Dear Members and Friends,
You’ve been hearing quite a bit from The Mother Church about “the spirit of Christ calling us together.”* Check out Margaret Rogers’s January Journal editorial if you missed it. Notice our Annual Meeting ads. And since Church Alive remains a focus for Annual Meeting, I think you’ll value seeing what other members are sharing and learning from each other on christianscience.com/churchalive and the inspired ways they’ve found to move ahead.
While Mary Baker Eddy uses this phrase in relation to the unity of Christian denominations, the power behind the idea can bless a wide range of connections: a practitioner and patient relationship, a family gathering, a church business meeting, how nations work out issues among themselves. These are wonderful ways to see the Christ at work, bringing us together in harmony and healing.
There is also another way to think of this concept of how the Christ nurtures oneness. Here’s how I began considering it one day. I remembered someone commenting about a fellow: “He really hasn’t got it together!” She was suggesting that his life was somewhat scattered, his choices weren’t always the wisest, he wasn’t always dependable. I suppose she could have been describing any of us—at least during some point in our life. In other words, can any of us claim to have always “had it all together”?
Perhaps this is an important point—defining where we all need to begin. With ourselves. Maybe it echoes the words of a song, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” We might say, “In so many ways, we can bear witness to the spirit of Christ calling us together. And let it begin right within me.” Yes, let me get my life together—as a foundation for praying to see the spirit of Christ calling the rest of the world together.
And so, as you let the theme of Annual Meeting begin to take root in your life, remember that it’s more than just how others are brought together. It’s also how your life is coming together. It’s how you are feeling the kind of oneness that encourages calmness and poise to be at the core of your being. It’s how you are feeling a cohesiveness that gives you ordered and progressive days.
Do open your thought to all the very special ways the spirit of Christ is calling us together. And don’t forget to consider what this means for your own individual life in this unifying experience.
I hope you’ll join with us at Annual Meeting, Monday, June 4, at 1:00 p.m. EDT, either in Boston or on the Web. For more information about the meeting and other events during the weekend, please visit ChristianScience.com/annualmeeting.
Warmly,
Clerk of The Mother Church
* “Our unity with churches of other denominations must rest on the spirit of Christ calling us together. It cannot come from any other source.” (Mary Baker Eddy, Pulpit and Press, p. 21)
