope that I’m one of the ones with good soil. The sentence from Mary Baker Eddy that I quoted at the top of my last post leads to deeper consideration. She talks about God preparing the soil for the seed. This awakens my awareness that my consciousness is liable to all the conditions in the parable, and that it’s good to be open to receive God’s preparation, because I can sure use it.

The wayside, in my consciousness, is the place whereon the traffic of the world moves - the place where I consider my relative accomplishments and failures, where I try to make a name for myself or at least, within myself, to justify my actions and failures to act. The devil that steals the Word from me is that old paradigm that tries to interpret my experience along a scale of winners and losers, in which worth is a relative commodity which may be earned by some, while others must languish, worthless, in the dust. If I try to interpret any glimpse of the Word within that paradigm, I have lost it. If I think my gains in understanding will help make me better than other people, or better than the person I was before, they won’t be able to do anything - no growth, no fruit.

I have a couple of different thoughts about the rocky ground. One is about when I feel my intention has sprung up fast and then withered. It’s often been when I’ve made a resolution to do something better next time. Then when the next time comes, I find myself in the same struggle. It occurs to me that those resolutions are planted in the belief of temporal life - a state of imperfection that has the possibility of improving along the path through time. Doing well can’t take root in that belief, because doing well needs to be rooted in the fertile knowledge of timeless perfection. If, instead of making a resolution to be better, I find and take in the truth that my being comes from the One sustaining infinite, then my roots can drink and send that truth through everything I do.

I also thought about rocks in terms of what in my consciousness is hard and impermeable. Judgments about others, resentments, self-consciousness, fear. When these are in my thought, I can’t let anything tender in. If I want to bear fruit, I need to let Love prepare the soil by breaking up those hard thoughts with tenderness towards me, melting them away.

As for the thorns - I note that cares and riches and the pleasures of this world can all choke the Word. Cares are not any more virtuous than riches - both of them are material. That is, they act as if certain material conditions determine whether goodness is present or not. The pleasures of the world are the same way. Pleasure is the natural state of being at one with God, but the pleasures of the world say that this good feeling is the result of certain conditions being met. So if I’m following the pleasures of the world, I’m looking for those conditions instead of finding joy here and now.

So I remind myself: God prepares my soil. Love draws my attention to the true things, the ones that absorb the water of Life and nurture sweet seeds. Love compels me to leave the wayside and kneel on the soft ground. Love sends grass and dandelions to break up the rock - experiences that force me to question my assumptions and opinions. Love teaches me to stop spending time among the thorns - stop looking for happiness-engendering conditions and look at present happiness. I am willing to have this be done to me. Which is good, because ultimately I have no other choice.

It Matters Not ...

2008-04-17T10:49:00.000-07:00

There’s a place in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, “A germ of infinite Truth, though least in the kingdom of heaven, is the higher hope on earth, but it will be rejected and reviled until God prepares the soil for the seed.”

At times I have wondered what about Truth would be rejected and reviled. After all, it’s all good stuff - it’s all about goodness, so why should it be rejected? More recently I asked myself, like what? What germ of infinite Truth would be reviled before the soil was made ready for it? - And then I knew. This one, for example: It doesn’t matter what your material circumstance is (or, as Mrs. Eddy says, “It matters not what be thy lot”).

What does that mean? That it doesn’t matter whether I got what I wanted, it doesn’t matter whether I’m cold and wet or dry and warm, whether I’m rich or poor, whether I have any friends, whether I have succeeded or failed in my life pursuits, or even whether I have failed to try?

Yeah. It really doesn’t matter. But God has to prepare the soil for the seed. What is that? How does God do that?

God prepares the soil of consciousness by so infusing it with the sense of goodness that all sense of material requirements for goodness is overwhelmed. Material things can no longer say that they are needed for goodness to be here, since goodness is so obviously the very substance of being.

Then none of the circumstances of life that I’ve deemed so crucial to my well-being matter, because the good they promised to withhold or deliver is already here.

I’ve visited this concept before. I asked myself, so what would be the incentive for doing anything at all, if I don’t stand to gain anything by it? And I answered, I do things because I’m the expression of Life, and Life is active. I do things because goodness directs me to do them, and I am joyfully humble enough to listen and follow. I do things because I love, and I love to express Love.

It doesn’t matter what my material situation is, but it does matter that I know God is here, and owns each moment. It matters that I notice goodness, and its constancy, and that all my actions proceed from the awareness of goodness. It matters that I keep myself from being deceived into thinking that any picture of someone else being less than good is true.

If my soil isn’t prepared for the seed, I will think it callous to hear that my material circumstances don’t matter. It will sound to me like I don’t matter, or that the standard of goodness demands that I deny goodness for myself. So when I speak to others, I must be very clear in my message that they matter, and this will include careful attention to their creature comforts and to their sense of self-worth. It will include honoring of their stories and their circumstances. It will include compassion for them in whatever difficulties face them.

It is with myself that I have the opportunity to consider that none of these things matter, to be unfazed by cold-and-wetness or lack of sleep, or inattention to my story or disregard of my point of view. And God must prepare my soil for the seed, too. I can only do it as it feels joyfully right, as I move in the consciousness of God’s ever present goodness. I, too, deserve compassion from myself when my consciousness is tangled up in a story. God’s story is always about goodness, and it’s able to reach into any story I might be running and turn me to the consciousness of good.

Traveling Lighter

2008-03-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

I was talking with the mother of the friend with whom my daughter did her search and rescue training. She said, I'm so happy that Kelsi accomplished this, because it means I know she can go anywhere. She knows how to make shelter, and she knows how to find her way. It has been an important part of the whole process of letting go and having her move out on her own.

I think it's true. The two things I need to know how to do are find my way and make shelter. I can think of that these days as I practice traveling lighter.

I'm traveling lighter by leaving behind a couple of big things that used to define me to myself. One of them is idealism. Growing up, I felt being idealistic was heady and lofty - it gave me a feeling of deep purpose. I couldn't imagine not wanting to be that way - it gave me something to think about, and a way of feeling good about myself, at least some of the time. I think people told me at times that being idealistic maybe wasn't such a great idea, but I didn't understand them. Now I'm looking at it differently.

As I parse out what it is to be idealistic, I define it as having a picture of the way things should be, and then trying to live out my life as close to that picture as possible. The problem with it is the assumption that any picture I could have in my head would do any kind of justice to the wonderful, convoluted, earth-smelling intricacy that is life. Holding a picture like that as my first reality would lead me to miss most of the crucial and alive things that make up each moment, the surprise bumps and the secret hollows, and all the things that ask to be noticed and responded to in the moment they present themselves to me. It was highly presumptuous for me to think I could predict any of that before the moment, and it prevented me from having the humble and supple readiness to meet life as it came.

So I've left my idealism behind - left it behind in favor of faith in the goodness of life as it presents itself in this moment; left it so I can expect to be surprised, and expect to find, in the present-moment-giving of life, everything I need to navigate the moment with grace.

The other thing I'm working on traveling without these days is criticism. It's actually a related thing: criticism is about thinking that I have a picture of how things should be done or how people should be, and then measuring them according to my picture and complaining about the things that don't match. Now I remind myself that God is the Mind of other people, and I am not. Primal goodness tells them how to be, compellingly. I can't, both because I can't know what's right for them from the inside, and because I'm not the voice inside them which speaks from their center and moves them with poise and balance. But God is that voice, and God is here. My job is to be humble enough to notice what God is doing, in me and in everyone.

The two things I need to know how to do are to find my way and to make shelter. I find my way by noticing what's here and how the law of goodness is manifest here and now. I make shelter by welcoming everyone I see into the warmth of being loved.

Digging Ditches, and other spiritual experiences

2008-02-15T21:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve taken great pleasure, in the last few weeks, in doing hard physical labor - using a digging bar and a post hole digger to make a deep hole in the ground. The four-foot wide hole goes down three and a half feet, and the narrow post-hole dug one extends an additional four feet down. The last six feet of the excavation is through hardpan - a compacted mixture of clay and sand and rock which needs to be speared with the heavy digging stick to break apart. After the hole got too deep to allow for effective swinging with a shovel, I climbed in and used my hands to fill a bucket, which I would stand up to dump outside the hole. When going deeper down with the post-hole digger, I would pull the dirt up and dump it into the bucket in the bottom of the deep hole. When the bucket was full, I would dump it.

There’s a tangible substance to the satisfaction of the work. Part of it is made of doing something harder than what I am used to doing. Part of it is in the perseverance, and the success of actually making it happen. I feel a steady and warm light, about the size and weight of a fist, a coalescing of the reward of the work, solid inside of me. It makes me feel nourished, strong, and substantial.

I’ve started collecting things that make me feel that way. There is love,similarly solid and powerfully centering, when given freely and with no tally about how it is received. And there is honesty. Last December my friend Laurie, who was visiting from Bali, lost her wallet in a Seven Eleven parking lot. She didn’t even know she’d lost it till the man who found it contacted her. The wallet had everything in it - all her documentation for travel, all her money, her credit cards, the PIN of her debit card . . . And the man was willing to wait there until she could come for it.

I thought about what it would have felt like to be that man. I could feel how what he found in that parking lot was the precious opportunity to exercise his honesty - to reach out and make a big difference to someone. I imagine that that opportunity must have left him with a greater reward than anything that was in the wallet. I could identify with the glow - entirely independent of the gratitude he might receive from Laurie; the internal reward of acting according to his best nature.

I got to exercise my honesty a month after that. The kids behind the counter at the computer store were ready to let me go without paying for the optical drive they had just installed. I asked them twice - they said that was all, I was free to take my mac and go. (And in a way I would have liked to; I wasn’t happy about my mac burning out so soon after the warranty ended - first the hard drive then the optical drive) But I said, Are you sure? You’d better check that - I expected to pay for an optical drive. Then I waited about twenty minutes while one of them went in to talk to a supervisor. And when he came out, he charged me $236 for the optical drive - more than the price I’d been quoted, or the one that appeared on the printed receipt (which their records seemed to show I had already paid). He didn’t thank me for my honesty or for saving him from his mistake. So I didn’t get any external reward for being honest. But as I walked away with my mac, I acknowledged to myself that it was worth the price to feel the surging, centering, comforting glow of an act of honesty. A gift that had been given to me through the circumstance of their inexperience. I felt grateful to them then, and felt compassion for them and whatever mix of thoughts they had that made up their world view and life experience.

There are other things that give me that feeling. The heart-soaring response to a majestic vista, the delight of an “aha” moment, the satisfaction of creating a work of art, the warmth of being in community with others. I’m using these collected experiences to redefine my sense of substance. What if my substance is that solid, glowing feeling? What if the whole point of life is to bring out that substance? What would it mean for me to understand that I don’t need to seek out activities, or manipulate events, to experience that substance? Could I have it all the time?

At our spiritual formation group last Monday, the scripture that was shared referred to drawing water from the springs of salvation. What came to me as I listened was that the springs of salvation are made of the same substance that I’ve been collecting in my experience. I draw water from the springs of salvation when I acknowledge that this is the substance of being. I can have it right now - it’s not dependent on having any material conditions met. And if this is true for me, it’s true for everyone.

More on Humility

2008-02-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

In an article entitled, “A Timely Issue,” Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Mothers should be able to produce perfect health and perfect morals in her children . . . by studying this scientific method of practicing Christianity .” I think in prior times reading this, I kind of threw it off as something impossible, or at least something I didn’t have the ability to do. Lately I’ve realized that, perhaps counter-intuitively, this throwing off was an arrogance on my part. The humble position is to take the statement at face value and ask how it is to be done, and be willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it.

In my career as a mother, I’ve wrestled with voices from society, and some of my own, that have said I should protect my own rights and dignity by not doing too much for others. I shouldn’t pick up after my kids too much, shouldn’t be the main person keeping the house clean, shouldn’t let my life get too enmeshed with theirs. Lately I’m moving the line I’ve held on that.

When I look at the successes of other people, a primary common quality is that they didn’t stop at any kind of a line that said “this should be enough.” There’s been no line, no limit, just the continued dedication to living in the truest possible way. My cousin Debbi has been like this with her kids. When her youngest was a toddler, she used to take him to the beach every summer day, and they would crawl along looking at everything. It was entirely at his pacing, at his interest. She didn’t think about how she could be sitting reading a book or whether it looked funny or was appropriate to dedicate that many hours, day after day, to the explorations of a toddler. Her love, and her willingness to give all, silenced any such voices. There were similar activities with her other kids - massive amounts of time that she dedicated to being with them at their pacing, doing what was of interest to them. I thought of this last summer as I witnessed, again, the wonderful relationship she has with them, and how willing they are to work with her, to let her encourage them to excel. I realized, it wouldn’t do to come in and just wish my kids would be that way with me, or to expect them to be. A huge investment went into those kids and that relationship, and that is how such fruits are achieved.

My sister is an artist who makes vessels in clay - wheel thrown porcelain, altered and carved to explore the minimal substance required for structural integrity, and the fractal patterns that reverberate through all things of the earth. Though for years she has been creating pieces beyond the skill of others to replicate, she is compelled to continue to push the edges of her skill and her artistic sensibilities. It requires a great humility to continue, year after year, with no sense that she should have done enough by now and should be able to slack off. It requires humility to put oneself daily in the place to be moved by Spirit, to leave behind all tallies and measurements and take a ride on the wind train of infinity. And that is what it takes to actually get anywhere.

So in the case of my mothering, I’m no longer asking if I should stop, because I must have done enough by now. In the case of “producing perfect health and perfect morals in [my] children”, I now recognize that there’s no way that I could ever do that if it were up to me, to my prowess or enlightenment. So it must be a matter of stepping aside to acknowledge that the laws of Truth already have established that perfection, and that I, through humble and never-stopping attention to the law, can sufficiently get my own tangles out of the way so I can see what’s true.

So here I am, at the kindergarten of humility, trying to practice a little bit more each day, so that I can be free, at least in moments, from the tangles of worry and arrogance. And I’m considering: what is meant by the scientific method of practicing Christianity? I know that Christianity is the practice of knowing and loving God, and of loving my neighbor and my enemies with enough strength that they are healed. I think the scientific method of practicing it entails reminding myself of the ontological system that makes it make sense to do so: the fact that, since God is good and all, there is no evil, so I don’t engage with evil or contend with it; instead I hold out for good, bear witness to it, and thus bring it into experience.

I’ll tell you about a way I applied it this morning. It’s Saturday, chores day, and my son was, once again, pleading for me to not make him do his chores before he had a friend over. I refrained from sliding into the usual debate, the tiresome repetition of all the reasons we must do chores first. Instead I looked at the image of my son that was forming in my thought: was he an effort that I had failed at, someone who hadn’t developed the strength of character to pull himself into action and do what was needed? Or was he the expression of perfect Soul, receiving all the information about who he is from the very source of his being, including all right understanding of what each moment calls for and the means for following through? I held to this latter image as I formed my responses to him. The result - chores were completed on time, and our relationship with each other regained the sweetness it should have.

It’s an arresting question how to put something into practice. Practice takes more humility than does the arranging of planks of conviction in my thought. But it is in practice that I am alive.

Humility

2007-11-25T21:30:00.000-08:00

“Take a happy pill, Heather,” said my daughter’s violin teacher. “You’re just going to have to do the work it takes to learn this – you might as well be happy about it. Settle down and do it with humility and attention.” – Something like that.

I was struck by the wisdom of his words, and the fact that humility is, indeed, a crucial component for learning anything. It gives me the willingness to go ahead and work at something even if it’s hard, instead of making excuses for why I don’t know it already. I look back these days on huge swaths of my life in which I didn’t make the effort to learn something that I wanted to and could have. I see that arrogance was a large cause of my inactivity. I felt I should already know something, given my great education and/or experience, so I didn’t want to put myself in the group of those who didn’t know in order to actually learn it. This has been true at different times about my writing, my music, illustration, web design, and probably other things I could have been good at.

Thinking deeper, wondering how I could have not seen this arrogance at all, I realize that it was tied in with my sense of self-worth. My self-worth rested on my concept of myself as a smart, well-educated person. The way I had it set up, to be a person who still needed to learn all those things was in conflict with what made me worthy of existence. I apparently was willing to accept huge blindnesses in order to preserve the illusion (delusion?) that I knew as much as I needed to know to be the person I thought I needed to be.

Going deeper still, I see that I could have, and still can, place my sense of self-worth on something more elemental than an image of myself as a certain kind of person. I can place it on my source, and my place in the universe - on my identity as a child of God. This view of myself maintains my worthiness no matter what, and allows me to admit to ignorance, and to missteps, and to my need to learn and grow.

Isn’t it funny that having my self-worth be placed on a much greater thing would allow me to be more humble? Isn’t it interesting that arrogance is a mark of a deep need to find the elemental source of self-worth that isn’t dependent on a cardboard cut-out self-image?

I got an award two weeks ago. It was for showing up. It was because two years ago I stumbled across an organization that struck me as so good that I needed to give something of myself to it. It’s a self-organizing advocacy and support group for homeless women. I remember thinking about the fact that I didn’t have anything in particular to offer them, but that I could be, perhaps, a body – answering the phone or doing whatever humble labor might help them. It turned out that they set me up to work with a writing group, which spluttered along weakly under my unconfident leadership, such that I felt lucky they were allowing me to be there. This evolved, for a time, into my helping with the production of a bi-weekly newsletter. I felt mostly like a weak catalyst prompting them to keep putting in the energy it took to do it.

Eventually my comfort and confidence evolved, and the writing group started to get stronger. This coincided with my clarity that my best role was to do the very least – to impose no expertise, offer very little advice, and basically encourage them to listen to themselves. So I continued to feel that my role was a very humble one. That’s why I was astonished, at the 13th annual Homeless Women’s Forum, to be this year’s recipient of their “Woman of Light” award, for a woman who, while not homeless, does much to help their cause.

