The Educational Systems of the Pharaohs

This is something Mrs. Eddy refers to in Science and Health, only once (on page 226). She doesn’t go on to elaborate about it; the crux of her sentence is her desire to save people:

“The lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the sick, the sensual, the sinner, I wished to save from the slavery of their own beliefs and from the educational systems of the Pharaohs, who to-day, as of yore, hold the children of Israel in bondage.”

People in my part of the world (and of the internet) would be quick to jump on what the sentence implies, that there are modern Pharaohs holding us in bondage. The illuminati, the 1%, the Oligarchy. I think it’s interesting that Mrs. Eddy doesn’t dwell there, doesn’t call out the Pharaohs or call for a rally to overthrow them. I don’t find it surprising; to call them out would be using the tools they would use, and falling into the same bondage. Mrs. Eddy makes clear that all evil is a lie, and the need is to drop it — to refuse to engage with it on its terms or any terms, since divine Truth obliterates any lie, and is the only place for us to dwell.

But she also points out the need to understand how evil works in order to avoid getting taken in by the lie. And as I started to understand the unconditional nature of good, I also started to see its opposite, and how it seems to be held in place throughout our educational systems and all of our society. Its shape is a pyramid, so it is aptly named the educational systems of the Pharaohs.

The pyramid shape has one or a few people at the top and many at the bottom. It illustrates the concept of relative good, graded good.  And its function is to hide the power of good from us, and its accessibility. I remember a ditty from childhood: 

Good, better, best

never let it rest 

till your good is better

and your better best. 

It’s interesting that the word good, in the romance and germanic languages, doesn’t have a comparative or superlative form. The comparative and superlative words are taken from a completely different root. I think that’s telling. Good, as a word for the unmistakeable God quality, is not qualified. But we lose sight of that when we make good relative, arrange it on a pyramid. Instead of being the key essence of what we desire in life, the engine of all our growth and movement, good becomes something in between “excellent” and “poor.” What does in mean, in that context, to say “God is good”? 

That’s it. That’s the whole educational system of the Pharaohs in one little lie about how life is put together. It is a way of hiding good in plain sight. And it’s so pervasive that we can go for years, and many iterations of growth and progress, without breaking free of it.

In school and in society, we are taught that there are only a few people who are really excellent at any given thing, and everyone else is either trying to get there or has given up on it because they can’t be the best.  Similarly, we are taught (a little under the surface) that some people are more worthy than others, more deserving of good things in their lives. It is intimated that those at the top of the pyramid are most deserving, and those at the bottom not deserving at all. 

So the game of life, we are taught, is to work our way up the pyramid, and to try not to fall down. A great deal of our time as mortals is spent making open or clandestine assessments of where we stand in relation to others.

Yet it’s not a secret that friendships thrive in a field of equals, that we can most successfully be friends with people when we consider ourselves equal to them and they to us. In a good friendship, the corrosive comparison to each other can be put aside, so we can rejoice in each other’s good. But along the pyramid on which we’re arranged (according to the Pharaohs’ system) it’s hard to carve out little pools of equality to share friendships in, and it’s easy for some event or misunderstanding to tip the pool into inequality, spilling the friendship out. 

And it’s not a secret that a key to happiness is having a solid sense of self worth, and a generous sense of the worth of others. The belief that worth is graded tends to keep us from being content. We even feel that it is virtuous to always be striving for more. But in always striving for more, there’s little room to realize that we already have enough, are enough, and that God’s unconditional love for us is always here, without us needing to do anything to be worthy of it. And if we can stop our striving and assessing, we can use the slack we gain from that to really appreciate ourselves and others. We might, also, begin to grasp the vast and amazing meaning of the sentence “God is good.”

Poem: Deliverance Prayer:

http://www.wendymulhern.com/2012/02/04/deliverance-prayer/

From my part of the internet: The pyramid and the pool:

The Pyramid and the Pool

A Compound Idea in Mind

It was clear to me that a healing of grief would have to include our whole family, and particularly my husband, who was having a very hard time of it. I prayed daily that divine Life, Mind, God, would make itself known to him, would tell him what he needed to know — that he, too, might experience The Allness.

Heather and I had talked about the significance of “daughter” in the Bible —“shake thyself from the dust, o daughter of Zion”; Jesus’ blessing at the healing of a woman: “daughter, go in peace, thy faith hath made thee whole; “thy daughters shall be as corner stones” … She had even started to prepare readings on the subject.

