I have one of those long, many-stranded necklaces so popular today. It looks great until it gets tangled, and it gets tangled with every move I make. Frankly, it’s a mess. The longer I let it go, the worse it gets. Once in a while I take the time to unwind the snarls. I find that in order to do that, I have to take each strand, one at a time, unwinding and unwinding until all the tangles are gone. It reminds me of our work in Christian Science.
It seems a process, at times, of “unwinding one’s snarls,” as Mary Baker Eddy puts it in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “The divine method of paying sin’s wages involves unwinding one’s snarls, and learning from experience how to divide between sense and Soul” (p. 240). We take in a little suggestion, a comment made by a friend, a drug commercial on TV, a newspaper item, a blog, a tweet—a whatever. It seems like such a little thing, but it begins a snarly process.
One snarl, not taken care of, leads to more and more until we realize we’ve got to do something about it. Like an inattentive watchman at a doorway, we see we’ve gotten careless and have let alien thoughts creep in—thoughts unlike God, good. We have two things to do at that point: delete and expunge what needs to be deleted and expunged—and then do a better job of standing porter at that door to thought.
