Years ago, I felt a leap of inspiration when I read that Mary Baker Eddy frequently told her students, “Now remember what you are” (We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, 1979, p. 203). It was a terse and no doubt profound directive to get on track with the view of oneself as the image and likeness of God.
Because Mrs. Eddy chose her words so carefully, I knew that somewhere in that sentence was a truth just waiting to be revealed. I noticed she didn’t say, “Remember who you are.” So my next thought was: What’s the difference between “who” and “what”? Why didn’t she say “who”? Was she taking away my “me”? After all, didn’t I think of myself as “someone”? Someone with a physical body, and someone with very definite opinions that were housed in a “mind” that made up my personality? If I truly gave up that human sense of myself, what would become of me?
But wait. Didn’t St. Paul say, “If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself”? (Gal. 6:3). Could it be that the feeling of being a person separate from God is that very “man” Paul was referring to? I didn’t want to be deceiving myself. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mrs. Eddy warns, “This thought of human, material nothingness, which Science inculcates, enrages the carnal mind and is the main cause of the carnal mind’s antagonism” (p. 345). Becoming enraged or antagonized at this realization was out of the question for me, for that would be buying into the carnal mind, instead of obeying Paul’s behest, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). Jesus surely didn’t honor the concept of a material person—he held in consciousness God and His spiritual image, the real “man.”