It was an amazing feeling to get the reward. There was the kind of embarrassed astonishment, and the awed sense of the great work the organizers and attendees were doing, and the gratitude for being allowed to work with them.

Later, I found myself thinking about the paradox of humility. Jesus talked about how we have to humble ourselves to be exalted. But being humble doesn’t turn out to be a wretched state, and being arrogant feels anxious, not confident. The strongest basis for humility is having an unassailable understanding of true worth. And humility is the grounding that allows things to be accomplished.

Grace

2007-11-25T17:12:00.000-08:00

A friend and I started getting together about a year ago for coffee or lunch, to talk about matters of Spirit and of the heart. When the food arrived, the first time, I lifted up my fork as usual to begin to eat. But before the food reached my mouth, he said, “grace.”

It wasn’t like he was admonishing me, telling me we should say grace first. The word itself, the way he said it, was grace. It made me stop the automatic movement of restaurant habits, made all my trajectories disengage, spin like gears on a coasting bicycle. I felt myself lifted – my thought floating into a much larger place. Grace. He continued, “It’s right here. It’s all that ever matters.” From that point I was ready for all our interactions to be grace-filled – to exude what matters.

At several Thanksgivings over the past years, I’ve felt the momentum of all the food steamroll over the thanks. We were a group of friends together, each family bringing something, doing the last preparations together in our kitchen. When it was ready, there seemed to be the need to eat it while it was hot. But later I missed the taking time – or whatever it takes – to disengage from the trajectory of motion and float, still, in grace. Last two Thanksgivings I had us spend a moment before eating to express thanks. It almost worked. I still needed to find a way to invoke that sudden peace that came with Peter’s “grace.”

So this Thanksgiving, before all the food was set out, I had everyone gather in a circle. I told them that I wanted to do a grace, and that others could have the opportunity to share their expressions. Then, when we were all holding hands, I said, “Grace. It’s right here. It’s all that really matters. It’s the joy that’s in everything that’s joyful, the thing that makes anything you’re doing feel worthwhile.” In that moment, for me, the grace came present. It stayed as other people shared thanks, and one friend shared a movement exercise. It continued throughout the time of food and conversation and movement and music, till the end of the evening.

Trajectories

2007-11-11T20:54:00.000-08:00

Last week I spent a lot of time scraping glue off a plywood subfloor. I had taken off the linoleum first, and when I was pulling it off I thought the swirly patterns on it might be the grain of the plywood. But on closer inspection, I found that they were swirls from the combed application of glue before the floor went down. They left bumps on the subfloor which, when scraped off, revealed the actual patterns of the plywood.

The scraping-off process was laborious, so that after a session of it I would still see the activity when I closed my eyes – feel the rubbing of the scraper against the glue until it would suddenly slice through, and the persistent scraping that would eventually lead to the smooth gliding of the scraper over the clean plywood surface. And I found a parallel to this image in something I was thinking about.

All the swirly glue lines are like the trajectories I often assume comprise my life – the pattern of me driving on the freeway to go downtown, the start and finish of a task, the arc of mortal life from birth to death. I may think they show the character of my being, but they are not the true grain. I reach the true grain by ceasing to direct my attention along the lines of the trajectories, to get still and look (or scrape) down and under to find out what I really am.

There is much energy, and much money, directed to selling the notion that these trajectories constitute life. Most recently I’ve become aware of the vast propaganda machine that hits people at 50, saying, time to fall apart – you’re on the downward slide now. It took me a few weeks of being pulled under by it before I stood up and said no. I recognized that this trajectory, like all the others, was just another bumpy application of glue that needed to be scraped off the subfloor. I did step back and look at the scope of the lie: just as people are thinking they’re free from the ropes of careers and family raising, they’re asked to take on a new burden of self-absorption – that of imminent physical and mental decline. As I looked at the story, it basically said the same thing throughout its arc from birth to death: you’re not at the right time for happiness, fullness, maturity, and blessing. First you’re too young, then you’re too burdened, then you’re too old. So when I rose up in rebellion to it, I rebelled against the whole arc – not just the decline being sold to me now, but also the awkwardness being sold to me for my adolescent children, and the sense of the burden of careers, and the basic bumpy lie that good is somehow delayed or missed, instead of being the signature quality of every moment.

The true grain of being says, good is here now. This moment is a blessing. You have always been exactly good, exactly right, and you are now. There is no importance in the direction or placement of any of the trajectories of mortal life. The deep value of each of us has nothing to do with what trajectory we are on or where we are in the arc of that trajectory. It has everything to do with our constant relationship with the Mind that thinks us up, fresh, moment by moment.

Parenting Lessons

2007-10-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

I’m getting a lot of mileage this fall from a confession of ignorance. A friend said she felt it illustrated true wisdom. Other friends also have given it a proper, respectful space to be listened to. It has made a big difference for me in raising my kids.

The confession is: I don’t know anything about how to help a boy become a man.

It has made me stop trying to pretend I know, or thinking I have any understanding of the best decisions of guidance and discipline for my son. It has allowed me to give up the burden of it and consider that everything he needs, to be who he is, is already in him. It is the nature of his being, as he is created, that provides him now with what he always has been, and develops it day by day. The qualities of manhood, which are so attractive to me even though I fathom them faintly, are already part of who he is. The strength of character, compassion, integrity, and ability to do are not my job to construct in him. Phew! They are part of who he already is as the reflection of God.

As I’ve relaxed in this, I’ve seen, day by day, that it is true about my son. It makes me happy to know him. It makes him happier to be around me. I’m no longer worrying about whether he’ll develop the qualities I think he’ll need. Even if I knew what they were, I wouldn’t be able to make them appear. But I can trust with the same trust I have towards the goodness of the universe that his Creator does know everything he needs (for he is, after all, his Creator’s idea) and gives it to him.

In the last few days I’ve reflected that this is also true for my daughter. Though I may have felt more comfortable about guiding someone into womanhood than manhood, I really don’t know anything about this either. Even what it is to be a woman is something I may be only just now discovering. It is lovely to feel that I and she can both be led, each from within, in the development of our own womanhood.

Jesus said, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?” – implying that none of us could. Depending on interpretation, that could mean: since you can see that you can’t, by setting up a self-help program for yourself or by worrying, make yourself a foot taller, don’t try to set up such a program, or worry, about any part of yourself. God is taking care of all aspects of you. And it can mean, since you can’t, either through worrying or a self-help program, do anything to improve your self-esteem, give up the effort and rejoice in the royal place that you are granted in being the child of God.

I’m learning that this applies to parenting, too. I can’t add a cubit to their stature, I can’t make them be a woman and a man. But I can relax and enjoy the expression of Life that Life, Love, gives to us in our relations with each other day by day.

“Mortal existence is a dream . . .”

2007-10-27T23:44:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was rainy. I was walking down the hill on Yesler, from up above Broadway where I had parked. I was carrying about ten Bibles in a plastic bag, and a similar number of Science and Healths in my backpack, along with my books – going to the jail to deliver literature and visit people. I had already gotten pretty wet picking up the books – unlocking the padlock at the gate, walking up to the Reading Room, walking back, closing the gate, replacing the padlock, stepping gingerly through the half-inch deep sheet of water pitted by raindrops. And I had driven in low visibility on a freeway thick with cars, my windshield wipers thrashing. The rain now was a little lighter but still getting me wet.

The walk down Yesler is always a bit breathtaking. There is the sweeping vista down and across the Sound, and to the left across the valley. To the right is the roar of freeway cars being channeled down various parallel and diverging rampings of concrete. Then you come down, across the homeless encampments, into the land of the skyscrapers.

So I was walking along, hunched and squinting, when I suddenly got an arresting thought. I imagined that this was all a dream, and I had awakened. I still found the dream interesting, so I was describing it to myself, trying to remember everything. I told myself, we had these things called cars that could move us along special channels that we had made for them. And we had these things called bodies that we moved around in, too. We considered the bodies more attached to us than the cars, but we moved them with similar instrumentation – with both we would listen to their feedback and supply them with what they were said to need.

A funny thing happened to me at that moment. The rain, which had been an annoyance, suddenly became an interesting detail of my dream. I felt the drops on my face as cool and soft, refreshing; something to notice. I wanted to remember everything – I felt a love for it. I also started to think about what I knew now that I was awake – that good is here, now. I could feel that goodness, that feels-like-flying lightness inside.

After I was done at the jail, walking now up the very steep hills but with a lighter load, I again put myself into mind of noticing what was in the dream. I thought, in the dream, we all had different things we were supposed to be doing. Some of them were considered more desirable than others. There were people that we really loved, and things we really cared about. But we didn’t necessarily notice that love is present all the time.

As I maneuvered my car onto the freeway, I felt a surge of satisfaction at having accomplished all my tasks successfully. And I thought, in the dream, we thought we could have goodness based on certain conditions. We set up the conditions, or felt that others had, and then we tried to meet them. If we succeeded, we got to feel goodness. Otherwise, we didn’t.

There are two places in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, “Mortal existence is a dream”. I’ve accepted that on an intellectual and analogical level, but hadn’t come so close before to feeling what it might mean. The question, so if it’s a dream, what difference does that make? is an important one. I could say, it’s just a dream so it doesn’t matter what happens. But that feels like a cop out, and also something my heart would never quite believe. I could say, it’s just a dream, so if we get good at lucid dreaming, we can make whatever we want happen. But that misses the point – it is an attempt to live in the dream instead of wake up. I could say it’s like the premise in The Matrix – that while this may be a dream, it may be preferable to stay asleep than to give up everything I know as true.

My experience on Wednesday pointed to a different answer. I had the feeling of being awake to the truth that good is here now, and that nothing else is absolutely true. The particulars of the dream give me many opportunities to love, and the love is real, something I’m actually doing in my waking state. I start to see that elements of the dream are only real to the extent that they are opportunities for me to love. The phenomenon of cars and highways is dream, but the desire to move freely and to harness power is real. I have the opportunity to love the dance of harmony, and the swift movement, and the ingenuity of invention. The phenomenon of bodies is dream, but locus and volition, presence and interaction with the environment, feeling and caring, are real. I have the opportunity to love the long strides and wide vistas of high hills, and tender touch, and being with people.

There are so many issues in the dream that cry for healing. The ground beneath the highways cries to breathe; the air cries to be clean; people cry to know their worth and purpose. All the currents of human systems, many swept along by blind grabbing for a misunderstood need, cry to be set right so they don’t keep on impoverishing people and wreaking environmental havoc. What delivers healing to the dream is doses of awakeness, moments of vision which guide actions toward the natural good that all creation desires.

My World is Mine to Save

2007-10-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

The problem with comparing my life to other people’s runs deeper than its being a bad idea, something that’s not good for me. It’s not one of those things to know I shouldn’t do but still do “because I’m only human”. The problem lies in its being an artifact of a false paradigm – an error which exposes a misunderstanding of the whole way the world is put together.

There is a part of the daily prayer (given by Mrs. Eddy in the Manual of the Mother Church) that says, “Let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me.” When I think of the “me” in the prayer, I sometimes think “the kingdom of me,” to remind myself that everything I perceive is part of myself, and the establishment of the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love in me means that it’s all I can ever see, in my whole world.

This is not a megalomanic statement. It just acknowledges that all I can ever know of others is my perception of them. My prayer for others is my looking to God – my source, our common source, to see something of their true identity. Seeing them, then, as perfect, is not some wonderful thing I do for them. It’s just cleaning up my own act about something that is already true.

It comes down to this. I have access to my world through my perceptions. What I perceive is, in a very real way, my world. I can’t assume that it is the same as anyone else’s. I don’t have access to anyone else’s world, except for this: through communion with God, I have access to the truth. The truth as God knows it doesn’t include any relative opinions about people. It doesn’t include an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, achievements and follies. It only includes the deep and perfect being, rooted in the infinite, sustained by Love itself. The only opinion I can have that comes anywhere near the truth is this perception of reality. Any other opinion is only my construct – the story I tell myself, based on my projections.

When I interact with you, it is an intersection of our worlds. I know that I am interacting with you, but what I think you are, and what I think you do, may be very different from what you think you are and do. You may say something that I feel compels me to react in a certain way –say for example, with indignation. But since what I see as you is just my construct, I’m not actually compelled to react in any way at all. I can notice that my impulse to react is based on my perception, but that my perception isn’t the actual fact. I can stop and check in with Truth before I react.

If I act on assumptions I have about you, based on what kind of person I think you are, I probably will offend you, as the assumptions expose the difference between my and your perceptions of you. My best chance at having an authentic interaction is by acknowledging that I can’t rightly know anything about you except by seeing what God knows.

Comparing my relative achievements with others is just comparing my view of myself with what I’ve projected about others. I can only do it in my world. I may assume that I have some kind of an objective standpoint from which I can judge, but I don’t. The others I would compare myself with are just my own constructs, and are probably unrecognizable by the people who share their names.

The powerful part of this realization is that my world is mine to save. It’s up to me to make sure that I view my world correctly, that I take careful and diligent time to make a fair estimation of what everything is, based on what God knows about it. Then I can expect to see my perceptions come more and more in line with the perfect reality. I may have wondered when “they” would get around to seeing things in a more intelligent way. But now the answer is clear: it’s up to me. Of course, this can be said by everyone else as well, though of course, I can’t say it for anyone but me.

Walking to the Mountains

2007-09-30T22:53:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-12T21:22:00.000-07:00

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.

.

Christian Science and the shell of it – breaking free

2007-08-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Giving and Receiving – the divine equilibrium of Spirit

2007-07-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a friend shared an experience that had been upsetting to her. She spent a weekend with two other friends – a thing they had done before and which she had happily anticipated. But one of the friends acted differently this time, becoming bossy and controlling, “taking over the whole thing.” This included preparing all kinds of delicious food, but my friend said, “it was all about her.” Apparently she left no room for the normal breathing of relationships, for other people to express what they wanted, to have a say about what was being done, to give their gifts to the group.

I reflected to my friend that I think I’ve been like that friend at times. I had ideas about what things meant and how to do things, and I thought I was being interesting and helpful to share them. On one occasion (when I was once again sharing with the other English teachers how I had approached a certain lesson) I saw a look of unmasked distaste on the face of one of the teachers. But I couldn’t fathom why, and it seemed I couldn’t stop myself from “being helpful” – sharing my experience.

After the conversation yesterday, I felt the need to pull myself back to equilibrium. Though those gaffes are well in my past, and I can mostly laugh about them, I’m not entirely removed from hurt and self-disappointment at discovering that what I meant as a gift was unwelcome; that I had been blind to the needs of others. I needed something more than to reiterate hard-learned lessons about listening, and how receiving another is often the one most needed gift. I needed the clarity of a wholly spiritual perspective.

At feeling this need, I instinctively turned to God, leaning my weight into the all-embracing presence of Spirit, letting go of my own sense of balance to sink into the equilibriating presence of Soul. I remembered that I’ve given up faith in my own ability to find a balance through the careful weighing of give and take. It’s not that I’ve become successful at achieving grace through razor-thin balancing acts. It’s that, when I achieve balance, it’s because I’m leaning on God.

Then I thought about how this law is also governing my friend, and her friend, and everyone who lives in life’s longing for love and fulfillment. It’s actually a force that is governing us more constantly than gravity, though we may think of it even less. Thinking of it more helps me relax and appreciate the glory of being. Understanding it helps me move in accord with the will of Love, and so feel empowered to bring more good into the world. But even when I haven’t understood Love’s governance, it still has shepherded me. How else can I account for the thread of joy that has held my life together, even on days when I didn’t feel it?

On my bike ride this morning I thought about the Bible passage “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.” I realized that this supported my earlier thought: God is the giver of everything. Therefore we, as God’s reflection, can’t be tied up in knots with regard to our need to give and receive. It’s not possible for God’s reflection to feel the need to give but be confused about how to do it. It’s not possible for God’s reflection to see a proffered gift as an act of self-aggrandizement. It’s not possible to feel a mismatch – that our gifts are unwanted or that we can’t get what we need. It doesn’t take years of trying and failing to get it right until we learn how to interact in graceful give and take with others. There aren’t people who will just never get it, and I’m not such a person.

I still have a vestigial reflex, when I’m learning a lesson, to conclude that I’ve been wrong, along with everyone else who I believe holds the same approach. Feeling the governance of Spirit, holding each life in the perfect equilibrium of giving and receiving, generating joy and glory, is a sweet antidote, which replaces the bitterness of wrongness with the gratitude of being home.

More than I can hold in my hands

2007-07-20T15:50:00.001-07:00

At a meeting of our spiritual formation group, we were asked to page, in our thoughts, through the past few days of lives, as if we were viewing a photo album, and to notice what stood out.

I saw the image of me driving up Third Avenue at ten that morning, after talking with women in the jail. The sky was intense blue between the buildings, the green of the trees luminescent. I felt in that moment the vibrant aliveness of everything, seated in a deep gratitude.

The talks with the women, the sharing of scriptures and stories of their lives, had been satisfying. My feeling was that no stratification of society, from homeless to penthouse executive, can put anyone closer to God. It also can’t put anyone further away. That closeness to Truth is right here for any one of us. It doesn’t need us to dig out of a hole, improve ourselves, earn it. Truth is Truth because that’s what it is. Truth is Love, so everyone has that perfect place – the true nature of themselves as loved and loving.

Paging back a day, I thought of the service we had done in the jail on Sunday. The feeling of love was palpable, comfortable, as we sang together, prayed together. I noticed how different it was from my earlier days of doing services, where I had just hoped to get through with out too much disruption. How before I doubted what our humble (and long) reading had to offer to those who came to hear, and now I knew we were sharing truth as if breaking bread, and it would nourish and sustain.

Going back to earlier that morning, I remembered the moment when the attendant had opened the door to my Sunday school class to tell us it was almost time to join the congregation upstairs. “They’re kneeling now” – Sacrament Sunday, where we kneel together in silent prayer, and then pray the Lord’s prayer again, together.

