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.

Why I am a Christian Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesson on Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

Splash of Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My neighbor as myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correcting Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The meaning of “the”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heart to heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Matters Not ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mortal existence is a dream . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking to the Mountains

I imagine this conversation with someone who watches out for my spiritual growth and progress. I say, “It reminds me of the story my grandmother used to tell about how she looked out from her house and saw the mountains so near, and suggested to her sister that they walk there that day. So they set out and walked, but even though they walked for a long time, and covered a lot of ground, they never seemed to get any closer to the mountains. I feel like that – I’m covering tremendous ground spiritually. I’m loving the things I’m seeing and learning. But I’m still not making it as a practitioner, and no one is calling me for healing. I thought I was ready but I guess I must not be.” He says, “It doesn’t have anything to do with your not being ready.”

I’m not sure what he says after that. But my sense is that the paradigm in which I could be ready or not ready puts too much weight on me as the center of things. Here’s a thing that Mrs. Eddy says about it: “God will heal the sick through man, whenever man is governed by God.” In the past, in what I believe is the false paradigm, I would have put my patient in the place of “the sick” in that sentence, and me in the place of “man.” Then I would ask myself what I needed to do to be sufficiently governed by God in order to heal the sick. However, the appropriate place to put my patient is in the place of “man.”

So then I ask myself, when does God govern man? Well, duh. God governs man all the time. So God heals the sick through man by talking directly to, emanating directly from, being the source of, everything that man – my patient – is. Which, of course, is exactly as God intends it to be. Which is, of course, perfect. “The sick” in that sentence turns out not to need an identity – it’s like a cloud of dust that just needs to dissipate. And there isn’t God and me and the patient, there’s just God and man – God making man perfect, and man enjoying it.

What I’m working on now is this moment. I told someone recently, faith is the habit of looking again to see God’s presence; holding out for a better answer if evidence seems to go against goodness. I’m holding out for a better answer, not for my future, but for right now. It’s clear to me that the better answer isn’t in the way human circumstances bend to be more favorable, but in the presence of Love that renders human circumstances irrelevant. The circumstances do, and must, align themselves with harmony, but they don’t carry the harmony any more than iron shavings define the shape of a magnet.

So maybe I’m walking to the mountains. But maybe I’m walking in the mountains, and maybe I can feel the fresh, fresh air every time I breathe in goodness. Maybe the view is right here, and I am looking right at it.

The Waters of Meribah

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.

Christian Science and the shell of it – breaking free

Since the time in ninth grade when my faith came alive for me, I’ve wanted to share it with others. And sometimes as I’ve tried to do so, a certain brittleness has come up - a sense that this wasn’t an area of interest to my conversation partner. The response would bewilder me, though I came to expect it. I couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to hear about this great thing I had to offer. Lately I’m looking at it from a different perspective. I see several obvious reasons why these past communications were brittle and awkward.

First is the problem of trying to tell about something: As I’ve mentioned, feeling the lift of God’s presence is much like flying. All of my being is on a bright and moving edge; I am illumined; I feel myself at the cambium, the growing place where all things unfold in the fresh newness of being. But to share this with someone else, they have to feel it. They have to experience God’s love, with its assurance that nothing they’ve ever worried about has ever mattered, that they have always been beloved beyond imagining, which takes care of everything. Mere words, however inspired, don’t bring this about.

Second are the limits to my own life proof: Christian Scientists are taught to operate from a different paradigm from the one assumed by popular culture. It is a paradigm in which perfection is the starting point, goodness is substance, and bad things are considered insubstantial, and are expected to fall away. We operate from that standpoint when our experience corroborates that – when we live at the point of healing. But there is a question of how I am to be when I find myself waiting for understanding – waiting for the clarity which shows itself as healing. I think there is a need to be very humble and quiet in my faith. I need to be watchful that the starting point of perfection doesn’t devolve into perfectionism, in which, though I don’t feel myself perfect, I feel I should be, and expect others to be. This falls into the posturing and judging, the precarious maintaining of facades, so familiar to social-climbing America and so antithetical to Christ.

Related to that is a problem of language: When speaking of a different paradigm, it’s easy to convey the wrong impression. Perfection in Christ can sound like perfectionism; the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free can sound like a burdensome responsibility. This problem is even greater when I cease to know what I’m talking about – when my words get ahead of my experience and I speak from my notion of the theory instead of the understanding only found in love.

