"Admonition and Counsel" is the heading of a chapter in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany by Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder and Leader of the Christian Science Church. In the first article, "What Our Leader Says," Mrs. Eddy begins her message with this instruction: "Beloved Christian Scientists, keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them." page 210 of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany. That counsel had always seemed to me to be unattainable. How could I possibly be that holy, that spiritually-minded? After all, I lived and worked in the "real" world, and it seemed only an ascetic could fulfill such a directive. But I learned otherwise.
In another of Mrs. Eddy's books, I read a statement that interested me and held my attention. I realized that I could certainly keep my thought on the truth it brings out. The statement is from Unity of Good: "This false sense of substance must yield to His eternal presence, and so dissolve." Unity of Good p. 60. As I considered this, I thought about the many false claims the material sense of substance makes, such as the argument that life is in a material body or that happiness is found in material possessions. I considered how these and other material beliefs must yield to the understanding of God, Spirit, as the only real substance. I thought about God's eternal ever-presence, and the fact that real substance is perfect, eternal. It is the substance of Soul.
During this time I was not an ascetic. I was a wife, mother of four small children, busy keeping the house in order, preparing meals, providing for the children's needs. I was busy every moment, but these duties did not preclude prayerfully acknowledging the ever-presence of true substance.