My two students, aged five and three, were standing on the table. It’s a heavy board table, so it wasn’t in danger, and though they had been jumping around quite a bit, my students weren’t, either. I felt a bit red-handed to have them both standing there, full of laughter and exhilaration. But I also knew it was good. In between their jumping around we’d been learning the First Commandment, talking about the words and what they mean, talking about their right to be governed by good alone, all the time. I felt that the love that was filling that room, the joy of their enjoyment of each other and their activity, was the main message of the class. Yes it was almost out of control. As I remembered the moment, I thought of the phrase, “more than I can hold in my hands.” I felt it was perhaps OK to be almost out of control just because there was so much life flowing there, so much goodness. It seemed right to me that I didn’t have to try to hold everything of life in my hands – because it there’s too much to it. Its order is not of my making, but of its own being – of God’s making. As a companion phrase, the Biblical “my cup runneth over” came to mind.

This was the image I shared with my group, though in my mind all the images contributed to the feeling. A member of the group offered a beautiful prayer for me – it mentioned increasing wonder at the presence of God’s glories, and at the miracles flowing through my hands. I desire to help my hands to remember not to grasp so much as to let the waterfall of life flow through them; not to control the flow but just to create a bubbler from which I and others may drink.

Another dimension

2007-07-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

I have no personal experience with the fierce loyalty of a soldier. I haven’t had the intense feeling of being willing to die for a cause or a person. It’s a thing I’ve read about in books, a thing I’ve felt the edges of in the “yes, ma’am,” of people involved with the military. It’s not something I’ve missed – my tendency is to be suspicious of obedience, wary of the blindness of following orders. Still, I’ve felt, from time to time, a wistfulness for the fervency such an allegiance could have. A book I read recently once again hinted at its power as an ordering principle and a giver of purpose in life. It left me thinking about what it would be like to have this kind of a relationship to God.

The intense eagerness to serve God wouldn’t have the pitfall of serving a person – the inevitable human failings – or of serving a cause, with the tendency of causes to get bogged down in process and co-opted by power-hunger. I felt a kind of swift excitement when I thought of being in service to Love – of dedicating all of my life to standing for Love, living it, acting according to its impulses. Though I think of God as Principle – as the creating, controlling force governing the universe, rather than an anthropomorphic entity, I found this sense of loyalty to be everything I hoped for it – galvanizing, ordering, purpose-giving. It added a dimension to my prayer. I thought, so this is the legitimacy of that whole allegiance concept. It is a thing we are meant to feel. It’s not a seductive but misguided way of having ones life ordered, or a great thing we miss out on if we are civilians. It’s part of the nature of love – part of my nature – to want to give myself in service. And service to Life, Love, is obedience to the great first commandment. Another compelling reason to give my allegiance to God.

Arc of the Covenant

2007-07-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

My daughter and I returned to Tae Kwon Do last week, after a month off. As we were practicing spinning hook kicks, I thought of the fact that, whatever the steps we are taught in learning the movement, we have to go beyond those steps to really do it. The steps are like dots we connect, but the movement itself is a smooth arc. Though we use the dots to understand the arc, we must then let go of them so that our movement is the smooth flowing from one impulse, with no stopping along the way.

This is true in many areas of life. In my daughter’s fiddle training, she goes beyond “the dots” – the musical notation – to the actual music, which is governed by its own internal order – the natural flowing of one phrase out of another. In social interaction, we go beyond the dots of polite behavior to find grace. In seeking truth, we must go beyond the dots of religion to the graceful arc of spirituality.

Riding my bicycle up the hill, feeling the complementary circles of arms and legs, connected by the undulating s-curves through my torso, I heard in my mind, “arc of the covenant.” I know the actual Biblical phrase says “ark,” and refers to the box which symbolically carried God’s promise to His people, or alternatively, to the boat which carried the promise of continuity of life for God’s creation. But I like to think of God’s promise, instead of something carried in a box or even a boat, as the laws which hold us in harmony, which make our movements flow in a perfect arc.

I’ve thought about how waves in water reflect the motion of Love. Each molecule receives the impulse of the wave in its own moment. No one is left out, and there is no strain of the impulse hitting a molecule more than once or failing to move through it to the next one. Each one is needed; each one is touched. Each one passes the impulse on to the next. The message of Love reaches everyone. The arc of the covenant is the circle-impelled wave that must fulfill all needs, because that is the law of it.

Even the first ark story also contains an arc – the rainbow which signified the promise of God’s continuing presence. And that arc appears unfailingly as a law of light – it’s not there at the whim of God; it’s there as a sign of God’s constancy. So, too, is the presence within us of the skill which lets us go beyond the dots to the arc of grace. Our lives are, themselves, a testimony to God’s constancy.

More on presence

2007-06-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

I was thinking more about presence Saturday, riding the bus with my son to the Fremont parade – watching the people get on the bus, listening to the boy behind us telling his parents about his plans. I was wearing clothes that were tighter than I’ve sometimes worn – living into my being, pushing out with my presence into the world. I saw other people living this way, too – being present, not hiding behind their clothes. Couples with kids and strollers they muscled up the stairs; single people; friends; people of all ages. The bus stopped often in the suburban neighborhood, and I had given up worrying about arriving on time. I figured the time we arrived would be right.

My son was slouched deep in his seat reading a book. I was watching everyone else. And this is what I thought to them: your presence is welcome. I felt a bit like I was just waking up from a long bad dream, and was teaching myself, again, what’s real. I thought of how, actually, no permission is needed to be fully present. You don’t have to be the right shape to be allowed to be seen. You don’t need the right credentials to be allowed to look at someone and smile. You don’t need to wait for permission to speak. You don’t have to already know the other people to appreciate them. And they don’t need to fit into any molds to be worthy of acceptance. There, with all the signs of who they are that they allow to show, all the choices they’ve grasped as signs of their identity, all the inside parts they maybe didn’t hide because they didn’t know were showing – there they are, welcome.

I tell myself again: my being is not based on absence. The goodness of my body is not based on the absence of pounds. My peace is not based on the absence of stress. My smile and eye contact are not based on a lack of inhibition. They are my presence, and presence is what I am.

I wondered what odd stamp of the world had made me at times think otherwise. Was it that I learned my kindergarten lessons too well – sit cross-legged on the rug, face the teacher, don’t speak unless given permission and only reply with the answer asked for? But in kindergarten I already had a disapproving judgment of the girl who sat under the piano (not like everyone else) and said, “just call me Nina,” instead of just saying her name. And I already had the sense that cats and dogs are enemies, and that enemies form the essential structure for a good story, and that good and bad define each other.

I broke myself away from those musings, for the line they lead in doesn’t lead to this new wakefulness, which I love. I recall that even then I was a dreamy, light-filled spirit who would lose myself in the pumping of the backyard swing, singing out songs that caught at my heart. This dwelling in absence is a story that I can put on all parts of my life, up to and including now, or I can let it all go and dwell in presence.

This is very important to me. I want to hold each one in my spirit’s embrace and say, welcome – your presence is appreciated. It is good, it is allowed. I don’t want to look through the old frame where I felt people were to be appreciated if they matched standards – if they looked right and dressed right and didn’t have bad habits, and lived within all of society’s painted lines. And I believe this is the paradigm shift that Jesus was talking about when he said, “a new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another,” and when he said “judge not, that ye be not judged.” I think I am now only in the surface layers of it. There is such depth to love – it’s able to go down to the very foundations of being. I sense that it’s able to change everything, to wake everything up to the harmony of universal presence, to heal everything. It is my deepest desire to participate in it.

More and more lovely clues

2007-06-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

I recently read that where Jesus said, “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand,” the Greek word for “repent” has the same root as the word “metanoia”, which I had earlier learned to mean “paradigm shift”. So Jesus was going around saying: have a paradigm shift, because the kingdom of God is here. It doesn’t just mean change your mind within the same structure of right and wrong; decide you’re wrong where you had been thinking you were right. Instead it means change the very structure by which you decide everything you do.

At this year’s annual meeting of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, I heard a practitioner talk about how she had helped a patient achieve physical healing by applying to herself Jesus’ command of “Judge not,” which Jesus illustrates with the following words: “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.”

She said she realized she had been thinking her patient had to change some things about his attitude before he could be healed. She realized that this was a flaw in her own thinking, the “beam” that she had to remove from her own eye before she tried to take the “mote” out of his eye. She said the removing of the beam from her own eye was the recognition that God made him already perfect, and he didn’t have to change in order for that to be manifest. Shortly after she recognized this, the patient called and said, “what did you do?” – He was completely healed.

Listening to her account, I realized that the beam in the saying denoted more than an impossibly large object to be unaware of having in my eye, in contrast to someone else’s problems that seemed so real to me. A beam is also a structural component – the main part of a building that holds everything else up. So casting the beam out of my eye means ceasing to rely on the same structure of thought, releasing presuppositions, expectations, and conclusions based on them. With these gone, I can “see clearly to cast the mote out of [my] brother’s eye.” In other words, I can see the evidence of spiritual being which establishes my brother’s perfection in my eyes.

Christ Says Yes III – nothing shall offend them

2007-06-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

In my orthodox period, as an aspiring good person, I tended to believe that when people were good, they deserved good things, and when people were evil, they didn’t, Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount notwithstanding. (Jesus says, Love your enemies, …; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.) Also, though I loved Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” as immortalized in Beethoven’s ninth symphony, I squirmed a little at the concept that “Everything that’s good and everything that’s bad follows Joy’s rose-strewn path.” I didn’t really want the bad stuff to get to be in there.

Lately I have been loving the concept expressed by these passages. To me they are gateways to a paradigm shift. In order to embrace them in my world, I have to change my understanding – have to open new dimensions in order to include them. The new worldview that includes them is much richer, more comprehensive, and more satisfying than the old one, so I am happy to be here.

I read something in a Christian Science Sentinel this morning which I found very interesting. In a discussion about the practice of Christian Science healing, one of the participants says, “You need to be the practitioner that is in you, with your own love. You cannot duplicate someone else’s life-experience or life model.” (Christian Science Sentinel, June 11, 2007, p. 7.) This seems very true and important to me. I think I allowed at least some of my upbringing to be guided by the grave, hushed voices that spoke, with eyes averted, of some unfortunate choice someone had made. Make sure you don’t do what she did. The implication was that you could make a good life out of negatives, by avoiding all of the bad things other people might do.

To me the message from this practitioner says that I can’t build my life based on what someone else found to be the right path. Similarly, I can’t base what I don’t do on what someone else felt would be a bad idea. There is a good reason Christian Science practitioners don’t give human advice. It’s because human advice is not scientific – it’s not based on anything provable, accountable, or replicable. The advice I would give is, decide your course based on what increases your love.

I will now illustrate why that advice must remain based on spiritual terms – your love – rather than human terms – the activities you take on. For me, one of the things that very greatly increased my love was having a baby. The influx of love for my children also strengthened the love in my marriage, increased my appreciation of others in general, and multiplied the level of my compassion. Yet it’s obvious that it would be very bad advice to tell someone looking for more love to have a baby. I knew it was the right step for me at the time; other people find their right steps, too. One person may find an increase in love by serving in a soup kitchen; another, by climbing a mountain; another, by writing a book; another, by an intense romantic relationship. All of these human things can be right steps for people at certain times. Only the individual, looking within and testing each step along the way for the increase in love, can know what the right step is.

This is the very loving way that the Christ works, leading us from within and saying yes to everything that affirms our being. This also leads us to a judgment-free appreciation for the different paths others take. I’m finding it very freeing to realize that no human pursuit is intrinsically more spiritual than another. An athlete is not less (or more) spiritual than an intellectual; a person who does finance not less (or more) spiritual than one who does art. Each person’s gift, nurtured and given with integrity, blesses us all.

Neither do I ever have to feel that grave concern that someone’s life has taken an unfortunate turn. I don’t have to become like my (perhaps faulty) memory of older church members, casting on myself and others the fear of some life courses and the people who take them. It says in Psalms, “Great peace have they which love Thy law, and nothing shall offend them.” It is my great joy to challenge myself to not be offended by anyone, but to love the law of Love and how it guides us all in our right paths.

Presence

2007-05-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

Part of my daily prayer involves thinking about God as presence. I started out thinking about God as omnipresence, but I wanted to avoid the thought of filling up a space that was there first. I think of presence as being there even before space. Instead of presence being within space, I think of space as a concept within presence, where presence is the very fact of existence.

Last Saturday at the folklife festival, I saw two sisters performing. The older sister is thirteen, though to look at her, she might have been older. She was playing fiddle in a group, and she stood poised, her foot tapping, her bow moving confidently and jauntily. She was smiling at everyone, and her eyebrows would go up as the music lilted. She clearly was enjoying the songs, and encouraging all the audience to enjoy them too. My thought, looking at her, was that she exuded presence. Not a self-important or ego-based stage presence, but something much more engaging. I suppose in the past, from my own struggles, I might have thought stage presence was basically the absence of stage fright, but this was something different. This was a positive and powerful thing.

In the next number, the girl performed with her younger sister, who played the harp. The younger sister is maybe about nine. She has the same expressive eyebrows, and a softer version of the same poise. As she was playing her harp, she looked out at everyone and smiled with each pluck of a string. My sense was that she had full expectation that she was pleasing the audience, and she was drinking in the love, reveling in their appreciation. I looked at their mom, then, who was in the back, as I was, watching and cheering them on. I thought, what could their mother have given these girls to have them be so confident? It must have been a deep and constant appreciation of their presence, with no judgment waiting to happen. Their great musical ability must have arisen in an atmosphere of permission, not pressure.

I had a little remorse, then, about my own parenting. Had I not, all too often, focused on absence instead of presence? - Noticed things that I saw as wrong or lacking, and tried to find ways to fix or develop them? I saw that this would always be counter-productive, making it seem like there were gaps and holes in my childrens’ being, engendering self-doubt and fear. My next thought was to be grateful that I’m not the parent – God is. It’s God’s being that determines what they are, and no foolishness on my part can change any of that. Indeed, since presence is substance, presence determines what we all are. So the only influence I can have had on them, all this time, is what comes from my presence. Things that come from absence – worry, fear, foolishness – can’t have any influence, while what comes from presence – my love – will always be felt. I realized that even now, I don’t have to look for ways to fix any results of my absence-based approach. The way to help – and really heal – any seeming gaps in confidence and presence is simply to see what’s present and love it. In other words, see everything that’s good (since, after all, God is all presence and God is good.)

This might seem like yet another refrain of “accentuate the positive”, but here’s what’s different about it for me: presence and absence are not complementary opposites. They don’t act the same way but in a different flavor. Two illustrations:

1) Though we have flashlights to use to get rid of darkness, there’s no such thing as a flashdark. There can’t be any device that can throw a beam of darkness into a place and get rid of the light. This is because darkness is not a positive quality. It has no presence of its own, no ability to move itself around, no ability to determine anything.
2) Artists often work with negative space. They train themselves to see the spaces in between the objects, and to use these spaces when considering the balance of their composition. But in real life, negative space doesn’t have presence. You might see the space between two trees, and it might look like some kind of a beast. But that space has no power to come hulking out from its place and sit in front of you. It can’t grow bigger and change the shape or size or position of the trees that delineate it. It can’t make any difference about anything at all. And whenever you move, the negative space changes. It has no continuity nor ability to maintain itself as an entity.

So if God is presence, there is really never any need to focus on absence. The way to fix any problem is just to look at what’s present. Then any sense of absence simply falls away.

This is a radical approach for me. It means no more diagnoses of any problems. No more thrashing through how to fix things. No place for annoyance, irritation, despair. Or, at least, a quick path out of them: a simple question – what’s present here? A reminder that it’s useless to focus in on absence, since absence has no substance. A reminder that all I am comes from elemental goodness itself, which is as present as God, who is presence itself.

I can feel this presence of myself as the expression of the presence of God. From this perspective, anything I need to attain seems easy. It comes out of the infinite substance that is already mine. I don’t need to conjure up something to fill in gaps in my achievement. I just have to live in God as a flower lives in the morning – supple and fragrant with the life force whose flow is my being.

Joy

2007-05-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

My deepest joy is in being one. On my bike ride, I saw a black bird sitting on the post of a yield sign – its beak yellow, its head tousled like a pajama’d child, its throat moving, showing it to be the source of the joyful sound that rose beside the trail. Joy rose up in me then, too, and I felt a oneness with the bird and all the living things expressing themselves in that moment. I have heard people who think they should know say that birdsong is a mere proclamation of territory, but I never have believed this. It doesn’t account for the spontaneous rising of joy.

People also say that joy is chemical. I think saying joy comes from chemicals is similar to saying Michelangelo made his statues with chisels. It may be so, but chisels, even a vast array of them, can’t account for the works. Neither can a deep knowledge of anatomy, though he must have had that. The one thing that would need to guide the artist in the creation of such works as the Pieta is that moving of the spirit, alongside and within, that feels the presence of another – feels the weight, the gravity – that which is deeper than emotion – in the other. This spirit is what allows the viewers to feel the same thing – to not only be there watching the drama of the moment, but to be in the bodies that are portrayed – to feel the presence and gravity as if they were our own.

Joy is the same way. Though chemicals may create a high, joy guides the spirit into oneness. Joy always leads to an expression that affirms Life and benefits other living things. It leads to the leaps of grace that cause more joy to rise spontaneously in other living things. We recognize it across species as well as among our own kind.

I have heard people say they have heard no compelling reason to believe in God. To me, God is the only way to account for joy. It can’t be explained in material terms. It can’t be predicted by the presence or absence of any material elements. It is something we recognize as highly substantial, and, in fact, as one of the main things of deepest worth and value, yet it is not made out of matter. To me this says that if joy is real, then Spirit is real. And just like the tousle-headed bird beside the trail, I choose to believe in the reality of joy.

