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.

The hand of Love

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

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

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

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

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

Sea Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hearing the Word

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

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

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

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

Musings

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.