Q: The Christian Science churches I’ve been in have the words “God is Love” on the wall. It seems so simple, yet I am having difficulty understanding what love is. What does it feel like? How do you know when you actually feel love? What kind of a feeling is it to truly love your neighbor, whom you may or may not know?
A: This reference is meant to be a comfort and a reminder that our Father-Mother’s love is all-powerful and is reaching out to us, protecting us, supplying us.
In the third volume of his biography of Mary Baker Eddy, Robert Peel writes about an early Christian Scientist who took her two children to hear Mrs. Eddy speak. At one point the mother noticed Mrs. Eddy smiling at the children and realized that she was expressing divine Mother-Love. At that moment the mother herself suddenly felt this love in a way she never had before, and she saw that it was infinite and expressed everywhere. Everything she looked at was more beautiful than ever to her. During this experience, a painful boil on the head of one of the children was completely healed. This presence of Love that she felt couldn’t entertain anything unlike itself, even a discordant physical condition (see Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, pp. 110–111).