Here I am

2007-05-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my teen-aged daughter participated in a Taekwon Do tournament, and my husband was there for part of it. When he was telling me about it afterwards, he said, “It was great – I was giving her advice, and she was actually hearing it.” He told me that the advice he was giving had nothing to do with the placement of hands and feet. Instead, it had to do with presence – feeling the purpose of each thing she was doing, feeling it deep in her belly, breathing. He told her to walk into the ring with a presence that would command the judges to look at her – one that said, even before the first move of her pattern, you’re looking at the winner. It wasn’t a matter of psyche-out or bravado. It wasn’t a matter of positioning herself as better than the other competitors. It was simply a matter of being fully there, of standing behind and within herself, of being a fair representation of everything that she is. Not one of many waiting to be judged, but one being of integrity, whole within herself.

I found this to be very good advice. I took it in, took it for myself, and considered how consonant it is with everything I’m learning about being. It doesn’t make sense that presence and poise be the exclusive purview of celebrities and a small percentage of people born to perform. If I am, in fact, the image and likeness of God, good, it doesn’t make sense that I would be missing the capacity to represent myself, to stand in myself, and to stand up with poise and confidence. These aren’t surface qualities. They’re not about polishing my image or developing a persona, however much popular culture would say they are. They aren’t contrary to humility, but are in fact an expression of it, an acknowledgment that God is the creator, that God does a good job, and that it’s not our place to say otherwise.

There’s a song I’ve sung a few times in other Christian churches. It says, Here I am, Lord – send me. It is in this willingness to be sent that I also find the presence and poise that will allow me to do the job required. It is interesting to consider that we are sent each day – that our being is the evidence of God’s being, and we don’t have any other purpose. So it is right to feel competent in every pursuit in which we find ourselves. It’s right to expect our actions to be effective.

My Purpose – Not for my Purposes

2007-05-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the sun today taking in the cosmic rhythm – the dance of the trees and grasses, the low tones of the bamboo wind chimes, the sweet songs of birds. I could feel a breathing that went through me, though it neither started nor ended with me. Breathing in the rhythm with everything around me, it was easy to feel the oneness. In oneness everything seems possible. If everyone can feel this peace and harmony, we will able to breathe the world we want into being. Just by who we are, we will bring it about.

This perception cast a new light on an old memory – that of the moment I fell in love with my daughter. She was two or three days old, and was sleeping upstairs. I went up to check on her. I remember thinking, on the way up the stairs, about how I would be able to tell she was fine – wondering how easily I would know if she was breathing. When I got to her, it was easy to tell, from farther away than I had expected. Her whole body was breathing. Even in sleep she exuded this tremendous aliveness, the expressiveness of something thriving. Before that moment I had felt maternal care for her, and a generalized happiness to have her, but in that moment I felt a leaping out of love for her, a love which stayed.

It occurs to me now that the aliveness she expressed was the same oneness, the same sense of a breathing much larger than oneself. It called to me to participate in a larger truth, a larger purpose. And though it was exactly the thing that I most wanted in the world, I could also say that the purpose was not my own. It wasn’t something I could have dreamed up and set as a goal for myself. Yes I had intensely wanted to be a mother; I had intuited that it was one role that would use all of me. I had a miscarriage shortly before we conceived her, and it was a time of deep grief. But the lesson I took from it, and the thought that I felt made me ready for motherhood, was, “not by will, but by willingness.”

I’ve been learning that lesson ever since. Most recently, I’ve been thinking about “firing the manager,” where the manager is the one who tries to figure out the direction for my life, and, while she’s at it, the direction for the life of everyone whose life path crosses mine. I find her to be stressful, anxious, and entirely incompetent. She forgets that she is not the center of the universe, and tries to make everything orbit around her. She tends not to remember that the divine Creator is giving every life form its perfect purpose, ideas, and course.

In firing the manager, I come upon a truth which is quite clear, but sometimes gets tangled in language so as to seem paradoxical. The greatest fulfillment, my greatest purpose, is not for my purposes. My purpose, which is found in oneness with everything living, is not something I (or the manager) can tweak or harness or use to enhance my place in society or my own designed sense of who I should be. It’s not something I can even know except in the context of oneness – something much greater than what I usually think of as me.

There is Christian language for this, as when Paul says “ye are the temple of the living God,” and “ye are not your own.” But it may also be one of those mysteries where the meaning is easy to misconstrue. We get told that we must not be selfish, and this is supposed to mean that we should suppress what we most desire and serve someone else’s purposes. But that is not an authentic meaning. I believe that it’s part of the law of Life and Love that everything is designed to want to be exactly what it is. We are designed to want what we want, and to fulfill the purpose that is our heart’s desire. And we are designed to be part of the oneness – to find our unique participation with all of the universe to be our ultimate fulfillment, the ultimate embodiment of our essential individuality. So our purpose is our own, and not to be suppressed for anyone else’s purposes. But it is not our own concoction. We find it in oneness, in the law of Love. We fulfill it in service, as do all living things. And we rejoice in it with the special high of being part of something bigger than anything the manager could grasp.

Standing for Peace

2007-05-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, on Mother’s Day, I stood in a circle with about 12 other people in a park near our home, to observe a five-minute vigil with the Standing Women – standing for a better world. It wasn’t just women – we had asked the men in our lives to stand with us. Three of the people were my immediate family – we had walked the 10 blocks from our house to get there. Three were people I had never met, who had seen my posting on the Standing Women website saying where we’d be standing. The rest were members of our school community.

As I looked around at this small, beautiful group, it occurred to me that the vast majority of people in the world want this – a good life for our children and all children, our grandchildren and all grandchildren, the planet. We want to live in peace; we want to love each other. Since that is the case, I reflected, the only thing we need is to claim our individual sovereignty, our ability to manifest what we are in our lives.

I had the image the other day that I am perhaps more like coral than I had thought. Instead of my life being a collection of intentions, events, and material artifacts which I need to manage and come up with a way to make work for me to achieve my purposes, my life is something that grows naturally out of who I am. Just as the intricate and colorful structures of the coral form effortlessly from the animals’ own being, so all the visible attributes of my life can flow from mine. I don’t have to worry about whether they will fit, or do what I hoped they would do. I can leave that to the grand plan of God.

In this context, my sovereignty and my faith are one. Saying I have the ability to manifest what I want in life is saying that my Creator has designed me so that the artifacts of my life, like coral, grow to serve the needs of my life. It is natural that the life of a being who is the expression of Love should be lovely, full of love in every moment, bringing forth blessing and healing. I get to bring forth what I want by being what I am. I am designed so this happens naturally.

I was talking afterwards to a woman in the circle who’s been active in organizing for peace. I said, it must be a constant consideration how to stand up for peace without taking in any elements of war and violence – such as anger and resentment. She agreed, commenting that most peace work is internal, but that there’s also the need for outward work – that it calls for a balance. I think this is true, and is consonant with the law of Life, in which giving and receiving are always reciprocal. I want to practice this balance by letting my life grow like coral. I know that the Creator’s design is for exactly the kind of world we want the world’s children and grandchildren to have. My faith is that as I give the job of managing my life over to God, God will do a good job. God will help all of us grow lives that support life, bringing forth beautiful, sustaining structures that provide safe habitat for all.

No more silence

2007-05-11T14:17:00.000-07:00

At a retreat I recently attended, we decided to spend a period of the afternoon in silence. While I was fine with the silence as I walked the beach and communed with the sunlight, I found it uncomfortable when I met another of our group and interacted with just a smile and a wave.

The nature of the discomfort was that it felt like I was shoving myself back into a box that I had been in for too long – it was a very familiar place that I had recently been finding my way out of, and I didn’t want to be stuck back in there again.

It’s not that I’ve been habitually silent. In fact, I’ve caused people discomfort too many times by dousing them with a torrent of thoughts with too little attention to the natural give and take of conversation. But these floods were perhaps induced by the paved over areas in my internal landscape, areas of enforced silence, the prohibitions to speaking in certain ways and situations.

Some of these silences were words that I wouldn’t say; some were things I wouldn’t talk about; some were situations in which I didn’t give myself permission to speak; some were people I didn’t give myself permission to speak to. These enforced silences didn’t keep me from thinking things – all kinds of things, which would get so thick that they would sometimes become another source of silence, as I knew or usually thought there was no way to fit them through the gates of communication.

What I want to say about this is that, although I didn’t even know before that it was a problem, I feel profoundly liberated to be out of that box. And I want to talk a bit about how I got out of it and why I think it’s a good thing.

The first step in liberation was starting to glimpse that I don’t need someone’s permission to be their friend. When I first glimpsed this, it was profound for me, and gave me a lot of courage to overcome shyness. But it has taken me many more years to fully realize this truth. I recounted my most recent revelations about this in the entry “Christ says yes II” in this blog. (Also in this blog, the entry “On being a Christian” touches on important parts of this realization.)

It’s been more recently that I’ve experienced a release from charged words and topics. It used to be that, in my internal landscape, there were certain words and topics where, if my mind would run over them, my voice would go silent. In some cases this was some sense of propriety, some sense of what kind of a person I am, which forbid me those words and topics. In some cases it was also that I had such a long habit of not speaking about these things that the words would come difficult. Then, if someone else began talking along those lines, while I might not actually have a problem with it, it would be impossible to convey that fact. My silence would shout judgment, whether I felt that way or not.

The release came about as I was working on finding my voice, and in conjunction with compassionate treatment of me by others. As it was coming about, I found some Biblical support for the direction I was going.

I was thinking about the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” And thinking about the name of the Lord, I thought of the passage in John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. These thoughts came together as – have only one God; have only one Word. Don’t have words be gods.

There were a few ways this was meaningful to me. First, because I realized it wasn’t right for any words to make me uncomfortable or make me judge someone else for using them. Second, I realized that also, in the area of persuasion and marketing, it’s not legitimate for words to make me or anyone want to do what is against our Godlike nature to do. It’s not legitimate for people to be brainwashed. The Word has the power to make itself heard. Finally, this corroborated what I wrote in this blog in “Love me; I love you, and the Hungarian Phrase Book” – that it doesn’t matter what words people are saying – only the Word can be communicated. Only love, and the deep value of each life form.

So I remain committed to staying outside of the box of silence. I remain committed to digging up the pavement in my internal landscape and exposing the soft earth to the penetration of rare seeds. I remain committed to keeping things light and moist so that new infrastructures of root and leaf may grow. Then my permeable surface will be able to take things in better, and give things out more appropriately, and the words I do speak will be of greater service.

Believe, and ye shall be saved?

2007-05-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

“Don’t talk like that,” I said to him. “Don’t you know that saying you can’t do it makes it harder for you to get it?”
“People learn things differently,” he said darkly. In other words, mind your own business.

Thinking about it many months later, I realized the foolishness of my words. What I had voiced, in the name of some kind of faith, was only the degenerate set of it, the way that popular culture, without understanding the depth of faith, talks of the power of positive thinking. This kind of talk is considered acceptable, and people agree that it might have some vague result. But it’s similar to other things people toss around as “good for you,” like a diet or an exercise program. There are some adherents, but their example doesn’t offer overwhelming proof. In honesty, I can’t base my faith on such a platform. If I have faith in the power of Truth to establish harmonious conditions, it must be something much deeper than this.

A friend was talking last night about how evangelists are trained to make a two minute pitch and then close the deal like a sales person, asking for the decision: Are you ready to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior? - As if someone could choose that like deciding to buy a car. Jesus does say “believe, and ye shall be saved,” but that doesn’t answer the question of how we come to believe.

When I was in ninth grade, I had a few direct experiences of God, and I was hooked. A couple of instances of feeling my hand led in a math test to guide me to understanding when my mind was blank, a few instances of going directly to objects I had lost, and God was unshakably real to me. It wasn’t just the help but the exhilarating feeling of being held. I remember going down the halls to lunch after those math tests, and I felt like I was flying. Other signs of God’s presence followed – the understanding that gave me the courage to take resolute steps out of painful shyness; the healing of rifts in communication within my family, a sudden healing of tonsillitis, guidance in my choices about school and relationships.

There were other times, painful times, where I didn’t find the healing I was seeking. I came to dread getting sick, and having to try to pray for myself, and feeling some unnamed obstacle between my words and what I actually was thinking. I wanted to say, with the man whose son Jesus healed, “Lord, I believe – help thou mine unbelief!”

Some internal voices would ask me from time to time why I didn’t just give up. But my answer was always, where else would I go? Once having felt the divine presence, and having experienced it as something more real and satisfying than anything else, I simply couldn’t give it up. So I persevered at the practice of continuing to seek, growing to almost like the feeling of having the rug (of all my presuppositions) pulled out from under me, leaving me in an ignominious sprawl to rediscover my center in the resulting stillness. Through many, many of these experiences, I'm coming to have a clearer, more powerful faith.

There are only a few things I know to tell people about the process of coming to believe. One is illustrated in the fact that the Ten Commandments address the reader as “thou”, which is second person singular intimate. Singular – this is not addressing a group. It’s not offering rules for people to hold over each other’s heads to judge them. Intimate - it’s addressing the very inward thought of each individual, with intimate individual care for each unique case. So it is that the fundamental, foundational teachings about behavior, in relation to God and man, command a very individual search. They are not for others, even the others who reside, judging, in the rooms of consciousness. We find God not by being told what to believe and what to do, but by locating God within our very blueprint – finding God’s hand in the nature of what we are.

Another is that belief can’t be forced – that you can’t believe something by willing yourself to do so. Belief is not what you adopt because you like it and it sounds plausible (such as whether you believe there is life on other planets, or whether you believe in parallel universes.) Belief is what you walk on. You walk over the bridge because you believe it’s strong enough; you leave your children with their Grandma because you believe she will take good care of them. You believe in God as you feel God’s gentle presence in your life. If you haven’t felt it yet, you can consider what’s good in your life, and you can consider your marvelous fortitude in difficult times, and you may find some proof there. Being quiet within helps a lot. But God doesn’t need to be conjured up. God is able to make God’s self known.

And one more: coming to believe isn’t a process of choosing a God off the shelf based on a comparison of ingredients. Though some religious movements may try to sell you an off-the-shelf concept of God, this doesn’t have anything to do with what God is to you. Though you may not have heard anyone present a plausible concept of God, this doesn’t mean you can’t know God. Clearing your mind of preconceptions helps. But God doesn’t need to be pre-defined. God is able to make God’s self known.

Christ says yes II: loving one another

2007-04-30T18:50:00.000-07:00

Last night my husband said, the message Jesus brought says love – love each other is the main thing he taught – yet the churches seem to say: but only within prescribed limits. Only within your marriage.

To elaborate on that, it is supposed that there is one kind of strong love that should occur only within the confines of the marriage bed, another kind of strong love for family and some close friends, and then a sort of a weak, diffused love for everyone else.

He and I are working out a different paradigm. We have identified two planes in which the thought of love plays out. One of them is the plane of pure energy exchange. The other is the plane of temporal negotiation. Both planes are valid in their own right. The shift from one plane to another can happen quickly and without being noticed. Confusion about what plane one is operating on causes all kinds of problems.

The plane of pure energy exchange is the one in which one life form recognizes another, sees the deep and shining soul within, and rejoices. This is the plane of the brilliant smile of a stranger on the street, and it is the plane of “namaste” – the divine in me salutes the divine in you. When such an exchange occurs freely, both participants go away enriched. They are affirmed in two ways: one, by sending out a shining signal, and two, by being recognized as shining. This kind of exchange can be a deep blessing, sending out ripples of joy through succeeding interactions. And I believe it’s fair to call such an exchange an act of love – of loving and being loved.

The plane of temporal negotiation is the one in which people ask, what am I to you? Will you be there for me? It is the one in which they seek to define what the relationship is in time, in the course of lives as they play out. This kind of understanding is important. It takes many loops of feedback to come to clear communication, to find the common language and an agreement of expectations. It can only happen successfully when both people are committed to making it happen.

Here are some examples of how these planes get confused: Someone shoots a smile at a person, and she wonders, is he coming on to me? Would I be leading him on to smile back, would I be sending the wrong signal? Because she’s confusing the pure energy exchange with a temporal negotiation, she feels the need to mask her natural response of joy towards another life form. Thus the exchange doesn’t happen, and the world gets a little colder. Another example: Someone shoots a smile at a person, and she thinks, he has no right to smile at me. He can’t follow through with a relationship, and I wouldn’t want him to do so. Men are so arrogant, thinking they have the right to have any relationship they want to. So she gives him a dirty look back, to make sure he knows that she will not be entering into relationship with him. Again, the energy exchange doesn’t happen, and life is not as delightful as it could have been. I use these examples because, as a woman, I have experienced both these states. I expect the examples told from a male perspective would sound a little different, but I’m not so intimately in tune with them to pull them up.

The planes can also get confused in the other direction, where someone thinks that, because there has been an energy exchange between the two of them, something is owed, obligation is incurred, an agreement for temporal relationship has been made. Or it can be confused when someone thinks they can do things that have consequences in the temporal plane without entering into relationship.

It has consequences in the temporal plane to say you’ll be there for someone. It has consequences in the temporal plane to make a baby with someone. It can have consequences in the temporal plane to get to a certain level of intimacy with someone, and that level may vary from person to person. This is why very deliberate communication is important in the negotiation of temporal relationships. An energy exchange does not signal a temporal relationship. It also doesn’t preclude one. Temporal relationships are built on the communication that explores these issues.

Meanwhile, I think it’s of crucial importance in the world that we not confine our love to temporal relationships. We must love in every way – in the way that treasures and holds up each life form, in the way that offers quick aid without obligation, in the way that allows us to be graceful and loving in our dealings with others.

It has been supposed that such exchanges should only be from the neck up – share a nice smile, but don’t get too involved. Feel it down to your heart maybe, but don’t feel it in your gut, don’t feel it to the core of your being. Don’t feel turned inside out, turned on, transformed. Save those deep feelings for your temporal relationships. But I believe that is not so. If it were, the love that Jesus tells us to do would be a dull duty, a tiresome obligation.

