Recently, a brown-bag lunch—an informal meeting—was held in The Mother Church Sunday School building in support of the Church 's daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, and its holiday program of gift subscriptions. We thought our readers would enjoy the following excerpts, beginning with some comments from , Editor in Chief of The Christian Science Publishing Society, followed by remarks by , Manager.
I'd like to share some thoughts with you about gift-giving and the Monitor, based on the healing of the "man lame from his mother's womb," which we had in last week's Bible Lesson. In thinking about that story, it seemed to me that there were some similarities between that man's experience and the Monitor's.
In the Bible, the book of Acts, chapter 3, describes the man's problem as being "lame from his mother's womb." Isn't it true that we run into trouble whenever a false, material sense of origin is attributed to any person or thing? For that man, his lameness, his limping and lack of free, unhindered movement, arose from the belief of material origin —"from his mother's womb." If we were to classify the Monitor as emanating from material persons and with a material history, that certainly wouldn't help the Monitor to walk forward freely! Additionally, Acts says that the man "was carried"—that he was a burden to others—and that he was "laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple." Isn't it perhaps true that we sometimes think of the daily Monitor as outside the Church—as "laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful," and asking alms—asking in a passive way for something to be given to it by those who are entering into the temple?
