For many years, Mary Baker Eddy’s mirror analogy of God and His reflection, man, in a mirror was a challenge to me. She states, “God is revealed only in that which reflects Life, Truth, Love,—yea, which manifests God’s attributes and power, even as the human likeness thrown upon the mirror, repeats the color, form, and action of the person in front of the mirror” (Science and Health, pp. 300–301). She goes on to say, “Few persons comprehend what Christian Science means by the word reflection.”
Although this mirror analogy seems simple at first, the challenge to “comprehend” the meaning of reflection is something Mary Baker Eddy understood. In my attempts to really comprehend, I would sometimes get out a pencil and paper, draw some figure, or even just a mark (since God, Spirit, has no form), to represent God as “source.” Then I would draw another figure, or similar mark, in a mirror, to represent the reflection, or “me.” It was always an individual figure as the source and a complementary single figure in the mirror as reflection. At this point, I became completely blocked. Focused on the image in the mirror (“me”), separate from, and outside of, the source figure, there seemed no way to connect or find an identity with God. Obviously, something important was missing.
The first major breakthrough came when I decided to look up the word reflect in the dictionary. I found that reflection isn’t just an image seen in water, a mirror, or some other reflective surface. Webster’s dictionary defines it, in part, as “to make manifest or apparent … to realize, consider … to think quietly and calmly.” It was the last few words that really opened the door for me. Everything changed as I realized my identity was actually as a calm, reflective thought, in and of God, one Mind. Complete identity is found in His contemplation of all His ideas, coming out from Mind, perfect and complete.