One night, as I was praying for my husband some months after Heather’s passing, I had an image of what an important thing a daughter is to a dad’s concept of himself — that it represented his ability to protect and nurture something precious and beautiful, that it was, indeed, a very cornerstone to his sense of himself. I felt how much, to human sense, the loss of a daughter was shattering to his sense of identity and self worth. I also perceived that this sense of daughter was something that couldn’t be taken away from him. A verse in Psalms reads, “the king’s daughter is all glorious within”. For the first time, I saw an additional meaning to the verse — not only is the king’s daughter glorious within herself, but she is glorious within the king. His internal daughter is intact, glorious, safe.

I was telling this to a new and dear friend, with whom I was staying for my Christian Science Students’ Association, and I said I’ve been praying to see that he can know this wholeness of his daughter within. She said, “he does know it, because he is a compound idea in Mind.” These words struck me as deeply true. Further insights at the Association meeting brought out the idea that human personality has nothing to do with what we are. If God is All, and we are the reflection of God, then God, Mind, is the only Mind we can have, the only source of thought, the only holder of conclusions. I saw that there is no small “m” mind that can hold a false view of its identity, that can feel that some part of its being is shattered.

This has become an important focus for my prayers: no human personality, no small “m” mind. No repository for wrong ideas about being. Instead, I am here to bear witness to man as a compound idea in Mind, including all right ideas, as Science and Health points out (see page 475). So in my prayers I am affirming that man (and that includes me and my husband) includes the full and whole idea of daughter, and of son, and of father and mother, and also many other right ideas such as home, livelihood, joy, friendship, companionship, fulfilling activity, brilliance, skill…

I told my friend what I was beginning to see: Heather showed us daughter, but she was never our daughter. She always has been, and always will be, God’s daughter. We can love her and be so grateful for what she showed us, both of her own wonderful identity and the wonderful daughter within that is part of each of us, which can support us like a cornerstone and insure that we protect and bring forth beauty in our lives. And we can expect to learn new things from her, and share new things with her, as we grow in our perception of Spirit.

I won’t say that this healing is complete at this point, but I do see continuing progress in my witnessing of man as the compound idea of God.

Click here for poem: Windows of Heaven

Spiritual Sense vs. Material Sense

As I became more aware of Love’s Paradigm, through my intense reading of Science and Health and also through my daily life, walking around and looking at everything with new eyes, I started to understand something about the senses with which I was perceiving.

 

I had given some thought, before, to the question of spiritual sense vs. material sense. Mrs. Eddy tells us that the material senses always lie, and that, if we want to see the truth, we must perceive things through spiritual sense. (See, for example, Science and Health p. 318). I had struggled with the meaning of this, to some satisfaction, in various earlier iterations. I knew that she wasn’t saying that everything we see with our eyes or hear with our ears, or touch, is material. After all, in another place, she says, “Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost.” (Science and Health p. 486.) I had come to recognize that spiritual sense is seeing good, where material sense is seeing phenomena either as bad or without a sense of being good or bad. I recognized that we humans are not strangers to spiritual sense, since we certainly do see good in our lives, being hardwired, as it were, to seek it.

An analogy that helped me, then, was to consider a fountain — in particular one of those ones that shoots water straight up so it cascades in beautiful, ever-moving whiteness as it falls down. Was I seeing water? Yes, but I was also seeing the forces that propelled the water — the pressure sending it up, the gravity pulling it down. If I wanted to change the fountain, I couldn’t do it by trying to push at the water. And I couldn’t take a tub of water and form it into the shape of the fountain.

Similarly, if I look at a person, I may see arms and hands, a face, etc. But I can also see joy, grace, purpose. Just as the fountain is a reflection of the forces that make it, we are a reflection of the Spirit that motivates us. Spiritual sense is our ability to see that.

In this recent time, my understanding of spiritual sense took another leap. When I recognized that good is impartial, unconditional, I noticed how different this was from my usual way of seeing. I recognized that my default position had been to assume that things were good if conditions were right, and not so good if they weren’t. As I looked out from my eyes, I would assess the relative goodness of things. If they were good, well, great. Otherwise, I would be asking myself what needed to be done to make things better. 

If good is unconditional, this way of looking at things becomes obsolete.

I need to say that again. If good is unconditional, this way of looking at things becomes obsolete.

This is huge.

This means a whole different way of looking at the world. 

Not looking to assess relative goodness or harm. Not looking to make things better. 

Celebrating the full goodness of everything, its unconditional blessing!

No need to try to fix anything, to make anything better.

I realized that I could consider material sense and spiritual sense as two different query systems — flow charts of questions and answers. And just as a query system can only return the results of the questions it asks, spiritual sense and material sense return very different results.

