It is a change indeed when a dear one has passed on and we no longer see him. Yet this experience can be elevated to the hallowing one of comprehending what a loved hymn terms "the form divinely fair."Christian Science Hymnal, No. 51; Then this can be an interval of greatest victory for the individual, rather than for the illusive evil called death.
In a statement in Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy depicts this situation. It reads, "The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares."Science and Health, p. 574; The advent of angel thoughts in consciousness and the righteous utilization of them to nullify evil is triumph of the highest order.
In the study of Christian Science it is learned that we never love anyone fully until we perceive that in reality he is what God made him to be—is a thoroughly spiritual idea, composed of right qualities and ideas. As part of her answer to the question, "What is man?" our Leader writes in the above-named textbook, "He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas."p. 475;
When one thus learns truly to love another through beholding him as an intact composite of perfect ideas, there comes inevitably the realization that this "compound idea . . . including all right ideas," the one truly loved, has not departed to a remote location. As an idea in Mind he has become not only dearer than ever before but also nearer than ever before.
Thus, since the view from this mental vantage point beholds the dear one in the ever-present now, it accomplishes more than making it easier not to grieve. It makes grief impossible. This is not a cold attitude, for it arises from feeling the warming closeness of universal and individual good; it is kept aglow by steady spiritual ardor and felt in a gladdened heart.
What blessing and surcease from woe come with our discernment that "the form divinely fair," seen mentally, is the only one to behold. The practice of recognizing every individual with whom one has contact, directly or otherwise, as a God-constituted and God-actuated entity can and should become habitual with each student of Christian Science. Then this is not suddenly a new procedure of thought when someone passes on.
Jesus said, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."John 8:51; If one adheres to the meaningful message of the Christ Truth, he will never hold in consciousness the belief that someone has died. When we understand the eternal allness of God as Life, death can cause us neither distress nor dread. We discern that it is illusion only, the fictitious opposite of true being; and so it cannot appear to us as something that has happened or is happening.
Several years ago the news was received that our son was among those lost in an airplane crash. Immediately there came the complete conviction that I had to decide at once for all time that God's child is deathless. With profound gratitude for the teachings of Christian Science I realized that my thinking must be filled with and governed, from the outset and enduringly, by the understanding of all-encompassing divine Life.
The certainty that there had been no moment when an idea of God had been cut off from his only Father-Mother brought unshakable reassurance that actually he was, therefore, untouched by harm; and that there was no change in his true spiritual existence—his only real existence.
One of the first angels entertained was Mrs. Eddy's statement: "In the illusion of death, mortals wake to the knowledge of two facts: (1) that they are not dead; (2) that they have but passed the portals of a new belief."Science and Health, p. 251; Then, since our son now knew that he had not died, I could not be thinking something contrary to what he now knew to be true of himself.
There had been an especially warm relationship between parents and son. This warmhearted bond has continued to be felt, yet without a difficult moment for me from that time to this. The clear awareness that our dear one, as the reflection of God, expresses good without end has clinched for me the fact that true relationship is forever unbroken.
Comfort is complete in the confidence of man's unvarying perfection. This establishes our outlook on existence in the great I am of ever-present being and shuts out the mortal view that someone has had life in the past only.
Life does not leave matter because it has never been introduced into material formations. Ignorant mortal sense is all that testifies to intelligence or sensation in fleshly forms; and we have been warned against this falsity, this lie of a full-time liar. Jesus said of the carnal consciousness that could not understand his speech or hear his word, "When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it."John 8:44;
Christian Science teaches with Scriptural authority that God is all Life, without cessation, and that the only man there is, is created in His likeness. Therefore it follows that man has only the uninterrupted life imparted by Him. The deathlessness of Deity can be neither doubted nor disputed; hence man in His divine image, eternally inseparable from Life, is deathless. That which God constitutes is subject to no time span; man derives all that he possesses from his Father-Mother, the source of all reality.
The questions, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" are answered by the exultant indication of dominion: "But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."I Cor. 15:55, 57. This recognition may be confidently taken as conclusive and as pointing to the method by which followers of Christ Jesus may subjugate the evil called death—by the spiritual steadfastness that prevails through mastering the belief in it. Such is the progressively triumphant way in Christian Science.
