Absence from the body no longer hints at any post mortem achievement to the student of Christian Science. He thinks of it as a present-day victory over the corporeal senses, and then starts in to "fight the good fight of faith" and to lay hold of eternal Life, which was never in or of matter.
There is just one way of becoming "absent from the body," here or hereafter, and that is through spiritualization of thought. A material sense of one's self is a false sense, and the overcoming of this false sense will mean the correction of all that constitutes the belief of life in matter. In the same sense that Jesus told his followers that he who lost his life should find it, may it be said of the body that whoever loses his false material sense of body will gain a true or spiritual sense of God and man. It goes far toward destroying a sense of fear for those who think that any part of real being can be lost, when they learn in Christian Science that a false material sense of man, earth, and heaven is all that can ever be lost. Something could not be lost; but nothing masquerading as something can and will be lost. We read in Scripture, "Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more." Surely what God does not remember is forever lost.
The belief that man lives in a matter body which is a component part of himself, is the foundation of all discordant tones of human existence. Could we but realize that this belief of life in matter is the "old man" which is put off, we would no longer look into the empty tomb of matter to find those who have passed from human sight. Here and now should we gain a spiritual sense of those near and dear to us, if we would avoid the sorrow, anguish, and loneliness which the sense of separation would try to force upon us. Then would we know, as our Leader tells us in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 151), that God "is man's only real relative on earth and in heaven." Only through spiritual sense do we learn to love father and mother and sister and brother with that love which knows no separation. All that is evil and perishable is at home in the body, while all that is good, pure, and true, all that belongs to God and to His man, is "absent from the body." It is through a knowledge of Life eternal that we learn to die daily to sin and to become alive to man's incorporeal existence as an immortal child of God.
