Appreciating one hundred years of spiritual insight and healing
If we were at sea in a storm where all was confusion and imminent danger, and we were wise, we would keep calm and think and do the best thing possible to save the situation. We would resist the selfish temptation to yield our thoughts to the dread of shipwreck and death. We would put forth every effort to save ourselves and others.
In the midst of a war-swept era conditions are very similar to those outlined. Confronted with the loss of loved ones, and possibly of home and of national honor, the temptation to give way to inconsolable grief may be strong indeed. The compassionate Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus wept because of the sorrow of others, but he did not acknowledge its reality, for he healed that sorrow and proved that divine Love can undo the bonds of death and set the captive free.
Christian Science has come today, in the hour of the world's greatest need, to prove true the promise of Jesus "He shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever." John 14:16. We know that the comfort God gives is sufficient to meet all our needs, no matter how hopeless the seeming conditions. In The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, Mrs. Eddy says: "Remember, thou canst be brought into no condition, be it ever so severe, where Love has not been before thee and where its tender lesson is not awaiting thee. Therefore despair not nor murmur,for that which seeketh to save, to heal, and to deliver, will guide thee, if thou seekest this guidance." First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany., pp. 149-150. The promise is to those who seek divine guidance, not to those who turn to the witch of Endor See I Sam., chap. 28. for help, or who seek the gratification of the material senses, which have never told us the truth about God or man.
Christian Science teaches that God, good, is the one and only Mind. It unites man to God, hence to his fellow man in the image of God. It can never unite us with evil, but only with good. It also teaches that evil is not of God and therefore is not eternal, but that all which is good and true and lovable is of God and is therefore eternal, deathless, changeless.
Christian Science shows us how to put off the carnal mind, or "mortal mind" as Mrs. Eddy terms it, with all its illusions, its sin, sorrow, sickness, death, and to reflect the Mind which sees and knows only love, joy, peace, life, health, harmony. It may take courageous wrestlings with our old beliefs and false habits of thinking to overcome the inertia and mesmerism of grief, but each struggle with selfishness (and that is truly all it is) clears our thoughts and lets in more of the light and joy of Truth. It brings a peace which the world can neither give nor take away, and enables us to understand the passage in the New Testament which tells us of Jesus' forty days' struggle with evil, and his great victory, after which "angels came and ministered unto him." See Matt. 4:1-11.
So often we are tempted to give up the fight just before the moment of victory, and thus feel only the weariness and even uselessness of it all,—whereas if we would but keep on as did Jesus, until we know and prove the nothingness of evil and the allness of God, we too would be refreshed and renewed by ministering angels; and we too would return "in the power of the Spirit" to heal others as God healed us. We surely would hold out if we only knew what our victory would mean to others.
If all were faithful to the highest ideal, there would be no more tears in all the world. Jesus commanded his followers to raise the dead, but how can we do this until we have raised ourselves above the belief that death is real and that it can separate God's children from one another? So long as we cry out, as Tennyson wrote, for
The touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still, Break, Break, Break.
we are not mastering the temptation to think of man as matter rather than as Spirit's reflection. The blessed thing in the touch of a hand is the love back of it. The joyous thing in the sound of a voice is the truth and love which it expresses. Man is forever the expression of God, Spirit; he is not and never was material. What the senses cognize never was the real man,—the man God knows,—the man we love, or the man who loves us.
So often we are tempted to give up the fight just before the moment of victory.
We can never find unity in matter. Even if we could, its object would be subject to change and decay. We can only find that which we really seek in God, Mind, and to do this we must understand what God is. The Bible tells us that God is Love; but so long as we hate anyone we cannot enter into the fullness of Love and make ourselves one with it, and so one with those who dwell therein. Hate, fear, selfishness, pride, materiality are estranging thoughts which separate human hearts far more sadly than does death. As we rise above sense-testimony we rise above the sense of death and sorrow.
It matters not what our present beliefs about living may be, nor those of the dear ones who have gone from us, any more than it matters what dreams may fill the sleeping thoughts of two individuals lying side by side. The all-important thing which we can always gain in Truth and Love is to awake. Every thought which is based upon the belief that man lives in matter rather than in Mind, is but a dream, and it separates us from God and from our fellow man. Even if we dreamed of union with our dear ones, it would not be the true unity, and would quickly vanish when the dream changed. Every thought based upon the understanding of man's oneness with God, good,—that is, every loving, forgiving, uplifting, honest, pure, and healing thought,—is a waking fact which cannot change or be lost.
As we all learn to keep awake, keep conscious of spiritual, harmonious being here and now, we are truly united, and we know that we are. Material longings but prolong the dream of life in matter. It may cost us unceasing effort for a while to keep out the sense of heart hunger and to keep on declaring the truth of being, but we shall never wake up until we do this, and the joy of the awakening is beyond mere words to express. Only those who taste and see it can know the bliss of spiritual reality. The disciples of Jesus tasted of spiritual reality as they left the mount of ascension, for we read that they "returned to Jerusalem with great joy," Luke 24:52.—quite a contrast to the hopeless grief that drove them back to their fishermen's nets after the tragedy on Calvary, and before they glimpsed the glory of the resurection morn.
We can never lose anything good by placing it in God's keeping till our vision clears sufficiently through individual growth to see again, beyond the mists of materiality, that which we loved so well. Let us wait and trust; watch and pray. Now and then, along the way, will come a message straight from God, a message all our own and almost too sacred to tell to anyone; a message which will reassure and comfort us, and shorten the way.
On the walk to Emmaus his disciples could not recognize their risen Master because they were so convinced that he was dead. He walked and talked with them, yet they knew him not, because of the blindness of their own state of mind, until, illumined in the "breaking of bread," See Luke 24:13-35. they saw him and believed. Christ, Truth, will break for us the satisfying bread of Life as we are faithful in seeking "first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness." If we run after a "sign" as did the people of old, it will evade us, for "there shall no sign be given," nor can it be given, "but the sign of the prophet Jonas,"—the sign that obedience to the commands of God will deliver us from all evil, even from so seemingly impossible a dilemma as was that of Jonah when he cried from the depths. We know that all evil claims to do, an understanding of God, divine Love, can undo, until we can truly say, with the conviction born of proof, that evil never did anything, unless it were to destroy itself.
After all, there is no near or far in infinity,—in the Mind which is God, and in which we all "live, and move, and have our being." Acts 17:28. Near and far are finite terms! To the ever present infinite Mind all is here and now. As we rise above the finite sense of good (a belief in limited good) we see that time and space are not known to God, or to man in His image. Age and weary waiting vanish from thought which contemplates reality. How can we ever forget a child of God, when God never forgets and we reflect the divine Mind? There is in reality no other mind. This brief dreams of existence which we call human life is not all there is to man. In the Bible we read, "From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God," Ps. 90:2. and He made man in His image and likeness. Therefore from everlasting to everlasting man coexists with God, is environed by infinite Life and Love.
On page 304 of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy lovingly assures us of this when she says, "This is the doctrine of Christian Science: that divine Love cannot be deprived of its manifestation, or object." Science and Health, p. 304. And on page 410 she says: "Every trial of our faith in God makes us stronger. The more difficult seems the material condition to be overcome by Spirit, the stronger should be our faith and the purer our love." Ibid., p. 410.
