Let's, for a short while, break out of the familiar everyday picture of what we're doing in a particular building or street or neighborhood. On a country lane or a city block in some fine building given to us by our forebears. Let's break out of the model of church that's based on the committees and services and meetings and budgets. All necessary, of course. Desirable.
But what would happen if we shifted, instead, to two imperatives that Mary Baker Eddy provided. "We must . . . take up . . . 'the science of real being,' " she wrote. "We must look deep into realism instead of accepting only the outward sense of things." Science and Health, p. 129 Look to the realism and de-emphasize the appearance, she told us. Make that shift from matter to Spirit.
Mary Baker Eddy was a churchgoer well before the great revelation of Christian Science came to her. After that, she applied to the church her own advice about realism, looking deep into the realism of Church—not accepting only the outward sense of Church, with which she was so familiar. And Mrs. Eddy perceived Church, in its everlasting realism, as "the structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle." Ibid., p. 583 She didn't originate the divine idea, of course, but she did identify it.
