Death may claim to separate people mercilessly from each other, but never does it separate anyone from God. We who are left on this side of the curtain of mortal belief when someone dearly loved has passed on to a new experience can take comfort in this knowledge. Paul said, "I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."Rom. 8:38, 39;
Paul learned this fact from the followers of the master Christian, Jesus, who taught and proved that life is indestructible. Anyone who understands the significance of those instances when Jesus raised the dead and when he came forth from the tomb himself finds his fear of death lessened. In each instance, Jesus showed that life had not been extinguished, that the individual had never been cut off from the source of life, from God.
To exist is to express the one divine Life, and whatever actually lives is evidence of that Life; it cannot die, else Life itself— without expression—would become extinct. Hence the importance of understanding one's existence and of treasuring the opportunity of proving what man is as Life's expression.
In "Unity of Good" Mary Baker Eddy makes the relationship of man and Life clear when she says: "As the image of God, or Life, man forever reflects and embodies Life, not death. The material senses testify falsely."Un., p. 39;
The knowledge of Life and its expression which Jesus and Paul possessed made them fearless regarding flesh and death, for they saw these errors as powerless to interfere with existence. Their very fearlessness showed their complete conviction of man's deathlessness, and this Christly conviction made it possible for both to destroy the illusion of death, which strongly suggests that life has ended. They knew that identity is not subject to the dissolution of flesh, but continues forever.
As poorly and feebly as Christianity has been lived in ages past, its insistence that the incident of death does not mean the end of life has freed Christendom significantly from limitations of love and intelligence imposed by the belief in death's finality.
Christian Science is helping mankind break the tensions and erase the effects that belief in death incurs. Every healing brought about by this great Science gives a glimpse of man's real life, inseparable from Spirit. Through Science, the eternal Christ, the true idea of sonship, is coming more intimately into individual experience, always bringing with it a comforting sense of man's unity with Life and the ability to prove this unity.
Mortality is the opponent of Life, and the mortal senses resist the coming of Christ, which presents deathless man. The same mortality that dominated the minds of those who crucified Jesus is influencing today the minds of those who believe in death and agree to its claim to destroy. One way of refusing to submit to death is to rise quickly above the belief that someone has been separated from Life. Every individual healing of grief helps to break down the universal belief that death can have its way over life.
Jesus said, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."John 8:51; How can we keep his saying, his vital precept that man's life is eternal, if we believe in mortality? Only the mortal senses witness to the illusion of death. Spiritual sense discerns and continues to discern the identity which cannot die.
Our refuge from grief is found through spiritual sense. This true sense rouses us to realize the great gulf that separates man, made in Life's likeness, from the mortal, whose life seems to depend upon frail flesh. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mrs. Eddy says, "Entirely separate from the belief and dream of material living, is the Life divine, revealing spiritual understanding and the consciousness of man's dominion over the whole earth."Science and Health, p. 14.
Separate from material existence but inseparable from divine Life—this is the statement of Christian Science regarding man. The seeming death of anyone is a challenge to those who long to break the dream of mortality and reveal the state of consciousness called heaven, where every individual coexists with God in incorporeal glory, reflecting Life without beginning and without end.
Great comfort comes to one who glimpses this realm of Light and Life, for even a slight glimpse of real existence assures one that every individual is safe, cared for, loved by the Father, who includes all that exists and expresses Him.
In striving to overcome the feeling of separation from those who have gone on, one will find it helpful to so discipline himself that he will look away from the material personality he has loved and hold thought to the spiritual view of man as he is revealed in Christian Science. The fleshly concept is then abandoned for the spiritual concept.
No power exists that can prevent us from drawing nearer and nearer to the real man, who exists intact in divine Mind as its idea and likeness. And when we become conscious of this idea, we can suffer no grief, for we shall understand man's unity with Life that knows no death.