Material sense assumes that goodness results from the meeting of specific conditions. If the conditions are met, there is goodness; otherwise, there is not. Material sense looks out from the place of fear that the conditions for goodness might not be met. If I’m viewing things with material sense, I will feel vulnerable to harm. This will lead me to be critical, disappointed, angry, sad. 

The corollary is that, if I am feeling critical, disappointed, angry, or sad, I have been using the query system of material sense. Somewhere in thought I have taken in its premise that goodness is conditional. If I want to see things good, see things as they are, I have to drop, completely, the material sense approach. I can’t be looking to fix things, on any plane. I can’t be starting from a critical sense and praying to make things get better. I need to turn to spiritual sense to make any true sense of things, and to bring about any healing.

Since spiritual sense is given to us from God, it always tells us about God, and goodness. It expects good everywhere, and always seeks to behold the particular exquisite unfolding of each expression of goodness. When I am seeing things with spiritual sense, I see God’s creation everywhere, and so feel very close to God. This is where I am striving to dwell, as much as ever I can.

Click here for poem: Message from Heather

Love’s Paradigm

While I was in Boston with Heather, this concept of Love’s Paradigm emerged as a key point of growth. I felt like I made a huge paradigm shift in my thought, a shift away from the notion of struggling towards healing to a notion of Heather and I being the perfect ideas of our Creator, infinitely loved right where we were. I was astounded at how different this was from the way I usually saw all aspects of myself and my day. Very often, as Heather and I confronted some way of thinking about something, we would say oh, but that’s from the viewpoint of the partiality of good. What does Love see? 

I can’t speak for sure of how Heather felt on the inside. For me, it was a completely different atmosphere inside my thought. I hadn’t reached yet the vast canyon of light I call The Allness, but I was approaching it. I felt much lighter inside, and much encouraged that continuing in this line would bring us the desired healing. 

This revelation came in the midst of my very deep study of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, the textbook of Christian Science. I found all the sentences illuminated as I held in thought the distinction between the partiality of good and good’s allness. I found the call to this paradigm shift permeating the book, and as I held to Love’s paradigm, everything I read made more sense than it ever had.

Heather encouraged me to write an article about it for the Christian Science periodicals. I am trying, but haven’t found the right tone yet. Meanwhile, here is an attempt to describe some key concepts that got fundamentally changed as I made the shift:

Good

In the paradigm of the partiality of good, good is a thing that sometimes appears when material conditions are favorable. My goal, in this paradigm, is to assess how favorable or harmful the current conditions are, and then try to manipulate the conditions so they will bring me more good. So whether I’m thinking about my body, my character, my home and work conditions, or my larger environment, I feel subject to the material conditions which I believe determine the present amount of goodness or potential harm.

In Love’s paradigm, good is the ever present law. I start learning (as pointed out in Science & Health p. 206) that what blesses one blesses all. My goal, instead of assessing material conditions and trying to improve them, is to see good in every place, to behold the perfect man and the harmony of being, and to celebrate the unfolding of good.

Worth

In the paradigm of the partiality of good, I think of my worth as relative, arranged along a slope where there are always people better than me and (I hope) people worse; where I am always struggling to improve my worth. In this paradigm, I don’t think I ever feel good enough, and my constant struggle for self-worth doesn’t seem to get better as I fight my way up the slope. My job of assessing my relative position is fraught by turns with envy and an uncharitable feeling of superiority. On this slippery slope, it is hard to love myself or anyone else.

In Love’s paradigm, every idea of God has infinite absolute worth. I can rejoice daily in the certainty that I am well beloved of God, that I am enough, that my individual being naturally brings forth the glorious qualities of God. From this place of comfort, I automatically feel love for my fellow expressions of God’s glory. My goal is to participate in the grand harmony of Love’s ideas making great music together.

Gratitude and love

In Love’s paradigm, gratitude and love are the normal, natural state of being. In the partiality of good, love is rare and unexplained, a tippy and perilous brightness, which I’m always desiring but seldom find. I save my gratitude to be given only when material conditions are optimal. I also may think of gratitude as a negotiating chip, a measure of obligation to others that has both positive and negative consequences in my struggle for greater self-worth. It’s hard to understand the exhilarating  nature of gratitude from the partiality of good, but in Love’s paradigm, I soar with it.