What distinguishes an energy exchange from a temporal relationship is not its depth, but simply its continuity through the plane of time. An energy exchange can be rockingly deep. It just incurs no obligations. It can be reciprocal, but the love is given unilaterally, with no expectation of a temporal relationship. It is given from the nature of who we are, because it’s what we are made of.

An energy exchange can also be practical and kind. It can help and bless someone (and when it does, it blesses both, by the law of balance.) It can be the stranger who changes your flat tire, the man who walks a mile with you to show you the way.

Does that sound familiar? Love one another, say yes to the core of each other, be rocked, transformed by each other. That’s how you’ll know that you’re his disciples, he says. I don’t think there are two kinds of love. There’s one kind of love, and if you do it, you’re going to feel it, and it’s going to feel fine. No temporal obligations, but deep aliveness and satisfaction. I don’t think it’s sacrilegious. Christ says yes.

Christ says yes

2007-04-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

Last fall I went on a retreat with a group of friends from several different Christian denominations. We broke bread, shared stories, sang hymns (sometimes each using our own words to a familiar tune), prayed together, and drew closer.

At this retreat I kept thinking how the Christ says yes. Though we may have thought our upbringing was defined by a framework of nos – things we’re not supposed to do or be – in fact the way Christ defines us is by saying yes to what we are – yes to what we always have been. When we are recognized as what we are, what we have always hoped about ourselves leaps out as truth to us. We feel affirmed, validated, loved. This is how the Christ heals – by affirming that which we always have been but didn’t dare to believe could be true: our perfection in the purpose of God. So in my earnest desire to follow Christ, I took on this assignment: No more nos. Be one who says yes to people. Yes to who they are, yes to this unique expression of God, yes to their soul’s desire to be seen and loved.

Our surroundings were a wedding of sea and farmland, with a garden for the songbirds, a steep bluff for the raptors, and a great shallow bay for all the sea birds – herons, loons, gulls. This place was as much a teacher as we all were to each other. Here is something I wrote about it:

The change in experience that results from the touch of Christ is as instant as the change in the water at the touch of light. The majestic liquid transparency, the sudden subtlety of color that appears in the place of inscrutable gray, can touch the whole surface of the water at once. The unique beauty of each moment, in the myriad faces of the water, always present and always revealed in the now, is seen whenever we look. So it is that the Christ is always present, and transforms our experience – not just the surface of it, but the whole depth of it – all that ever was, all that can unfold. Thanks to the Creator for all light – “Light baptizes life.”

Last weekend I was there again, with a different mix of people but with the same intention. Again the Christ spoke to me, and the land spoke to me in the same words; the water voiced the truth about Love, and in people’s prayers for me came the message: Just let yourself be loved. I’m not sure how to do that, yet, as a daily practice. But I did feel loved by the warm sand and the gentle wind. I did feel the comfort of being exactly what the Creator intends me to be – the grace in my steps and the joy that stretched to my fingertips. I need to learn what it means in the dance of interaction with people – a lesson I look forward to.

Love heals the past

2007-04-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Finding my voice, finding my walk, I feel the ground under me firmer than before. I feel the shifting balance of my footfall, a dance of centeredness – all the steps connected together into one motion – kinetic energy from the ground, up my stride, through my core and down to the other side. No longer step step step but one continuous wave.

I feel like I’m a grown-up now. Now after all these years of playing at adulthood, I feel the ability to take in the input and let it be folded into the wave of my motion – to respond not like a ping pong paddle but like a sling – pulling the energy in, cradling it, turning it, releasing it in a soaring arc, giving what needs to be given.

Is it possible that I could have been incomplete all this time, a being whose circuitry was not finished, the arc of whose power would always stop before its effect could be realized? Maybe it’s part of the completeness to also realize that no one was ever broken, not even me. In all the broken circumstances of human affairs, Life still has the power to complete its arc and establish its circuitry.

And so the world becomes whole. Each organism already moves in the way of all living. Like the delicate swirls of a smoke tendril folding in again and again on itself, making visible the air currents that always move in one continuous wave, so the Love that is Life connects us continually.

I wrote this in a rapid writing exercise in a writer’s group for the Occasional Times, a newsletter by and for homeless women. I started volunteering there more than a year ago, and from the start felt grateful to be allowed to be there. I had not earned the right, through heartbreak or family legacy, to be among the homeless – not faced the gritty issues of bleak survival head-on, not come to the place where making a choice between untenable things was a daily demand. I was allowed to be there and let my comprehension of humanity expand, and to see that, contrary to the tales told on the surface of society, grace is everywhere.

Now I no longer feel like an intruder. Not just because of the many issues of the Newsletter that we’ve put out together, but also because I, too, have been on a journey, and I find many of the landmarks to be the same. In the group where I wrote about finding my voice, another woman shared an account of healing – an unmistakable testament to the law of Love. Through her courage and her trust in God, she found reconciliation with her past, which entailed the embrace of the person she is and forgiveness towards the forces that shaped her. Part of her healing was in her writing, because she was using her own voice, for herself – not needing for the right person to be able to receive her message; just telling it because it was true. In that act of truthfulness, her voice turned out to speak for others at the table. It wasn’t that she tried to do so, it’s just that that is the way telling the truth works.

When I wrote about how love heals the past, I wrote it for me, not in any attempt to be universal. Yet the others at the table found resonance with what I wrote. No one was ever broken, only human affairs are broken. Life still establishes its circuitry. Grace is everywhere.

My love is my own; my love is for you all

2007-04-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

Like many people (judging from stories and the way they talk) I grew up thinking that love is something that’s negotiated between people. I went around with a desire to love, looking for some kind of a permission – someone to love me back, some sense of spark that if I were to shoot an arc of love across, the circuitry would be completed in another person, and we would be in love.

There was a boy I knew who seemed promising in this regard. A few glances, a few things said to each other, seemed to me like connected circuitry. It was like a promise that there could be more – that we could have this kind of relationship. My hope was encouraged by a few near misses, and I came, perhaps largely through constructs of my imagination, to believe that we were soul mates.

Life happened differently. We never did have a real relationship with each other, and I went on to other loves, marriage, family. But deep in thought, I still held that unfinished connection. I still had a little fantasy that somehow the courses of our lives would change and we would come together. I would occasionally have dreams about him, but they were always marked by his absence. I would be among people he knew, or in a house that was his, and I was thinking I might see him, but I never did. Then last spring I had a dream in which I did see him, and he offered to take me sailing. The offer still wasn’t fulfilled in the dream, but the fact that it was made was very satisfying to me.

After I woke up, I had a realization from that dream. It was that the piece of unfinished connection that I felt wasn’t what I had thought it was. It wasn’t a sign from fate that some part of my destiny had been tragically unfulfilled. It wasn’t a very foolish construct in my mind where I was imagining something that was never there. It didn’t even have anything to do with the person in question. It was something I had done, and it was an act of love. I had opened my heart to whatever this person was, and had kept it open. It was something I could do any time, for anyone. It didn’t require their permission or participation. When I realized that this was so, I felt the circuit connect itself in me, and I was aware of the power of my love, and that it is a good thing for me to do. I was also able to feel an unfettered love for this man, and for his wife and kids whom I’d never met. There was no need for me to be involved in their lives at all. It just was.

Last summer, while on vacation, I did see this man again, and did meet his wife and kids. We talked for maybe about fifteen minutes. It felt very satisfying to do so. The next day I took a bike ride, in the fresh-washed after-storm early morning, along the seaside and through the town and out across the fields to the beach, where I was the only one there with the brilliant blue of sky, clouds, and water. I walked, holy and barefoot, on the beach, and received a compelling message from the vastness about the nature and presence of God.

Then I went back to my bike and rode home. All the way riding, in both directions, I felt a big halo of amazing love all around me. It was like a golden sphere around me, that I could almost see.

It stayed with me for days, though it was sometimes under the surface. In fact, in a way, it never left. I brought it home with me, and in time shared the experience with my husband. Through the course of months it has contributed to a great deepening of our intimacy and love. And I’ve found that the love is a presence I can use. I can hold others in it, I can give it to them, I can use it for healing. It’s not just the love that came from that one experience. That experience taught me about the present and available source for all love. The words that I have for it are: my love is my own. It’s not something I have to negotiate with others for. My love is my own, I’m free to give it, I do it for myself and not to incur favor or obligation or even relationship. I do it because it is what I am made to do – it is what I am made of.

And because my love is my own, it is also free. It is for all of you – you can have it without obligation. You don’t have to pay for it; you don’t owe me anything back. It’s not the opening salvo for negotiations about a relationship. It’s simply the truth about who I am.

Christian Science teaches that God is Love, and that man is the reflection of God. From this it follows that love is our essence, and that God is the source of it. It makes sense, from this, that we should love naturally, reflexively, simply as the expression of our being. And I like knowing that this love is not theoretical, but real and satisfying in every sense.

Absent from the Body?

2007-04-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

Here’s a quote from 2 Corinthians 5:
“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”

I like the idea of being “present with the Lord,” but I think I’ve been, at times, rendered ineffectual by confusion of the meaning of being absent from the body. The phrase could be associated with out-of-body experiences, or it could mean that we’re supposed to cultivate an unfeeling state, stolid and stoic, and consort only with our concept of God, which we might assume would reside in our heads. We would read the words in our holy books and not try to associate too much with the experience of the world, since, presumably, we’d take in this information through our bodies, from which we desired to be absent. In our efforts to “translate things into thoughts” we would trade the vibrant, colorful, fragrant world for dusty, abstract, concepts. This would give us a God that we could have intellectual ideas about, but not a God we could really feel.

This can’t be what is meant by the phrase. If our purpose were actually to have no relations with things in the physical world, why would physical healing be part of our ministry? Why would we care what our body was manifesting, if we are supposed to be absent from it anyway?

So it must mean something other than that. Here are some things that shed light on the subject:

Immanuel means “God within.” Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” If God is omnipresent, it can’t mean that God is present up to the boundary of our skins, and then there is the part where God isn’t because our bodies are there. God is law, and law permeates and pervades everything. In fact, it’s not just that God permeates and pervades everything – it’s that God is what is. There’s no “everything” first which God then permeates and pervades; everything is within the being of God, and so is subject to God’s law.

So we, here and now, in the place that we may think of as “in our bodies,” are the manifestation of God. Here where we feel joy, where we delight in beauty, where our hearts swell with love, is where we experience God. Here where we walk in our own centered balance, and speak in our own centered truth, we are present with the Lord. We don’t know God by absenting ourselves from all of the glory that is Life – we know God by being Life’s expression, with all the strength, agility, beauty, sensitivity and love that entails.

So what are we to be absent from? More and more I’m seeing that we are to be absent from complaint. What we perceive as our body is a fine instrument for expressing the glory of God, but when it wants to turn around and tell us it needs certain conditions met in order for it to experience or express goodness, it is out of line. If God is creator, and God is good, then good is here now, and there are no conditions on it. If we are present with the Lord, we are aware that good is here now. I think Paul’s sense of being “at home in the body” is the sense of being at the beck and call of all the body’s complaints. I think from this place we can’t be aware of God’s continual goodness, because we’re assuming it’s not there until conditions by the body are met.

Mrs. Eddy says the intercommunication is always from God to man. This to me is a clue that we receive the knowledge of God right where we are, right in what we perceive as our bodies, and we feel present in that goodness, right in our bodies. But the body doesn’t get to be the determiner of anything – it doesn’t get to send information back. This makes sense, since there isn’t any place in consciousness we can go where God isn’t. So there isn’t any source of information or communication other than goodness.

Mrs. Eddy also writes: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” I think this means look away not in a spatial sense. Look into Truth and Love not in a different place from where our body is. But look at Truth and Love right where we are, right as we experience it in what we think of as our bodies. Look away from complaint or a sense that there are conditions to be met before goodness is present. Consider that the divine cause establishes everything that we are, including our bodies. Then we will exude the health and glory which are God’s plan for us.

Good Friday and the Cross

2007-04-12T16:05:00.000-07:00

I participated in an ecumenical Good Friday service last week, which was very inspiring. The bulk of the service was done by lay members of various congregations. The person that led the Call to Worship said, (and I paraphrase) It seems it was only moments ago that we were spreading palms and singing Hosanna. Now we are at this moment, where things have taken such a different turn - betrayal, desertion, crucifixion . . .

And I thought, wow, so that's the thing. In other times when I've expected the next step to be the crowning culmination of success, and it hasn't come to pass, maybe it's actually following a different pattern. Maybe the cross is, as Mary Baker Eddy says, the central emblem of history. Maybe the challenge of the cross is to realize that it isn't the disposal of human events that establishes reality. It is the ever-present consciousness of the present divine order, the governing hand of Love, that establishes it. The people who put palms down for Jesus probably thought he was the saving king who would free them from the Roman yoke. Or at least that his power, as demonstrated by his healing works, would rise to the place of banishing all oppression. They didn't know that the greater work of the Messiah was to go into all the fractal paths of human thought and set everything right - to establish an order of peace that was universal because its underpinnings were internal - that it was the law of Love governing every cell of being, thus establishing pure individuals whose natural course is to engage lovingly with each other. Taking up the cross, then, would be the willingness to stand up for the goodness of being in every instance where it is challenged.

My part in the Good Friday service was to read Luke 23: 44-56, and then do a meditation on the phrase "Father, Into thy hands I commend my spirit." Here's what I shared:

“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Jesus commends his spirit to God. He entrusts God with all that he is. He does so in the acknowledgment that his spirit is good – worthy of commendation. There is no doubt about this in his expression. He simultaneously establishes the worthiness of himself and the trustworthiness of God.

Jesus lets go. He lets go of all the machinations of the world, all the politics, all the sordid soul-selling that led to the conspiracy to put him to death. He lets go of the need to teach anymore, to explain anymore, to make the people understand. He commends his spirit to God – he trusts God to take care of everything that he is – his life, his purpose, his mission.

Jesus cries to his Father. His relationship with God is unbroken. All that he is is established by this relationship – the son who can do nothing of himself, but who always does what the Father tells him. He is always motivated by Spirit, the creative power that gives the impulse of life to the whole universe, and the impulse of love to everything moving in Spirit’s consciousness. This allows him, in this most dark time, to release any sense of responsibility for what will happen, and let Spirit work to establish its unbroken harmony.

Jesus is our way-shower. We are his disciples, and his friends, if we do what he commands, and he commands that we follow him. We follow him not so much by suffering as by allowing God, Life and Love, to lift us out. We can do this with each smaller despair, each human heartbreak, each place where things seem hopeless. We can commend our spirit to God.

We can let go of the sense that we have to explain things, set things right, figure them out, bring all guilty parties to justice. We can let go even of the grief and the pain and the disappointment with events of the world. We can commend our spirit to God, with the confidence that, even if we don’t know exactly who we are, God knows. God made us, God loves us, and God will teach us what we are. God will prepare the table before us. In the end, the circumstances of our lives don’t get to have the last word about what we are.

Understanding Self-Immolation

2007-04-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

On the very first page of Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she writes, “Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God’s gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind.” When I quoted this, a friend said, “did she really use that word?” His understanding of the term was that it meant: to set oneself on fire – which, indeed, is the meaning you will find if you look it up in Wikipedia. That meaning of the term is not what this post is about, and I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not how Mrs. Eddy meant it either.

The Latin word it comes from means to sprinkle with meal in preparation for sacrifice, and the word in earlier times meant to prepare oneself as an offering for sacrifice. The first definition of sacrifice is: an act of offering something precious to deity. So you could define self-immolation as preparing to offer yourself as something precious to deity. This makes the term more palatable to me, but my desire is not just to make it more palatable. My desire is, and has been, to understand how to accomplish the Christianization and health of mankind.

A word about Christianization – my working definition is that it means establishing the rule of Love – that is, achieving the state of civilization where people are always motivated by love in what they do. The law of Love is that, at whatever scale you look, everything there is being tended with utmost tenderness and perfect provision of exactly what it needs to thrive joyfully. This is seen on the level of the individual, the family, the civilization, the planet, the galaxies, etc, and also on the level of the cell, the atom, and all the things we don’t even know enough to name. To me Christianization has nothing to do with what people say they believe. It has everything to do with Spirit moving within.

So when I consider how I might have a part in bringing this law into human consciousness and experience, I need an operational understanding of self-immolation. Setting myself on fire, as a suicide, wouldn’t do much, but perhaps setting myself on fire with the fire that burns but doesn’t consume would be a good idea. Being on the burning edge of aliveness, being the flame that dances in its embrace of the air, demonstrating the spontaneity, heat and brightness of the fire, could be good.

Self sacrifice as it’s most often understood is a cause of much harm to people. Sacrificing my voice to some other authority entails the loss of my ability to stand up for my heart’s wisdom – for what I know is true and good. Sacrificing my choice to do what I love for some assumed necessity deprives me and the world of the gifts I am meant to give, and also prevents me from making sure that the things done in the world are life-affirming. Self-sacrifice is a concept too often used to allow uncaring forces to be at the helm of civilization, designing structures that kill life. The design of the universe is for each being to be heard, honored, and given its place to fulfill its whole potential, and not be sacrificed for anyone else’s purpose.

There is a part of my experience of growth in grace that involves constantly putting aside things that I thought defined me. Judgments, justifications, the sense of being the one who understands, have to go. Since growth entails continually gaining new understanding, the need to put aside the sense of being one who has the answers is also continual. There are other flavors of this as well in life experience, related to gaining of skill and even to being kind and feeling the glow of goodness. To use another analogy: every time a wave comes up on a sandy shore, it leaves a little line when it recedes. I need to remember: no matter how beautiful or how ungainly each line might be, I am not the line. I am the wave. It is the sense of self as a line left on the sand of time that I find useful to continually put off. As I become more conscious of myself as the wave, it serves to make me a precious offering to God. I offer not my death but my life, my life that is bright and fervent because it isn’t stifled by these senses of myself that are not me. So that is how, for now, I am using the concept of self-immolation.