Finally, there’s the question of relationship: I guess I assumed that it would be good and helpful to others for me to impart inspiration, or at least information, in my communications. What I didn’t account for is that my desire to be the giver left others in the role of people who needed my help. Often, as it turns out, people don’t appreciate being cast in that role. So if I come along telling them that their lives will be much better if they only allow themselves to be moved by my insight and wisdom, or if they adopt aspects of my faith, I shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t respond with great enthusiasm.

So what does this all indicate? Even within my own faith I have felt the resistance to the things others resist. I, too, turn away from mere words and crave the authentic experience, the overwhelming sense of the God presence, that makes many words unnecessary, and makes the ones that are spoken perfect. It’s useful to start noticing what doesn’t work so I can stop trying to do it. It’s even more important to begin collecting the moments of perfect love that define everything I want to have and be. Recently, facing the need to comfort a loved one, I found myself choosing not to say thought after thought that came to mind. I felt that words of instruction, however insightful, would fall flat, and that even words of encouragement must not contradict his feelings. I needed to keep my own thought in the place of pure love. No words that strayed from this could be any use at all. What I shared was not important. What mattered was that the solid Love that holds the whole world together be felt by both of us. Listening in this way allowed the needed comfort to come in. It was conveyed in touch more than in words – touch guided by love.

Words about Christian Science are a mere shell of what I value. They are a shell that can be brittle, and that can keep the glorious essence from shining forth. By insisting to myself that I stay centered in truth, I can begin to break free of that shell. No longer do I feel the need to share the great truth that I have found with others. Instead, through my faith I can see the light that they are already shining. My sharing can be in appreciating what they are. Then it will be their words as much as mine that bring inspiration.

Feels like Flying

Ever since I was very little, I’ve had the sense that I know the feeling of free flight, and have longed for it. I have flown in dreams from time to time, and always awake from such dreams with a deep sense of well-being.

When my being grasps for a moment the wonderful law of goodness, it feels like flying. There’s the same sense of expansiveness, of filling with more joy than my lungs can hold, of hope soaring – a buoyancy behind my chest and beneath my throat. There is power, belonging, and coming home – a sense of the rightness of this, and that it has always been part of me. It also feels like a huge new world to explore. In those moments my questions are gone – questions of how I am to improve, what my course of growth should be, how I’ll ever get there (wherever “there” might be). For I am conscious of the rightness of here and now.

My sister said this morning, “We’re taught that our thoughts determine our experience, right?” I said, “We’re taught that, but I’m not sure it’s right.” I told her of a book I had been looking at, on the Sermon on the Mount, which said it would bring out the Science of Christianity by explicating the meaning of those teachings. But it didn’t mention Mrs. Eddy anywhere, or even Christian Science. I soon determined that what it said may have been along the lines of what I was taught as a child, but also that those lines would never get one to the flying place, never bring healing, and so would lead seekers awry.

The problem is that it shares the underlying world view of the great body of self-help instruction to be found in our society. It assumes that there is something wrong with us, or at least something that can be improved upon, and that if we adopt this course of discipline and work hard at it, we can make ourselves better.

In this paradigm, God is not the moving and shaping force in our lives, our creator and determiner, the law which governs us. At best, God in this scenario is a judge, someone whose favor we might eventually earn if we are good enough. This is not the God that Jesus taught when he said “the kingdom of God is within you”, “I and my Father are one”, and “Our Father, which art in heaven.”

When I have been in the self-help paradigm, I’ve found it hard to love, much as I wanted to, much as I thought it would make me a better person to do so. I was too busy being anxious about myself, how I was doing, how I was progressing in my self-help program. The love that Love teaches is a celebration of universal oneness. It is a joy that springs forth in the contemplation of others, an exaltation at their presence and all the unique qualities of their being. It rides in the deep confidence of being well-loved, of belonging, of being home. It feels like flying.

It is an interesting project to steadily untangle myself from the self-help view of life and to embrace, more and more, the love that is the law of Life. The benefit is opening up those soaring spaces, where the fabric of my world view rips open and my whole vision fills with light.

Giving and Receiving – the divine equilibrium of Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than I can hold in my hands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More and more lovely clues

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

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

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

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

Christ Says Yes III – nothing shall offend them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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