All these concepts — goodness, worth, gratitude, love — have representations in both paradigms. I realize that, if I want to view things from Love’s paradigm, I have to give up my old-paradigm notions about these fundamental points of value. I can’t reach Love’s paradigm by continually pushing up along the slope of partial goodness, relative self-worth, elusive love, and negotiating-chip gratitude. But I can get there by letting go of that painful effort and allowing the Christ to lift me to the unchanging truth that has always been present. I can stop trying to be good and recognize that I can’t be anything else, since God, good, made me. So I stop comparing myself to others to determine my relative worth, and can instead recognize the absolute and infinite worth of myself and everyone else.  This opens out my ability to love my neighbor as myself, and to understand the vastness of the love of God. Thus I am received into the heavenly kingdom, thus I can’t help but fulfill the two great commandments. Thus I am lifted into the ever-joyous domain of Love’s paradigm.

Click here for poem: Amnesty

Click here for poem: Spring Clean

Navigating Grief

I mentioned that my experience of The Allness sustained me through grief, and that I didn’t experience Heather’s passing as a failure. This is not to say that I thought her passing was “for the best” or “what was supposed to happen.” Certainly there has been much soul-searching, much asking what we needed to know or do to have occasioned a different outcome. There have been different answers to that, and places of no answer. And there have been massive floods of tears. As people who have been there have attested, there can be a sense of being in a world where things are almost normal, where we can even laugh, and then we can fall, as if through a thin partition, into the place of drowning. 

We are taught in Christian Science that death is unreal, that grief at death is without cause. But it was clear to me that I needed to be honest with what I was experiencing, and not to try to stifle or bring to quick closure whatever was happening as the tears stormed through. Sometimes I was completely under the waves; sometimes it seemed I could observe the weather system and notice things about it. And one thing I started noticing was how my identity seemed to separate out — the one that cried being a different person from the one who found peace in The Allness. 

The one that cried was the one that is referred to in Christian Science as “personal sense.” But, if you’ve been studying Christian Science, try this: say “personal sense” with utmost compassion. This is the one who believes she is a separate entity, and that whether she knows God or not is her choice, and that she can make wrong choices, and will be punished for them. What she most deeply wants is the comfort of The Allness, just as we all do, and what she is starting to learn is that she can find it by simply abandoning the sense of herself as the entity she has thought she was.

In the presence of The Allness, there are no tears. And there’s no sense of being a person who can fail. In The Allness the sense of identity is as the beloved of the One, not separate from anyone or anything.

Let me try a different approach to explain this. After Heather went through the first iteration of her ordeal, in 2015, I started to recognize something about myself. It was that I viewed life as a process of attaining what I found myself calling “the plums of life” — the things that were supposed to bring happiness. Things like marriage, a good job, a good place to live, children, achievements, skills, experiences. And what I most wanted for my children was for them to attain “the plums of life.” So when I would meet new people, or reconnect with ones I hadn’t seen in a while, I would bring out my “plums”, and those of my children, to share. They were what made me, in my eyes, a worthwhile person to be around. Oh yes, I would say, Heather is learning to play the fiddle, and has a black belt in Tae kwon do. 

So when Heather faced the next portion of her life with some big challenges, I realized that I couldn’t take for granted her eventual achievement of the “plums” that I hoped for her. More importantly, I realized that none of the “plums” that I or anyone could name could guarantee happiness for those who achieved them. Any one you named — marriage, job, children, home, skills, experiences — could as easily be empty, or full of heartache. 

So I started to have a different view of what would get me, and my children, happiness and fulfillment. And it started to become clear that everything worth having in life is spiritual. Which doesn’t mean it’s ethereal. Actually, it means, instead of thinking, for example, that in order to have love one needs a relationship, I could see that love, the spiritual quality, is what we each have by nature of our identity as Love’s ideas. So we could have, as it were, the juice without the plums. It became clear to me that it was the juice that we really wanted — the sense of spiritual connection to goodness, of loving and being beloved. The plums might or might not deliver the juice; going directly for the juice was a much surer way to get my needs met.

This understanding helped me in my spiritual growth since that time, and helped me to have a better, and growing, relationship with Heather. It helped me to be fully in support of her doing what she most wanted to do, as we worked toward healing.

So here’s the thing: when I would be overwhelmed with tears, it was often set off by something relating to “the plums” — Heather was saving her doll treehouse for the kids she hoped to have … And when I noticed that dynamic, I often felt the tears and sorrow simply fall away. I could then, with a little contemplation, find my way back to The Allness.

In my experience, I found that if I was crying, it was good to let myself cry. At the bottom of all the tears is The Allness. And if my husband, Heather’s dad, was crying, it was good for me to cry with him. All tears are eventually cleansing. 

Lately, I haven’t been overwhelmed as often, and I often feel a sweet sense of Heather’s presence. But just when I think they’re all done, more tears will come, and that’s OK. I have all of my life to learn spiritual being, and no sense of having any other purpose.

