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.

Answering by Fire

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)

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.

The Waters of Meribah

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.

Arc of the Covenant

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.

Good Friday and the Cross

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.

Keeping in right relation to Truth

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.

Angels

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.

Cain and Ishmael

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

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.