To readers: request for dialog

2007-04-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

Starting into my second month with this blog, I am reflecting on what a gift it is to me every time someone reads it. Reading it completes the circuitry of the desire for connection, healing, and oneness which rises up as my voice and demands that I give it expression. I can't know who's reading, but whenever I hear back that someone has, I feel a deep gratitude.

This is my invitation to you to let me know, and to enter into dialog about things that are important to you. I have given my e-mail in the contact info to the left of the text here. If you prefer more distance than that, or are comfortable with a public forum, please contact me by sending a comment to this post. I will respond.

Thanks very much for reading!

“Love me”, “I love you”, and the Hungarian Phrase Book

2007-04-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

A few years ago it occurred to me that, no matter what anyone was saying, they were really saying one of two things, or both. They were saying, “love me” and/or “I love you.” People complaining about the horrible (or annoying) state of their lives were saying “love me.” So was my daughter as she was pointedly saying how terribly I had misunderstood her, or my husband intimating that I wasn’t doing my share in the family equation. When my husband railed at me for how I was driving, he was saying, “I love you.” When he responded indignantly to my resisting the railing, he was saying both. So I began the experiment of translating people’s messages and receiving what they were really saying instead of their words.

A help in this was a favorite Monty Python sketch, the one about the Hungarian phrase book. In the first scene of the sketch, the news report says that the visiting Hungarians are a great nuisance because they are so obscene. It shows clips of them being carted away by police. Then in a subsequent clip, the news report says that the real culprit has been found – the publisher of a phony Hungarian phrase book that gives a false rendition of the English equivalents for basic things that a Hungarian visitor would need to be able to say. It shows the publisher being carted off by the police. In the third scene, a Hungarian visitor walks up to a counter and haltingly says, “May I fondle your buttocks?” The man behind a counter, after a quick consultation with a corrected manuscript, replies, with appropriate gestures, “Certainly. Just go out the door, take a left, and go down two blocks. You can’t miss it.” The visitor expresses his thanks and goes out – problem solved.

So I realized, it’s not a requirement that I react the way society expects me to, or the way my own emotions first tell me, to anything said to me. I don't need to be hurt, angry, indignant, annoyed. I also don’t need to be a language police for people – to tell them that the way they’re communicating is wrong and try to get them to do it differently. Instead, I can just consult the corrected manuscript and respond to what they’re really saying. And I remember that they’re either saying “love me,” “I love you,” or both.

The interesting thing about this exercise is that when I respond as if that is what they actually said, nobody finds it to be a non sequitur. They act as if I have actually responded appropriately to what they said.

If anyone else wants to try this experiment, I’d be very eager to hear the results.

Substance: Vector or Bitmap?

2007-03-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

A friend told me last week about a TV segment he had seen where they showed an area one meter square and then went out in powers of ten so pretty soon you were looking at the whole galaxy. Then they went in by powers of ten into a water droplet. It never got less intricate or beautiful.

This morning I was reading this passage in Proverbs, where wisdom is speaking:
“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.”

As I read, the image from the TV program came to mind. At every level of observation and experience, the same law is present – the law that makes everything beautiful and delicate and harmonious – the same wisdom can be seen in the Creator’s hand. I thought, that makes sense, because the law of Love would always be operating in each reference point, in each center, at every here and now, no matter what the scale in time or space. With a shiver of awe, I felt the vectors of Spirit’s control, shaping me, shaping the galaxies, making all the streams of energy flow together in harmony – my life, my purpose, my limbs, the stars and planets, the surge of life.

And in the way that thoughts leap topics along the lines of thought vectors, I thought of vector objects in computer graphics. Since their shapes are established by code relating them to geometric shapes and relationships, they stay true no matter how much you zoom in on them. You can move them around and place them in relation to each other, and they don’t lose their identity. If they have a 3D component, you can change the viewing angle and see other sides.

Bitmapped images are very different. Since their code is just the color of each pixel on the screen at the time the images are created, when you zoom in on them you see jagged edges and little squares. The image only exists in the context of the pixels on the screen – you can’t move them around or see around them. If you do select an image and move it, it leaves a hole, which you then have to doctor up somehow. So I thought, we’re not bitmaps, we’re vector objects!

In other words, we’re not a collection of matter stacked together in a certain way. The pixels of our lives – our shape, our circumstances, our relationships – are not determined by the material code of location on the material plane of being. They’re not things that can get disarranged to our detriment, or things that lock us into a certain mode of being. They’re not things for us to manipulate around to improve or fix our identity. Instead, our pixels are determined by the vectors that give us our identity. These vectors allow us to move about freely, without being constrained by the circumstances around us. If one of our limbs is foreshortened due to a viewing angle, it doesn’t mean that we are deformed and will always have a shorter limb. A quick change in viewing angle will show us wholly symmetrical. This is the essence of healing: when we realize that we are vector objects – that is, spiritual, and we look to the truth of our vectors to show us our identity, we will find ourselves whole.

Keeping in right relation to Truth

2007-03-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

There is a message in the Bible that God (and those who speak for him) keep trying to tell the people. God tells it to Moses, who tells it to the children of Israel. Most of the prophets also are found trying to make the people understand. Jesus tried through stories, his healing works and his explanations of them, to make the people understand. Most of the time they didn’t.

The message has to do with the relation of the power of God with the goings on of the world. God is found giving the message of being the great I AM – in other words, Life, The Event Going On, That Which Is Interesting, That Which Sustains – that upon which our attention is designed to be focused. The misinterpretation of the message is that God is the thing that sometimes has the power to make the things in our life go in a favorable way. In other words, instead of God being the event, the circumstances of the world – issues such as food, shelter, wealth and social position – are seen as the event. Then God is seen as a force that can manipulate those things.

In the Bible, whenever people get the message right – when they see God as The Event – then things also go right for them in terms of their circumstances. They get their needs met – for survival, security, and prosperity. But whenever they get it wrong – when they think their security and prosperity are based on their food, shelter, army strength, etc, then they lose those things. So God, and the prophets, keep telling them: it’s not the things. It’s God.

It’s still a hard message for us to get. I think this is because we struggle to grasp what God actually is. The Bible language makes it easy enough to visualize God as an authoritarian, jealous figure, who doesn’t want us to pay attention to anything but him, although there may be other interesting things that would vie for our attention. When I read it that way, especially if I imagine God to be represented by the voice of some church institutions, I naturally bridle at the implied lack of freedom and the possible boredom such obedience would require.

On the other hand, if I can make my thought of God big enough, the command to attend to God is transformed. If I grasp that God is Life, I hear Life saying: Life is The Event – pay attention to it, learn all about it, be true to it. Live with all the vibrancy that Life offers. Don’t be stopped by the limitations of what you thought before were essential material conditions for your existence. Trust Life to guide you beyond what you thought was possible.

Like the Children of Israel, I have had definitive experiences of the presence and power of God. In those moments, I feel Spirit as tangible substance, as aliveness, as regenerative power. I think, of course this is what we’re about. We’re about joy itself, not about the material conditions sold as prerequisites to joy. Then, like the Children of Israel, I let my focus shift. I think, for example, that the e-mail in which I received the message of joy is the source of joy, and start checking my e-mail obsessively, and feeling let down when another message hasn’t arrived. Then I have to try to get back in right relation to Truth.

And so it goes. The challenge is simple, but all-encompassing. The lesson is there to be studied, but it is the practice that brings the mastery.

A few angel thoughts for creativity

2007-03-13T08:09:00.000-07:00

Who you are is vast, even infinite -

And wonderful beyond imagining.

God gives you what you need by giving you what you are.

It's not that you have one thing you need to give the world, if only you can find out what it is. It is that your being is a constant gift, and it's right for you to bring forth goodness continually.

All things that are alive are life-supporting, not only for their own species but for all life forms to come. You can tell that you are of Life because of your desire to bless.

"Be still, and know that I am God." - Psalms 46.

"To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings." -Mary Baker Eddy

The infinite is right here at all times. There is infinity between the span of your fingers.

Mind is Love. If you love something, you notice everything about it. It holds infinity - you feel you will never lose interest in it. This is why you do the best at the things you love.

Whether you choose to do what you love, or choose to love what you do, you do well.

It's not that it always comes easily, but when you work and work and work you discover that in the work is the joy -

And with the completion, a radiant rush of lightness.

The Ecosystem of Life and Love

2007-03-11T22:17:00.000-07:00

From time to time I’ve come across writings of scientists who study life, where they’ve expressed their continuing awe about what they’re studying. It seems, the more they study, the greater the awe: how does life manage to do it? How does it form? How is it that the deeper we probe, the greater the intricacy? The explanations that gave rise to Social Darwinism, touting a fierce and predatory competition for resources, give way to more nuanced views in which cooperation and a delicate balance of interdependence govern every aspect of life. As we’re ready to see it, we get to behold exquisite interlacings between and among species, amazing adaptations that require intimate relations with every other member.

I marvel at what a leap of trust is entailed in single celled organisms choosing to come together to be a more complex organism. Or for a fungus and a root to form a relationship that benefits them both. (I know some would dismiss the above as hopeless anthropomorphism; in my defense let me say I’m using the word “choose” in the sense that every action is a choice, whether it’s “conscious” or not, and that every action that depends on another entails trust, whether it’s reasoned or not.)

I remember in high school biology learning what were considered the properties that would make something qualify as life. They included growth, reproduction, metabolism, and adaptation. As a student of Whole Systems Design at Antioch University, I learned a few more: life is negentropic, cybernetic, autopoetic. I love these words. I sort of smugly love that I always have to define them to people:

Negentropic: working contrary to entropy. It is a law of thermodynamics that things always wear down – that they move from a greater level of complexity to a lesser one, that energy always moves to a less usable state. But life is negentropic – it always moves to a greater level of complexity, where more energy can be used. It creates conditions that make for more life, and not only within species. Trees make it possible for many more things to live – providing atmosphere, shelter, nutrition. I’ve read that in the early stages of evolution, the micro-organisms gave off gases that created an atmosphere wherein life forms such as ourselves could develop.

Cybernetic: equipped with a system for taking in information and, based on it, adapting behavior to optimize itself. In other words, it has a goal, a means of setting a course towards it, and a way of measuring its progress and using that information to steer its continued course towards that goal. Whether the mechanism for the system be a chemical one or a reasoned one, each living thing has this series of feedback loops which allow it to enhance and extend its life. Biologist Humberto Maturana made an eloquent case for intelligence to be redefined as present where goal seeking behavior is present.

Autopoetic: formed for its own purposes with a code contained within itself. Trees do not exist to be timber or even to be animal homes. They exist because of an imperative within themselves, and their being is for their own sake. This, of course, is also true for people, though we do seem to forget.

All of these properties have interesting implications for the understanding of life. Negentropy makes a compelling case for the existence of God, like this:

Clearly, life is a lot of work. Life is something that makes a lot of effort; in fact, you could say it defines effort. So the obvious question is, why does life bother? And the answer is, because it wants to. I am fond of quoting the biology teacher of one of my students, who said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” All the explanations for life’s continuance – the struggle for survival, the amazing efforts to procreate, the stunning adaptation – require as their engine life’s desire to be. Without that, there is no explanation for negentropy.

Well, desire is a property of love. The zest for life that gets us up in the morning is a kind of love. So is the absorbing interest that keeps us working hard at gaining a new skill even when the progress is slow. Though there is a predatory sense of the concept of desire, and though desire often filters into the dominant paradigm as something that keeps us from being present to the joy of the moment, in the simple sense of the desire of life to be, it doesn’t need to carry those connotations. Mary Baker Eddy says desire is prayer. This relates to the Biblical concept of being drawn by lovingkindness – being pulled forward by the power of a love that may feel to us to be our own.

The other thing I think is important is that desire can’t be expressed in material terms. Matter, by definition, can’t desire, as matter is defined as the inert building blocks from which things are made. Therefore desire is a spiritual property. What seems to me the obvious conclusion is that Spirit is a necessary component in the description of life.

And now I’ll stop pretending to be an authority on all this stuff. I’ll admit that I took a leap when I capitalized Spirit. I’ll admit that it could be another leap to say Spirit is God. And when I bring my faith into it and say God is Love, so Spirit is Love, and Love is the engine of Life, I have to abandon the voice of proof-through-argument. But these are things I hold to be true, and I find the contemplation of them deeply enlightening.

The cybernetic property of life gives evidence that Mind is Love, like this: Intelligence is defined by the presence and complexity of goal seeking behavior. The goal seeking behavior of life is always to make the best choice for itself. So intelligence is making the best choice. The act of always seeking the greatest good is a property of love, so Mind is Love. OK, that’s in shorthand, a little bit, but I find it interesting to think about it.

Autopoeisis is important to understand for the purpose of respect and the honoring of every living thing. Each thing has its own center. The center is the place of stillness around which things circulate. A tiny movement from the center can engender a great movement at the periphery. It takes much more effort to move something from the periphery, and there also is far less of a reference point for accuracy. It’s not surprising that each living thing would be designed to steer itself, from its center. Our society tends to operate on the assumption that it’s beneficial to have someone other than the individual determine what it will do. But the ecosystem of Life illustrates for us a better plan.

I think that whenever we study life with honesty and openness, we find great awe and inspiration. Similarly, when we explore our faith with honesty and openness, we approach truth. I find I do best in my inquiries when I’m not so much seeking to disprove other theories as to learn everything I can about the ecosystem of Life and Love. It seems to me that any explanation in words can only be a shadow – minus at least one dimension of the actual truth.

Banana Nature – an allegory

2007-03-09T15:45:00.000-08:00

I came up with this analogy a few years back, and since then it has grown into a story that I find useful. I've told it to people but not written it - so I hope this account is able to convey the light-hearted nature in which it's intended:

Imagine that a large group of people were hypnotized into believing that they were bananas. As a result of this, they would spend much of their time sitting in groups of reclining chairs (their bowls) arranged so their heads were near each other, reaching their hands over their heads and clasping them together with each other. They would mostly occupy themselves by talking about the condition of their skin – their coloring, how their brown spots were coming along – and their insides – how soft they were, how much they were bruised.

Imagine then that after a while, a few of them started speculating that there must be more to them than this, their banana nature. Someone might suggest that, after all, if they were really bananas, they wouldn’t be able to talk. But most of them would not want to talk about that. They would say that talking was one of those things that couldn't be explained, and that its existence could be questionable – it could also be attributed to a chemical phenomenon in the skin. And the conversation would quickly go back to such things as the effects of bowl location on health, and the effect of bunch size and position on personality.

But there would be some of them who would keep thinking there had to be more to life, and maybe one or two of them would get up and walk around. They would say, see – bananas can’t do that, and we can. Some might reply, that’s not healthy – it’s bad for bananas to be alone. You need to stay with the group or you’ll get terribly bruised. Others might say, wow, that’s something to aspire to. And they might try getting up. But they might say, I try to escape it, but I just can’t get around my banana nature. It keeps pulling me back with the deep need I have to sit in the bunch and be connected at the top.

Eventually, some of them might wake all the way up, and it would be clear to them that they had never been bananas at all. Some of them might just walk away from the whole group and go have adventures and live normal lives. Others might come back and try to wake up the rest of the group. They might say: look, you’re not a banana. You’ve never been a banana. It doesn’t matter if you think you were badly bruised during transit or that you’ve gone too brown and soft and need to be thrown away. This truth about you, that you’re not a banana, can free you from all those difficulties. You can get up!

If it’s anything like current life in our society, there would be some in the group who would be angry at that assertion. They would say, how can you say it doesn’t matter whether I was bruised? How can you assert that the inevitable process of becoming brown and mushy doesn’t govern us all?

Meanwhile, there might be some kind of a religion formed around this new teaching – it would be a gathering of the bananas who believed there was more to aspire to, and that it was reachable. There would be some among these who would sit in their place asserting the words, but not actually getting up. They might talk about how they were trying to have faith but they hadn’t gotten a clear sign yet. They might get in contests with each other about which of them was a deeper believer – which was best able to recite the words and carry on convincingly about how their nature was more than bananas.

The more these believing bananas would sit there and talk about it without doing anything, the less credence the words would have among the whole group. But occasionally, there would be a banana who would take the words to heart and actually get up and walk around. That banana would try to tell the others: you don’t have to be a banana – you can get up.

And in fact, any of the group who did choose to entertain the possibility that this was true, that they weren’t bananas, could get up and slowly prove it for themselves. Maybe at first they’d be drawn back to their banana natures, but after a while their actual selfhood would become clearer to them. They would find a huge world to live and move in, far beyond what they could have imagined. They would be free.

To be tiringly obvious in driving this point home: I believe that the gap between the hypnotized “bananas” and their true selfhood is not larger than the gap between what our societal norms tell us we are and our actual being. I believe we each not only have the power, but are already being much more than our societal constructs give us credit for. After all, we do have love as our engine. We do take soaring leaps of compassion and understanding. We have beautiful dreams. I believe that a close look at what we already are can help us see that we deserve to aspire to much more than we do.

Angels

2007-03-08T17:32:00.000-08:00

How can angels be everywhere, or at least in the precise place where you need them, every time you look up?

Is it in the way the moon stays with you as you travel down a long dark road?

Is it the way your heart stays with you throughout the day and night, so you always have access to all that is within it?

Perhaps both - they are bigger than the path we think we travel on, and they are a part of our very being.

May you feel the presence of angels, comforting and inspiring you.
----------------------
Angels come:

Angels came to Sodom.
It was a terrible place - a place where people had given up
on any sense of individual dignity, for themselves or others,
a place where people preyed on each other.

Lot wasn't an especially virtuous man. He was upright, but he wasn't very strong. He wasn't a great servant of God like Abraham. But he was OK. The angels came. They came into that sordid place and lifted him out.

Angels don't just come to the pious. They don't just come into well-lit livingrooms and studios with oriental rugs on the floor. They don't just come when we've been cleaning house for them, mentally.