Click here for poem: Transparent

Restarting my Spirit blog

I haven’t written in this blog in over five years. In early 2011, I started a poetry blog, which I have been very faithful with and which has fulfilled, for the most part, my creative need. (see http://www.wendymulhern.com/category/poems/) During this time, I’ve published nine books of poetry that are collections from my entries in that blog. 

This year, events in my life led me to some astounding revelations. In some ways, they are all one thing; I sometimes find myself calling it The Big Idea. And I feel the need to communicate what I’m seeing. An obvious place to communicate it would be in the Christian Science periodicals. I love the periodicals, and I am trying to write an article for them (I have three drafts in for consideration.) But I guess I haven’t yet figured out how to separate insights from context, and ideas from each other, to meet the required format. I still feel the need to communicate the ideas — hence the resurrection of this blog. I hope I will find readers, and I hope you, my readers, will share comments. 

Background 

In April of this year, we lost our beautiful daughter, Heather. 

The challenge she was facing began in 2015, and launched both her and me on a deep spiritual journey. Speaking for myself, I will say that the effort to find healing led to a tremendous amount of spiritual growth. During the last five weeks of her time with us, I was with her, helping her with physical needs and praying constantly to understand the spiritual truth that would bring about her healing. Of course, we were both expecting her to recover. But here is a secret that it’s hard for me to find words to articulate: I didn’t experience her passing on as a failure. I felt her alive and present in the room, felt that she was experiencing the knowledge of her perfection, and felt myself delivered into a place I only experienced once before: I call it The Allness. 

Even as tears flooded through me like sheets of rain, I was aware of the place, and whenever the tears subsided the presence of The Allness was there, like rays of sunshine, no, like a huge canyon of light with a clean wind blowing. And it was absolutely clear to me that this was what is real; that Love is present and everything; that there is no falling out of it, no dying out of it, no failing out of it. That everything I always thought about life was like living in a small bubble, and that this death experience — the very suffering of it, had ripped away the illusion of limitation, of living in a small field of goodness bounded by fear — the fear of falling out of it. That the only purpose of suffering was to rip away the limitations on our concept of good, to show us the allness of it. 

http://www.wendymulhern.com/2018/04/17/going-through-it/

This experience is what has sustained me through the journey of grief, and changed my whole sense of what comprises my life. It’s given me a way to go forward after the unthinkable experience of the loss of a child. And as I’ve explored this realm of The Allness, I have started to see the delineation of what I think of as The Big Idea. Which is what I intend to explore in this blog. I hope you’ll join me.

Forgive us our debts

In my studies this week I glimpsed the way prayer can be a means of sustenance. Rather than something I need to schedule among the other things vying for my waking hours, it can be the thing that gives me strength and regeneration. For prayer is not about asking God to help with my life. Prayer is about God being my life — that is to say, that elemental goodness is the Principle on which I am formed, the Principle of how I’m put together — my movement, my interaction, my growth, my purpose, my fulfillment.

So in church today, I opened my heart up to that sustenance, that sense of having my whole being created, in that moment, by the ever-present Love that was embracing me. And I embraced the rest of the congregation, as best I could, in that perception. That was during the silent prayer. Then we began to say the Lord’s Prayer, “Our father, which art in heaven; Our Father Mother God, all harmonious . . . “ It was a great affirmation of where I had been flying in silent prayer.

When we got to the part, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and Love is reflected in love,” I had an interesting insight. In order to be forgiving a debt, I first had to give a loan. Had to enter into relationship with someone, had to trust them and act on that trust. So in order to be forgiven for all that I don’t understand about who I am, I need to enter into a relationship of trust with others, and forgive them for all they don’t understand about who I am, or about who they are. A lovely practice that involves no passing of judgment, no miserly withholding, no cautious prudence. I agree to trust others to be the divine children that Life, Love, creates them to be. And then forgive them, and me, when I see something different. That’s how I am forgiven for seeing something different, and that’s how I rise to a truer perception of both them and myself. Thus, my relationship to God requires an active relationship with others. A thing I have been doing and loving to do, and was glad to see is part of the prescription for being Christian. 

Contribution, The Snapping Jaws, and the Economy of Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussing Scriptures (thoughts on Isaac)

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

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

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

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

Another bout with the snapping jaws

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

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

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

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

The Big Lie

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

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

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

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

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

The big lie tries to say a couple of things:

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

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

The big lie leads us to darkness and despair.

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

The Snapping Jaws

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

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

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

A little lower than the angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divine Love

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

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

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

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

Desire is Prayer

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

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

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

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