I love the stars. I grew up in a small village in the country with pitch-black nights and glorious starry skies. I’ve spent many hours gazing at the stars with the naked eye or through a telescope. To the naked eye, stars and planets appear to be mostly a black and white affair. A telescope changes that. Mars’s red color is visible with the naked eye but really comes to life in a telescope. Jupiter can be seen with its beautiful multicolored cloud bands.
But even a powerful telescope can’t show us the immense vibrant beauty of deep-space objects like the Horsehead Nebula or the Cat’s Eye Nebula the way we see them in high-gloss coffee-table books. Why? The answer is simple: exposure. In order to bring out the color in those faint nebulae a camera needs exposure times of many minutes, or even hours.
Do we expose our heart to God many minutes, maybe even hours, every day so that we are able to experience and to drink in the richness of Spirit’s nature? To feel the power of Mind’s intelligence, Love’s tenderness, Soul’s infinite individuality?
I don’t know how much Mary Baker Eddy loved the stars. But she certainly loved being close to God more than anything else. God was definitely—in a spiritual sense—rich and colorful to her. She spent many hours every day in prayer and study of the Bible. She was able to say from first-hand experience: “The immanent sense of Mind-power enhances the glory of Mind. Nearness, not distance, lends enchantment to this view” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 209).
We might feel we need some powerful telescope to overcome a distance between us and God—a distance created by unkind circumstances, by thoughtless people, or by some unwise decisions we ourselves made in the past. The truth is: God is nearer than we think. That perceived distance is only a mental impression, a subjective material sense, not an actual fact. There is a divine force at work that turns our thought away from this mental mistaken impression and illustrates our inseparability from divine Love. We might call this force the Christ, God’s uplifting and redeeming message of salvation that was incarnated in Jesus.
A friend of mine recently shared in a letter with me what it felt like to her to be touched and liberated by the presence of the Christ. Here is an extract from her letter:
“Two months ago, it felt as if something was really oppressing me, a great sadness and loneliness. I simply sat in my room and cried or dulled myself by watching something stupid on TV. But then I prayed, and prayer became more urgent; it became a real emergency. I really dug into exploring my spiritual identity and spent a lot of time with the seven synonyms [for God] and everything that’s connected with them. That was a moment when I was able to let go of a lot of the habit of blaming myself or even hating myself. The pressure left me, and things started to feel lighter and more loving. Besides, I realized how close God really is. He doesn’t have ten interpreters and spiritual layers between Himself and us. He really hears and sees and guides us, and He really loves us individually, just the way we love a particular child for its qualities, not generally but specifically.”
Prayer opens the windows of our consciousness to let in the light of God’s understanding—the understanding of His real nature—which brings physical and mental healing and freedom.
God knows His real being, and our spiritual sense effortlessly expresses this understanding. The understanding of our real identity is a divine faculty expressed in us. The Edward Norwood reminiscence in The Mary Baker Eddy Library has the following statement: “Mary Baker Eddy once defined Soul as ‘God’s eternal recognition of Himself as All in All.’ ”
This eternal recognition is not separated from Soul’s creation. In fact, we are one with it.
