Changing time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serenity Dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Trajectories

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

Standing for Peace

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

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

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

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

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

Believe, and ye shall be saved?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Substance: Vector or Bitmap?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping in right relation to Truth

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.
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Angels come:

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

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

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

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

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

Angels come. They lift us out.

Praying for people, and being prayed for

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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