They also come when we are slimed, filthy, defeated, when we feel like no one would want to be seen with us. They come when we're feeling ragged, or ridiculous, out of place or out of sorts. They slip quietly in, in the places between our rantings, and at the point when we've run out of tears. They push in at the little flaws in our illusions, exposing the truth that has waited all along, just under the surface, to bless us.

Sometimes they do it by making us laugh at ourselves. Always they make us know that we are beloved -
In spite of ourselves,
Because of ourselves.

Angels come. They lift us out.

Praying for people, and being prayed for

2007-03-07T22:52:00.000-08:00

I once had a young Muslim woman for a student in English as a second language. When I asked her about what she liked to do in her free time, she said, “I love to pray!” She said it with a sincerity that moved me, and I didn’t doubt that what she said was true.

I love to pray. Though I have at times felt like prayer was a duty or a burden, those times were when I wasn’t really succeeding at praying. It was more a thing with myself, a declaration of things I had been told that, if I knew were true, would heal me. But I didn’t know they were true, so my declaration didn’t have any effect.

Mary Baker Eddy says that the key to healing people is love. That is a thing I struggled for years to comprehend, mostly because I didn’t know how to make myself love more than I was already loving. Now I sometimes get it – it works when I don’t leave God out of prayer. I let myself feel loved by the divine presence of Love, and let that Love spill out in my love of others. So when I pray, I get to be lifted up in Love. I get to soar with it, and be in love, and have my thought lifted in love towards whoever I’m praying for.

What is amazing to me when I pray for someone is the love that endures afterwards. It is a spirit-bond, a sense of deep joy at the contemplation of the existence of the person. It is a gift to me – I get to keep it. And it feels just like love, the kind everyone wonders if they will ever find. And the more of that love I have, the more accessible the healing prayer.

Now here’s the really cool thing: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of you.” When people share the Christ presence, it generates for all of them more of that pure love that heals. And they get to keep it, and use it. I am part of an ecumenical spiritual formation group, and over a period of several months, we have prayed together, for each other, many times. At this point, I don’t even need to gather with them to reap the fruit of the Christ presence. I just invoke them in my thought, and there is the love. I can use it to get to the heart of prayer, where healing takes place.

Here is a description of my process of praying for someone. First, I “go into the closet.” In anticipation of the joy and peace that will arise, I retire from all of the trains of thought which say they need to be resolved first. Next, I let God “deliver me into the large place” – the place in consciousness in which I begin to grasp an inkling of the scope of the Infinite. Then I carry my thought of the person into the light of Truth and Love, and bear witness to what God reveals to me about that person. I get to experience the depth of God’s love for that person and the specific provisions of Love to meet the current need. I get to see God’s face in God’s image and likeness.

Also, when people have prayed for me, I have felt the same deliverance of love – They have gone into the closet and been delivered into the large place, and then the influx of love that they bring back floods to me, bringing something I couldn’t have generated by myself.

I think this is a taste of the Holy Ghost which the apostles gave to people when they traveled to see them. There’s a part in Acts where it tells about some of the faithful who have heard of the Holy Ghost but don’t know for sure if it exists. Then the Apostles come and give it to them, and then they have it. Prayer, Christ, faith – these things can be total enigmas to those who haven’t experienced them. But once we have, it is our duty and joy to share them as we can.

Cain and Ishmael

2007-03-06T17:39:00.000-08:00

The Church of Christ, Scientist, provides weekly Bible lessons on a recurring series of 26 themes. These lessons include citations from the Bible and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. Below are thoughts that came to me one week when the Bible lesson included stories of both Cain and Ishmael.

Thoughts on Cain: I always felt sorry for Cain, and identified with him. What a terrible feeling to bring the offering of all you do to the one whose love you most desire, and have it rejected! The direction to humbly take instruction from the rejection and do better felt like a bitter and disempowered standpoint from which to work.

What I realized in this week’s lesson (and as a result of prayerful sharing with a friend) is that the Cain story illustrates the way Christian Science works with both the absolute and the relative to bring healing to whatever situation we may be in.

First I realized that the bad guy in the story wasn’t so much Cain as the false premise embedded in the story – that man is made of something other than God, and that he could bring forth an offering that would not be of God, but would be of some other substance, such that God would reject it. This premise is never true about man. When I find myself in the feeling of Cain, in that sense of not being acceptable and having failed, I have the immediate solution of opting out of the whole story, of saying, wait a minute - this isn't what's true about God and man. This isn't what's true about me. I'm the enduring reflection of Soul, Life, intelligence. I have the divine Mind as my sustaining infinite, and can't be unworthy. My fruits must always be of what my substance is, which is of God. What I bring forth must be spiritual, and it must be a blessing.

Meanwhile, in the human scene, there is the ability to take the counsel that Cain is given and use it to make sure that my premises, and therefore my fruits, are spiritual, are of God.

To help me understand how this might work, I took an example that’s sort of far removed from me personally but not from world consciousness. I thought of someone who was brought up in a culture of vengeance and vindication - in a state of war. That person might come to think that there was virtue in killing others. So an act of killing might be one of that person's fruits. If that person brought that fruit to God - to good - that fruit would be rejected as not being of God. The person looking for a sense of holiness and benediction from his act of killing would not find it. In order to get the feeling of holiness and benediction, he would have to turn and do something else with his life - submit himself to be governed by a higher motivation - to be governed by good instead of evil. So he would have to change his course.

But let's say Christian Science was the agent for his change of course. He would realize that, since he was the reflection of good, there was no way he could be motivated by hatred. He would sense that this whole story he had been caught up in wasn't a part of himself. He would feel a glimmering of his own preciousness and holiness. He would also feel, because of that, a separation from everything he had identified himself as before. He might feel great remorse, and a deep desire to change his actions. So he would change them. In this way, he would be both following the divine truth (that the Cain story presents a lie about being and doesn't have to be lived in) and the human footsteps (reform) outlined in the story.

So if I’m feeling bad about myself, I have the opportunity to recognize that whole thing as the same lie of the Cain story. I can opt out of it. At the same time, I might be led to change something in my life. But it won't be because I am a bad or an unworthy person. It will be because I am the delightful child of God.

Thoughts on Ishmael: There’s a disconnect in this story - the image of Hagar having the child on her shoulder and casting him under a bush makes it seem like he’s a very small child, but according to the age that Abram was when he was born, he was probably somewhere from 16-18 years old. So perhaps because of this, I hadn’t stopped to think deeply about what was going on and what it would feel like for Ishmael. This time I did.

I imagined him mocking: “Oh, Isaac is weaned – what a great accomplishment!” I imagined that in that house he had a fair amount of security as the son of Abraham, and felt at home there, and felt he had a certain amount of stature. Then suddenly, because of one slip, it’s gone. Overnight. The next morning he’s out of there, and his mom too. So he’s leaning on her shoulder, probably with a deep sense of shock, betrayal, and the horrible feeling that he’s brought this upon his mom as well as himself.

So Mrs. Eddy, in the Science and Health part, says suffering is often the divine agent for our rising superior to materiality. So this must have been what happened with Ishmael under the bush. He turned to God. He glimpsed that his home, his heritage, and his birthright came from a spiritual source, from the Father ever at hand, rather than from his relationship with Abraham and his relative stature in that household. And it says in the Bible, God was with the lad. Which shows that he succeeded in rising above materiality. So suddenly this story came alive for me with a new sense of hope and promise.

Jacob, Jesus, and paradigm shifts

2007-03-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

As a kid in Sunday School I was given to believe (through reading and discussing the Bible stories) that Jacob was the better brother. After all, God talked with him. It's been a good lesson to me, looking at this again, that what Jacob did in tricking his brother wasn't a good thing. But the question of "who was the better brother" was not the issue of the story, and neither Jacob nor Esau, nor Rebekah nor Isaac, was the bad guy.

The bad guy was the lie of mortal, material existence, the false paradigm that put everyone under a pall. Here are some elements of the false paradigm:
• That there is a limited amount of good - of blessing, birthright, and love to be given.
• That if one person gets it, the other one loses out
• That this limited blessing is not something that is freely given, but something that would rise spontaneously from the satisfaction of, say, eating savory meat. And that, once given, this blessing, or lack thereof, would determine the relative prospering of the individuals involved.

As long as he was living in that paradigm, it was perfectly reasonable for Jacob to act as he did. In fact, it was virtuous, seeing as how he was winning out over others. It wouldn't make sense, within that paradigm, to give up the upper hand. That's why it was such a struggle for Jacob - he had to shift his paradigm. He had to realize that the God who supported him also loved others, and so beating others out was neither a requirement for success nor a way to follow God. This enabled him to have the precious reunion with his brother in which he saw, in his brother's face, the face of God, and felt that God was pleased with him.

Christianity doesn't make sense when applied to an old paradigm. Jesus' message has been greatly misunderstood by people saying that by telling them to be meek, and to turn the other cheek, he is telling them to be doormats. And because people haven't known how to integrate his teachings into the old paradigm, they've just sort of squirmed with them, and tried to find a happy medium, or whatever.

As I understand it, the way to follow all of Jesus' teachings is to have a paradigm shift. The reason we can bless our enemies is that we dwell in the all-power of infinite goodness. It's not that we submit ourselves to their power to destroy us. It's that we see that since Love is the only power, no enemy has power over us. And it's natural for us, as the children of God, to help these poor deluded people to be free from the enslavement of being an oppressor (or a criminal).

I volunteer at the local jail, doing Christian Science services once a month and visiting people who ask us to come in to talk with them. From my exposure to this, I've come to see that, as a society, we pay a great price for our desire to be punitive. Besides the monetary costs, we pay by having a hole in the fabric of our society that people can fall out of. Because it's there, we all are more tense, because any one of us (or any one of our loved ones) could fall out of that hole. Or, if we say it wouldn't be possible for any one we loved to fall out, then we carry that self-righteousness around, which takes great bites out of our capacity to love. Lately it's become very clear to me that God is not punitive - that a punitive model is used only by someone with limited power. If I have a punitive model, I am saying: I want you to do what I want you to do. If you don't, I will punish you. The All-power doesn't need to manipulate anyone, for the All-power is the only will. The All-power doesn't need to punish anyone, because no one can even be present except that God is thinking them.

Is this too absolute for adaptation to present society? I don't think so. I don't think we can ever say anything we learn from Jesus, or anything we learn in Christian Science, is too absolute to be relevant. It is, after all, the absolute that we dwell in, and it is the absolute that heals.

Communion

2007-03-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve recently been involved in some ecumenical groups, which have brought me into a contact I didn’t have before with the whole notion of the Eucharist. As to communion, the word itself – communing, “with oneness” with God seems to be what we are about, what we most deeply desire, and what all our prayers seek for. Having been raised in Christian Science, it’s been natural for me to look at communion from a spiritual standpoint. Here are some of Mrs. Eddy's clear words on the subject:

“The efficacy of Jesus' spiritual offering is infinitely greater than can be expressed by our sense of human blood. The material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious to cleanse from sin when it was shed upon "the accursed tree," than when it was flowing in his veins as he went daily about his Father's business. His true flesh and blood were his Life; and they truly eat his flesh and drink his blood, who partake of that divine Life.” –p 26.

To me this speaks of blood as life-force – volition, motivation. So when Jesus says, This is my blood, drink ye all of it, I think of him as commending us to be motivated by the same thing that motivated him – to have the same source of animation and holy purpose. Mrs. Eddy points out that the disciples were already eating when he shared the bread and wine with them. So it wasn’t a case of them getting material nourishment. I think (based on what she says) that this is what they experienced at the Last Supper – that, as they ate the bread and drank the wine, they simultaneously got a sense of what he was spiritually imparting to them – what would sustain them and what would inspire them.

Again, as one raised in Christian Science, my tendency has been to be suspicious of ritual. After all, Mrs. Eddy says, “Whatever materializes worship hinders man's spiritual growth and keeps him from demonstrating his power over error.” – p 5. But through interactions with my ecumenical friends, I’ve come to see something of why they do it. It is like a gate for them, a reminder to center their thoughts and think about holy things. Or like a prop: When I was in a freshman in college, I practiced riding my unicycle down the halls of the music building while my roommate practiced her flute. I found that, at first, I needed to rest my hand on something while mounting. But later I found that I could just rest my hand on nothing, imagining something there, and it would steady me so I could start. Just as it was my balance that kept me up, and the real or imaginary thing to put my hand on was a prop, so ritual, among Christians who use it, can be a prop, but it is still their faith which brings them closer to God. So the bread and wine can’t bring Christ into their thought, but they can do that. As can we, at any time, even without the ritual. As Mrs. Eddy says, “Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love--be it song, sermon, or Science--blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ's table, feeding the hungry and giving living waters to the thirsty.” –p.234.

Being a Christian Scientist

2007-03-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

I’ve been doing an ecumenical discussion group using a video series called Living the Questions. The first segment we did was on the subject, “Thinking Theologically.” Among the people there, there was at first an amount of the obligatory hand-wringing about the state of the world, but I think as we progressed, a sense of the Spirit entered the room. The joy we had in our experience of God, and the value we placed on it, was something we could share and feel together.

The next two sessions were on “The lives of Jesus.” In the first of those sessions, I found that others in the group shared the same perspective we have in Christian Science, that Jesus was not God, but a man, and that the Christ is the everpresent truth of grace for man – our way of sensing God’s presence. There was one woman who seemed to hold a more deified perception of Jesus, but the rest of them seemed to embrace the Jesus/Christ distinction, and to agree that Jesus was not God. Again, what we all had in common was the experience of the inspiration that comes to us from the Christ presence, the sense of the divinity of all God’s children, and our ability to access the Christ here and now. It seemed clear to me that Christ was real to these people, and at hand.

In the next session, I discovered that many of those people didn’t believe that Jesus had actually been resurrected, or that he had raised Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. They believed that what the disciples had experienced after the crucifixion was “visions of Jesus”. They would say that those visions were real and true, just not a physical presence of Jesus. And they say the accounts of miracles performed by Jesus were things people made up to help convey the importance of what Jesus was and how life-altering it was to follow him.

One of the women relayed how her husband, as a young minister, had come to the place where he felt he couldn’t believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, and that his senior pastor had told him that, if he couldn’t believe that, he wasn’t a Christian. My heart went out to this woman and her husband. I agreed with her standpoint that you could be a Christian without believing in the literal resurrection. After all, you can’t just decide to believe something, and it is crucial to be as honest as possible about what you actually believe. Later, you might become convinced. Meanwhile, it seems right to affiliate yourself with that which resonates as deeply important, and to follow, as much as you’re able, the example of the one your heart is called to follow.

As a Christian Scientist, I have been taught to pay attention to all of Jesus’ words. He himself said that his works were what testified of him. So it makes sense to me to follow him in healing as well as in love for our fellow beings. I had wondered, before, how other Christian denominations managed to get around that clear directive from Jesus. I knew that some of them got around it by declaring that he was God incarnate, and that was why he could do the works. We as mere sinners shouldn’t expect to come anywhere near that. This, of course, contradicts what Jesus said about himself and his healings, and about the sinless nature of man.

So it turns out the other way to get around it is to say that he didn’t really do the works. To say that he modeled authentic living, and that that model is compelling, and that is why everyone followed Jesus. To me this subordinates the message of God’s kingdom to the kingdom of our society and current technology. It’s not unreasonable to do so – we can only believe what our world view allows as possible. It was not so long ago that people were saying that supersonic flight was impossible, or that it would kill anyone trying to accomplish it. This is what they believed, based on what they understood of scientific principles at the time. And you can’t just choose to believe something that is outside of what you think is possible. In order to believe in supersonic flight, someone had to have a change in paradigm so they could consider it possible. Then they would be able to go ahead and prove it. And then other people could become convinced.

We don’t get any points as Christian Scientists just for having a textbook that declares that healing is not only possible, but to be expected. We don’t get any points for adopting that as a belief because Mrs. Eddy says so. But as we experience healing, and as our world view shifts such that healing seems possible to us, we do really believe in it. And then we are in a position to convince others in a way that no doctrinal points can do – by having them see for themselves. Then we are in a position to be a bridge between people who believe Jesus did the works and people who believe that Jesus was not God. “The works that I do shall ye do also.”

A deeper understanding of God – and time and space

2007-03-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

I had a healing last fall. There was a time of struggle and despair. I prayed deeply, and what I learned brought moments of light but no relief. Then the healing came, and ever since, I have felt the understanding of something that is very important to me. It is the fact that God owns the whole show – God is the whole Mind, the only perceiving and thinking that goes on, not just what is here but presence itself; not just a power but power itself; not just something that acts, but action itself.

To continue along this line of thought: God does not exist in space, but space exists in God. Space is a concept that God created – it is the idea of every creation of God having room to move, to develop, to interact. It provides for harmonious and intricate interweavings of motions on every scale, from cosmic to microcosmic, and at all levels between. The law of God regarding space is that everything has the right amount of it in which to move and grow, and everything with it in that space in order for Life and Love to be made splendidly manifest. Space wasn’t something that existed first, and God needed to fill it. Space belongs totally to God. Therefore, there are no spatial constraints that have any relevance to God. And for man, there can be no properties of space which hinder man’s relations with God. There’s no such thing as not enough space, as being cramped or stunted or imprisoned. There’s no such thing as too much space, as being lost or isolated or without needed resources and companions. When we think there are space related constraints, it’s just a story. Understanding that space belongs to God and is used only for God’s purpose frees us to move freely in space as God intends us to.

It’s the same thing with time. God does not exist in time, but time exists in God. Time is an idea which God thought up, which allows for various aspects of Creation’s expression. Time is the idea which allows for unfoldment and growth, for an identity to display a sequence of development while still being itself. It allows for rhythm and harmony, and periodic pattern. Time and space, as ideas of God, work together to allow the arena for music and dance, and for Life and Love. Since time is an idea of God, there is no time before God, and there is no time in which God is not being expressed. Since man is God’s expression, man must have the same dominion over time that God does. There’s never not enough time. God uses time to make room for every needed thing to happen. There’s never too much time – no time in which good is not unfolding, no emptiness or boredom. When we think we are under the crunch of time, we are believing a story - that time exists independently of God – perhaps that God might be able to help us, if we pray right, but that it is a hard problem even for Him. When we understand that time is God’s idea, we can see that we need never fear that it will give us a bad turn.

