Embracing true sacrament

One of my first powerful healings as a young adult came about when I learned how important it is to embrace a true sense of sacrament. Back then I had never particularly liked the Bible Lesson subject of “Sacrament” in the Christian Science Quarterly. It always seemed heavy and heartbreaking to me because it usually included the crucifixion of Christ Jesus, and I felt it implied martyrdom, sacrifice, and loss. But my view changed.

As a young wife and mother with two small children, I began to experience a menstrual period that went on month after month without normal breaks in between. I wasn’t in pain, but was afraid because I knew this wasn’t right. I’d had Christian Science Primary class instruction a couple of years earlier, and was endeavoring to give myself Christian Science treatment as I had learned to do it in that class. This involved affirming the allness and omnipotence of God, Spirit, and denying that Spirit’s opposite, matter, had any power to cause diseased action. I prayed to know that blood is not the vital source of life because Life is God. But the bleeding continued. 

Then one Saturday, I asked my husband to watch the children so I could have some time to pray more deeply for myself. I also called my Christian Science teacher to pray for me. When I explained this situation to her, she asked me a startling question: “What is it that you think you are being ‘crucified’ over?” She didn’t try to answer this question for me or dive into any psychological probing about what was going on in my life, but agreed to pray for me and turned me to reading the Bible Lesson for that week on “Sacrament” to spiritualize my concept of sacrifice. 

What is really being required is letting go of a personal sense of self in favor of embracing our true spiritual selfhood in God.

I had been feeling overwhelmed by many things about marriage, home, and motherhood. It seemed that my responsibilities were never-ending and that I owed all of my time and efforts to others, with no time for myself. I guess I felt I was the one being sacrificed. My teacher’s question helped bring to light the more fundamental false claim, the mental disguise, of martyred motherhood, and it moved me away from praying in relation to the physical symptoms. It directed me to listen for God to show me that this more basic lie was not a cause at all, because God alone is the cause and creator, the Father-Mother of Her spiritual universe and every child in it. It wasn’t up to me to hold it all together. 

As I slowly studied, pondered, and prayed with the Bible Lesson on “Sacrament,” I got to a passage in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy that I had read many times before, but it suddenly sprang to life for me: “In ancient Rome a soldier was required to swear allegiance to his general. The Latin word for this oath was sacramentum, and our English word sacrament is derived from it” (p. 32). Wow! It struck me that the problem wasn’t all the demands others were making on me, it was: Where was my allegiance? I felt immediate relief as I caught a glimpse of the fact that there is actually only ever one demand on man—for full allegiance to an all-powerful God, Love—and that this alone allows us to serve others in the right way without feeling burdened and martyred. Divine Love never demands anything of us without at once supplying our ability to fulfill that demand. 

The bleeding stopped while I was reading the Lesson that morning, and soon after I was joyously making lunch for my hungry crew. 

In the years since that healing I have loved the Lesson on “Sacrament” when it comes up, twice a year, and have embraced the idea of sacrifice because I know that what is really being required is letting go of a personal sense of self in favor of embracing our true spiritual individuality in God, which includes freedom instead of martyrdom. We read again in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health: “The purification of sense and self is a proof of progress. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God’ ” (p. 324).

But even though I’ve learned to love the sacramentum opportunity to renew my oath of total allegiance to God, that doesn’t mean I don’t still have to work at this “unselfing.” The perpetual drumbeat through the five physical senses that says we are indeed material, with a personal life, a personal body, personal family members, personal problems, and personal responsibilities, hammers away at all of us. The source of this thinking is what Christ Jesus called “the strong man,” the carnal mind which has to be bound before we can be released from feeling martyred and feel the peace of recognizing the divine Mind, God, as the one and only cause. Jesus said bluntly, “No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house” (Mark 3:27).

Mrs. Eddy gives powerful instruction on this need, in relation to feeling a false sense of concern and responsibility for others, in an article called “An Allegory” from her Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 (pp. 323–327). The way I have thought about the allegory is that “a Stranger,” representing the highest altitude of thought or Christ, Truth, enters human experience much like the sun shines on everyone and everything. Christ enters every phase of the mortal sense of life, and exposes all of its intoxicating sinful allurements, and all of the mesmeric forms of disease and distress that would keep us fascinated by, and tied to, a false, personal sense of life. 

Those who are tired of these limiting pleasures and pains begin to awaken and slowly follow the leading of the Christ up to higher standpoints of thought, but often they are still trying to carry the baggage of things they think will bring them satisfaction. This not only hampers their progress but causes more suffering and confusion about why the journey seems so hard.

Some people in the allegory set their burdens down readily and so move quickly toward the summit of spiritual consciousness, but then are tempted by the egotism of being a personal “fixer,” which is different from cherishing a sincere desire to do what’s best for others. This particular passage reads, “Then he who has no baggage goes back and kindly binds up their wounds, wipes away the blood stains, and would help them on; but suddenly the Stranger shouts, ‘Let them alone; they must learn from the things they suffer. Make thine own way; and if thou strayest, listen for the mountain-horn, and it will call thee back to the path that goeth upward’ ” (pp. 327–328).

Each of us can and must do our own spiritual climbing because no one else can unself for us or make that singular oath of allegiance to God for us. And I am also finding it helps to stop wringing our hands over how hard the ascent is and honestly face the temptations that are still alluring, distressing, and thereby compelling us to cling to the baggage of self. 

As the allegory indicates, the subtlest temptation may be that of taking on others as a burden of our own in an effort to help them carry the burdens of their mortal story instead of helping them see their immortality and drop the story completely. Interestingly, it seems that when we are up against the wall of inability to do anything of our own selves, we tend to set concerns down more completely. A recent experience brought home this lesson to me.

A severe winter storm brought 18 inches of snow to my new community. I had just completed a move to a small condominium with the “earthly all” of my personal belongings stored in the basement. As I watched the snowplow pile more and more snow right behind my basement door, I became concerned about flooding. All efforts to get the condo board to intervene were in vain. Then over the next two days there were warmer temperatures and a huge deluge of rain. In the middle of the night water started pouring down the wall of the stairwell. 

I had stayed awake to monitor the situation, so I quickly began moving the stored items up as high as possible. I had towels and a shop vac (a kind of vacuum cleaner that can collect water and wet debris) to try to keep the water at bay. I was also trying to pray, but frankly I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. Finally, about three in the morning it was clear I could not hold back the water, and I needed to trust God’s care completely.

Giving up trying to be the cause of anything does not mean sacrificing anything truly good.

I went back upstairs and turned to the Bible Lesson for inspiration. It wasn’t a matter of giving up and letting the water take over; it was a prayerful surrender to giving all sense of my “earthly all” to God. I wasn’t so much praying to get God’s help in relation to this situation, but praying to feel that God was, is, and ever will be my only “situation.” 

I prayed until I felt a release from worry and a calm sense of Life as God, and then went to sleep for a couple of hours. When I checked on the basement in the morning, the towel I had rolled up to soak up water was barely damp. The water flow on the wall was tapering off and soon stopped. Within hours a fan had dried the area with no water coming near the stored items. 

It’s so powerful to recognize that the one and only cause, Father-Mother God, governs Her infinite universe. Giving up trying to be the cause of anything does not mean sacrificing anything truly good, but means finding liberation from every burden. A loved hymn sums up what I keep learning to do: 

God is All-in-all and all good, and as we embrace a true sense of sacrament we cannot help but see the limitations of human existence recede before the one infinite God.