Grief can be healed. Instantaneous, permanent comfort derives from the realization that real being is incorporeal, divine, and that every spiritual identity dwells in the all-embracing arms of infinite Love—in the very bosom of God's fatherly and motherly care.
Finding comfort in Christ, the true idea of God, brings more than relief, more even than regeneration and restoration, important as these are. It brings a growing awareness that all God's children— His spiritual ideas—live deathlessly, painlessly, perfectly, eternally.
Christ Jesus' healing career exemplified the ideal ministry. It showed the immediate effect on the human scene of a clear understanding of divine comfort. When the gentle Master told a grieving mother to weep not, his words may have sounded unsympathetic, insensitive. But when he restored her son to life, those words took on the saving stature of Christly comfort.See Luke 7:12-15;
A broken heart can produce an open heart. Receptivity to Jesus' command to weep not can ready us to receive the powerful healing effects of Christly obedience and understanding. What seems like the end of everything can become a new beginning, a spiritual rebirth.
We all need to grow immensely before we can approach Jesus' demonstration of immortality. We need to discipline ourselves to view life and identity as they really are. Because the eternality of being is a spiritual concept, we need to cultivate spiritual-mindedness even to begin to comprehend it.
But we can progress. And to all who strive to follow Jesus' demonstrations, the promise of the faithful Master still stands: "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you." John 14:18;
Divine Science is the Comforter that has come to all mankind in fulfillment of this promise. Mrs. Eddy writes, "When, as little children, we are receptive, become willing to accept the divine Principle and rule of being, as unfolded in divine Science, the interpretation therein will be found to be the Comforter that leadeth into all truth." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 189;
Science reiterates the Christian command to "heal the sick." The great spiritual growth of those who heed this command impels them to redefine their human capacities, to reclaim their God-derived ability to "raise the dead," beginning with their own sagging faith and shallow understanding.See Matt. 10:8;
As the divine revelation of God and of man's spiritual, sinless identity as His child, Christian Science unfolds a basic theme of Scripture: that divine Spirit is the only Life, Mind, or Soul, and that Spirit's representative, man, is immortal. This Science explains that so-called life and death in matter neither precede nor preempt man's true, spiritual life. God's onliness makes obvious the fallacy of matter and mortality.
Mortality is a dream, a confused, hypnotic sense that the understanding of immortality breaks. So committed was Mrs. Eddy to rousing all those tempted to let their courage, conviction, and comfort exit with one of the characters in this mortal dream that she writes in Science and Health: "The dream of death must be mastered by Mind here or hereafter. Thought will waken from its own material declaration, 'I am dead,' to catch this trumpet-word of Truth, 'There is no death, no inaction, diseased action, overaction, nor reaction.'" And in the next paragraph she continues, "Life is real, and death is the illusion."Science and Health, pp. 427-428.
If we have been deluded by the material senses into believing that the pictures of the dream are more real than God and His man, we can master such an error. Through the understanding study and practice of Truth, we can gradually relinquish all belief in mortal, material sense and realize what is real and continuous: God and His ideas.
We will grieve no more when we realize that behind the conventional showing of respect for the departed, beneath the "healthy" venting of grief and self-pity, grief pays idolatrous tribute to belief in death. In some ancient cultures it was customary to bury a widow with her deceased husband or to incinerate her on his funeral pyre. But not far removed from such practices is the burial of hope and happiness with the deceased today. It is far from Christian teaching.
Not through dying, grieving, or merely suppressing grief, but through genuine Christian discipleship we are reborn into the selfhood that neither clings to a past locked in memory nor faces a future devoid of purpose but rejoices in the eternal now of perfect being. Through heartfelt prayer and practical efforts to be and do good, we can live up to, and so wake up to, this real self. We can realize that each individual in God's family remains forever alive, complete, and intact—entirely unaffected by the picture of death.
Christ Jesus' thorough understanding of the Christ Science resulted in deeply satisfying demonstrations of health, holiness, harmony. In proportion as we understand, we too will demonstrate in ways conclusive to us that man cannot experience death but is immortal.
Real identity is the eternal expression of the one Life. It is individually complete and invariably perfect. Real selfhood has never dreamed the dream of death. In reality no one has been in the material dream. It is possible now to discern beyond a doubt and without a tear the absolute truth that man cannot be excluded from the full consciousness of eternal, all-inclusive Life.
The conviction that Life is forever may come to us gradually. But right from the moment we seek it, the healing touch of divine comfort will enable us to realize progressively that all spiritual identities are continuously united in the one Mind, God. Everyone is included in heaven, the consciousness—demonstrable now—that man enjoys immortal, unprecarious life and love.
Step by step, Christian comfort more than compensates our efforts to deny the senses and identify with the Christ; to practice spiritualized living and universal love as Jesus did. Christian comfort is the cradle of spiritual rebirth.
To realize the indestructibility of a single individual and his inseparability from divine Life and Love is to recognize the immortality and unity of all being. To demonstrate immortal being is to be so completely comforted as to naturally radiate comfort to others and thus to launch a healing ministry.
