Spiritual Short

In this season of Thanksgiving and gratitude here in North America, I’ve been thinking about this: We don’t have to wait until we’ve been freed or healed to be grateful. Giving thanks to God in advance lifts us out of the belief that we’re mortal, limited, in pain, or sad.

In its purest form, praising God is not an imposition or an artificial religious obligation, but a natural outcome of wonder and awe—a spontaneous expression of heartfelt gratitude and appreciation. To many people in the world, however, enjoinders to “praise God” may seem badly timed or perhaps downright hypocritical.

Recently, instead of being annoyed by the gardener at the park using a noisy weed cutter in an otherwise peaceful environment, I cheerfully remarked, “You think you’ve done your job, and the next time you’re here, the grass has grown again!” We both laughed. As I thought about the grass, I realized that just as it continues to grow, even after being cut down, so do we often feel “cut down” by tragedies, hardship, criticism, and disappointment.

For several years now, I’ve had a nagging regret that I’ve been trying to push under the rug. Each time I think about this certain situation, I feel a deep sense of loss.

There are so many things I loved about attending the Christian Science Sunday School: the pure and holy atmosphere, the opportunity to delve into the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and the spiritual lessons I learned. Sunday School was a place where I was encouraged to take these spiritual lessons and apply them to my life.

Recently I was thinking about efforts being made to try to find the human remains of Christ Jesus—his DNA, his bones. Such efforts would try to deny the Master’s example to us of Life as spiritual and eternal, his resurrection, and his ascension.

To some extent our lives are defined, or at least affected, by religious ideas. Many Christians adopt the viewpoint given in the second chapter of Genesis that man was created materially perfect by God, and then original sin brought man down into imperfection.

Recently I overheard a child, apparently referring to a prior conversation, insist to his mother that he’d told her the truth; it “just wasn’t quite true. ” The mother gently corrected him, explaining that if something isn’t true, it’s not truth.

Don’t you love it when ideas come and bring with them a new level of spiritual understanding? In Psalm 37 , the 37th verse reads, “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace. ” I’d thought that the first word, mark, mostly had to do with vision—to identify, find, behold, or observe.

Yesterday I received a phone call from someone who had a heavy cold and told me that she had identified the “epicenter” of this illness at her job. This got me to thinking about man’s real, spiritual center as the child of God.