Credit Where It's Due

2007-03-06T09:47:00.000-08:00

I have gotten my understanding of life from the study of the Bible and of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. Every truth I come to goes back to there, and I find it said there, such that I suppose I could use all words from those books, instead of my own. But that would fail to illumine the process of my thought – that I’ve come to feel these things are true not by adopting them from the books but by finding them out on my own. In fact, this is the clear directive of both Jesus and Mrs. Eddy. Jesus told his followers to do as he did. Mrs. Eddy enjoins her readers, “see for yourself.” The ideas you see here are me thinking and striving to live the truth, working to understand myself and the world, getting dirt under my fingernails and juice down my elbows, reading and experiencing all kinds of things and attempting to pull them all in to the unity of thought that I feel exists here.

I will say you can find everything about Truth in those books, but not just by reading them. You have to have an intense personal quest to know what is true. You have to follow that. You have to be willing to think it through on your own, using your daily experience as a laboratory and testing things out for yourself. Then you will get it.

Being a person of faith

2007-03-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve had wonderful interactions with the folks of the University District Interfaith Alliance, which have led me to reflect on what it means to be a person of faith:

As people of faith, we have grasped at some time in our lives the presence of an all-loving power for good. We have felt the power as something that reframes the meaning of our lives. We have sensed something deeper, more important to us, than the smorgasbord of offerings on the secular plane. So we can’t go back to living as if that power did not exist. Sometimes we struggle with how to access it again. But we know it’s there and we keep trying to find it. I go to the lunches of the Interfaith Alliance and see this in the faces of the lovely people around the table.

Being a Christian
Other sincere people of faith probably share the “defining qualities” of Christian-ness:
• The notion that life is precious, that all people are God’s children, and therefore sacred and holy, that all nature proclaims the glory of universal good.
• That it is the awesome responsibility of all those that feel the touch of God’s love to give that love to others.
• That the Christ demands that we live true to our identity and heal the world.

Christians are followers of Jesus. Jesus is very clear about what he asks his followers to do:
• love each other
• love their enemies
• heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils, raise the dead
• do the works he did, and greater works
Also, in studying the people that Jesus commended, it’s clear that he approved of boldness, or proactive compassion that doesn’t care what others think, of fearless willingness to step forward into the scary place of action and self-transformation.

Christian Living

2007-03-03T22:25:00.000-08:00

How I live:
The “straight and narrow way” is not defined by a list of prohibitions. Rather, it is the exquisite precision of Life – how the bee and the flower, the root and the rhizobia, exactly meet one another’s needs. It is the perfect tuning of a chord, the exact slap of a polyrhythmic beat, the supple balance of a gymnast. It is that alive feeling of something cleaner than fear that steps, with a catch in the breath, out onto the living edge.

To walk the straight and narrow way is to be continually committed to being as true as possible, in every moment, to the inner compass that shows me when I am most alive. Jesus says, “strait is the gate, and narrow the way, that leads to life.” The way that leads to life is defined by aliveness – that vigorous force that defines itself. My practice of the straight and narrow way is to stay on the fresh growing tip of being – to do things based on who I am, not on what I fear. In other words, to be based on Spirit, not on the trajectory of expectations from birth to death.

What does it mean to be spiritual?
The first mention of Spirit in the Bible is Genesis 1; 2: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” To me, this identifies Spirit with volition – with that which moves according to its own desire. So being spiritual means being governed entirely by volition, instead of by outside influences. As a Christian Scientist, I identify Spirit with God, and man as God’s image and likeness (as stated in Gen 1; 26, 27). So my practice of being spiritual is to feel Spirit as the present, governing force of my life – to be guided by it, to be defined by it. To do so is a continual act of courage, in which no blaming is permitted or even possible. There is no resting on definitions of myself based on past activities or behaviors, no lazy projecting of the future as being set in motion by the past. There is an ongoing release of what I have, up till this moment, considered myself to be.

What does it feel like?
I often feel washed clean like a bright morning after a rain. I often feel like a water droplet trembled by the wind. I often feel a central stillness, with a sphere of open space around me. I feel that my life is precious to God, that the Cause of the universe includes what I am, that the unfolding of all I am is something God is delighted to give me. I feel the power of home. At other times, I feel like the page upon which was written all that I thought I was keeps being ripped off, scrumpled up, and thrown away, and I have to remind myself that I am not that page, I am still here. And I have to wait, again, for the writing on my page to come clear to me, revealed, once again, by the eternal Mind.

Spirit and Matter

2007-03-03T22:23:00.000-08:00

In the Scientific Statement of Being, Mary Baker Eddy says that matter doesn’t exist. I have found it crucial to understand what this means and doesn’t mean. If you define matter as that which you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears, touch, etc, then it doesn’t make sense to say that matter doesn’t exist. After all, you can see beauty and love and harmony, you can observe incredible intricacy and order. If you say that what you can observe is matter, and then say matter doesn’t exist, you miss out on all the myriad, specific, splendid acts of love that are manifested in all forms of life, from the minute to the cosmic. It would close you off from all the color, texture, symmetry, pattern and grace of being, and leave you trying to construct a shadow world out of abstracts. Clearly, that’s not a good way to start.

Here is my understanding of matter: Matter is not a thing, but a construct. It’s not just something there, which we observe. It’s a set of assumptions about the nature and behavior of what we observe. Specifically, it is the notion that things are constructed of a substance that is independent of their identity. So a living thing is said to be composed of chemical substances. The substances are supposed to exist independent of the presence of life, and to operate according to a set of laws that have no necessary relation to those said to govern life. So every living thing is considered to be subject to two forces – one; whatever it is that holds it all together and causes it to organize as it does, and two; the matter, which is presumed to operate according to the tendencies inherent within it. So the life-force (whatever that is) is set as being in opposition to the forces of matter, which are said to tend toward entropy and inertia. Then, in many discussions, the life-force is hardly considered at all. All the discussion is about the somehow organized building blocks and how they may go awry.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to construct a theory of life without a life-force component. The theories I would call most material are those that posit existence to be a series of reactions of different forces on each other. Their proponents want to be clear that there is no grand design, no intent. They believe that random forces account for every development of life. Yet even these theories have a spiritual engine: the desire of life to perpetuate itself. Without that you can’t have natural selection, you can’t have survival of the fittest, you can’t have DNA and RNA working to keep life continuing. I’m not sure why it is considered anti-scientific to notice a required, fundamental element of one’s construct. Yet biology, as taught in schools, rarely mentions the spiritual force without which none of the explanations of life could float. A student of mine once told me that her biology teacher said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” But no further examination was made of what would constitute such a desire. It seems to me that such a desire can’t accounted for as a material force, since matter is the construct of something that doesn’t have volition. I understand volition to be a property of Spirit. Therefore I state that the engine of these theories is spiritual.

Once the spiritual engine of life processes is acknowledged, it begins to seem less obvious why we should think that Spirit needs a mindless component as a medium for its self-expression. And it seems more possible that an interplay between a spiritual force and a passive substance is not the only way to think about things. In fact, the word mythological comes to mind. A myth is a story which is used to explain a possible cause for something observed. People’s mythology then tends to color what they look for – hence what they see to be the driving causes in their lives. So we develop the expectation that the body, if not assiduously tended to, will fall apart (and will sometimes fall apart despite all tendings).

How would it change what we observe if we started out from the standpoint that things that are alive are comprised of the force of life itself? The properties of life are observable and very interesting. What if these properties are the organizing principle and the substance of life? For my own part, the more I am clear that my being is spiritual, the better my health, and the more lovely are the unfolding of things in my life.

So to get back to the question of Spirit vs. matter, I find that Spirit is something we observe with all of our being, including our sight, hearing, etc. It really is everywhere, so we experience it everywhere. Matter is a story about how things are put together, which says that existence is passive, and determined by various forces that act on it.

God and gods

2007-03-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

My mind has been circling around a comprehensive discussion of religion-as-phenomenon. It could be framed as “why people choose to believe what they believe”, or “what is the basis of faith?”

I’m thinking about why the children of Israel wanted to make a golden calf, and what they did with it. (Background: They had been led by Moses, who was following God, out of slavery to the Egyptians. But Moses had been gone for more than a month – he was up in the mountain getting the commandments from God. So the children of Israel felt rudderless, and asked Aaron to make a god for them to worship.)

To me this points to the power of projection of the human mind, and man’s habit of externalizing the forces he believes to be governing him. If the Children of Israel were in a habit of looking to external forces to guide them – kings to rule them, war commanders to send them to battle – they might have closed off access to the notion that they, themselves, could determine the course of their lives. So in the absence of Moses to command them, they wanted something to project their allegiance to, so they could follow it. So they gave Aaron their jewelry to melt and make a calf. Symbolically, they put things they owned into it – they projected their own ideas, intentions, and motivations onto the calf.

The Bible’s main premise is that there is a God who is more than just the projection of the human mind. The Bible presents the appearing in consciousness of a creative force that teaches man the power of truth over treachery, the presence of a life-force beyond manipulation and might-makes-right. The Bible delineates a God who would always win in a contest between truth and illusion. And, as it comes clearer as the Bible history unfolds, it acquaints us with a God who is good.

In thinking about the gods of these times, there are many things to which people give away a sense of their own sovereignty. Genetics and chemical makeup get a lot of press, as do brain development, personality, diet, exercise, and economic background. People, in their efforts to define themselves, choose a whole raft of limitations, such that you would think they were defined by their constraints instead of their life-force. People in this culture don’t think of these limitations as gods, but they think of them as forces which control them, and which they can’t control, but which, through certain carefully performed actions, they may be able to appease.

What would be thought of one who said she doesn’t believe in these gods? She would be considered foolish, ignorant, in denial. But that is what people always encounter when they deny the prevailing gods. To deny the prevailing gods is a courageous stance, and a wilderness experience. It is to choose to be alone – to be outside the comfortable boxes. It is also to choose to be free.

Maybe when people choose not to believe in God, it is from this same desire for freedom – the desire to throw off anything that is a projection of power to something other than themselves. They put God into the category of all the other projections of the human mind, and they refuse to bow down to a force external to themselves.

I applaud this. I think it is a necessary step towards truth. But I think the next step is learning the nature of the power that remains – the power within one’s self. And on examination, I have found the power within myself to have discernable characteristics, and to be an unfailing fountain of strength, and to be something I can lean on for guidance. I find its characteristics to coincide with what in the Bible is called God. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.”

Religion and Science - God as Cause

2007-03-03T22:21:00.000-08:00

In ancient times, there was not a distinction between science and religion. People’s inquiry then as now was about cause – what makes things happen as they do, and how can they make things come out better for them. God was a concept that meant cause. Some people’s inquiry led them to posit many causes – the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, the earth. Where people’s lives were more urban, and power of people over each other became an overwhelming component of life, this became another realm for the inquiry into cause. The gods were the impulses giving power to some, and making others submit.

The Bible chronicles a people’s explorations into the nature of cause. At certain points, they found themselves in possession of a power with which they overwhelmingly won, in conflicts with rivals and when up against challenges in nature and circumstance. They called this power God [cause]. Various prophets gave insight as to the nature of this cause called God, and as time in the Bible progresses, this understanding grows clearer and more accessible to more people. Earlier senses of fearsomeness, vengefulness, and exclusiveness give way to love, support, and universal inclusion. Worship (doing whatever is needed to have the cause work the desired effect) goes from burnt sacrifice, to living mercifully, to embodying a love that embraces all mankind and nature in universal harmony.

The separation of science from religion came, it seems to me, as politics, rather than inquiry, became the basis of what people were led to believe. As long as the study of cause is pure inquiry, science and religion are one. When politics gets wrapped up in religion, manipulation is mixed with inquiry. People are told things are true not because this is someone’s best understanding, but because it will make them do what those in power want. And once people are relying on others to tell them what is true, instead of inquiring on their own, they can be deceived.

I believe the same happens with science. The pure inquiry of science is also susceptible to manipulation by powers that want people to behave in a certain way. We have heard outcries about this regarding the way the current administration has dealt with issues of global warming and other environmental degradation. Less decried, but more pervasive, is what we are told daily by those in support of pharmaceutical giants regarding the nature of health and disease.

In the debates about science and religion over issues such as intelligent design, I keep thinking all the arguments are muddled. Instead of being so concerned with what students will be concluding, I think the focus should be on how they are coming to those conclusions. Are they just being told to believe what’s in the textbook? I know the field of science prides itself in not being susceptible to manipulations. But does the structure of science education protect students from it when it does happen? Does it give students the tools to inquire for themselves?

If students inquire as to the nature of cause and discover God as a palpable force in their lives, what should they do with that? Is it right to make them compartmentalize their inquiry based on subject matter? Is it right to say their attending to the cause that they find governing them (by prayer and worship) is less permitted than for someone else to attend to the cause they find governing them (such as diet and chemicals)?

Well, but is it right for students or parents to shut down a whole area of inquiry because they don’t believe in it? And is it right for students or parents to impose their beliefs on others? What kind of an enlightenment would it take for us to get to the place where none of us felt the need to impose any beliefs about cause on others, but to encourage and trust us all to find out on our own? Then no science education would be repugnant to people of faith, and no faith inquiry would be repugnant to people of science. We would all present our findings as the sharing of our best inquiry to date, knowing that we may or may not be able to express them in a way that resonates with someone else, but trusting (as I do) that all honest inquiry leads to truth.

What if the religion that people are getting is not about inquiry, but is about being told something, with great persuasive manipulation or with threats of damnation? Religion has the sanction that people can believe whatever they want, and a group of people can collectively believe what they want, and they can use whatever means they want to make people agree with them. It is valuable to have this sanction, as there are many ways of knowing that are not universally understood, and there is truth that mainline science doesn’t know how to get to at all. But in this necessary safe haven for religion, there can also bloom various bizarre enslavements. The best protection against this is to have a healthy amount of unmuddled truth readily available to all who seek it. And that is one of the reasons I have chosen to write all this down.
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On Being a Christian

2007-03-03T20:47:00.001-08:00

Two things Jesus said would characterize Christians were that they loved each other and that they loved even their enemies. He described this love as something people would be able to see and feel, and as something that would heal them. I’ve found this kind of love to be incompatible with judging people.

For many years I felt that I could love people if they met certain criteria. The criteria would change, but I was always in the role of gatekeeper – the one who decided whether or not there was a love match. Often I deemed myself unworthy of loving another – probably at least as often as I felt others unworthy of my love. Both of these conclusions made me miss out on countless opportunities to love. Although I’ve known and championed Jesus’ injunction “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” I guess I didn’t get the scope to which it applies to my life. I guess I didn’t get that I couldn’t be a gatekeeper and love at the same time.

It is a challenge for people of faith who try to uphold strong moral values, to not judge. What I’m coming to now is that my sense of right and wrong can’t be based on constraints. If my rightness is defined by my not doing a certain thing, it contains an implied judgment of those who do that thing. But if my rightness is defined by who I am, and this is true for everyone else, there is no judgment required in order for us to accept each other.

I’m starting to grasp that morality can’t be based on fear. It can’t be based on fear that I might do something that would cut me off from goodness. My faith must be that who I am on the inside – my own best sense of goodness – is a reliable guide for what is good and real. It doesn’t work to say I shouldn’t explore any direction of thought because I might get myself in trouble by doing it. Mary Baker Eddy says that creeds and doctrines are not a benefit to man, but that the time for thinkers has come. Jesus says the kingdom of God is within. So I feel it is my call to explore this kingdom. I am confident that my very makeup, as the image and likeness of God, gives me the ability to know what’s true. This must be the basis of my morality – not what I’m told not to do but what leads me in the focused harmony where I feel that crystal zing of love.

This coincides with the teachings about love in the Bible. It’s natural to love when I consider that each of us possesses the kingdom of God as our core. No choice of lifestyle or path of inquiry changes that. Any person, any time, can look within and see this kingdom of God. Meanwhile, it’s not my job to steer anyone’s ship. The whole attention of all my being must be in keeping myself in tune with the great symphony of being. This will enable me to make the decision to love in every interaction of my day. And I can love knowing that I don’t need to wait for permission to love, and there is no gate of worthiness that either I or the other must pass through – that deep awe at the wonder of each of God’s children is really our natural state of being. Mary Baker Eddy says, “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings.”

The Practice of Holiness

2007-03-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

God is not an absence, so God is not worshipped through abstinence. God is worshipped through active embrace of everything that is alive, everything that is honest and true and life-affirming. Life as Love, as pure goodness, is a reliable power – if embraced in honesty, it always leads to itself. Temptations of the senses have nothing on Life – they are not to be feared, and they don’t need to be fled from. They don’t have the power to enslave or to hide the all-encompassing delight of Life.

God is not a feeble voice. We don’t have to be afraid we won’t hear it. Really we only fail to hear it when we embrace fear instead – fear that we won’t have enough if we don’t fight others for it, or that we won’t be enough if we’re not better than others; fear that false voices will overpower us so that we can’t be reached by God.

People who embrace Life may be found to abstain from certain things, such as obsessing about physical appearances or engaging in perpetual sensual gratification. But it is not their abstinence that makes them holy – it is their commitment to Life, their surrender to Love, which catches up their lives and guides them in the perfect unfolding of grace.

Just as it is much harder to balance a still bicycle than a moving one, it is harder to hear God’s direction when not actively engaging in Life. There is no precedent anywhere for people who hem their lives in with constraints ending up holier than those who don’t. People who go overboard with sensuality may find it unsatisfying sooner than those who restrain themselves. There’s no place in God’s world for “holier than thou.”