This audio lecture was a conversation between Chet Manchester, Co-Manager of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship, and Barbara Vining, a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science who lives in Toledo, Ohio. Barbara has also been a Christian Science lecturer.
Tell me a bit about the inspiration behind the idea, To progress, let God lead.
When I work with patients, I often find that they’re so concerned about how they’re doing things that I don’t hear them mention much about God. In the second volume of We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, in William Rathvon’s reminiscences, I ran across this statement, which Mrs. Eddy made to the household: “I am different from other mortals in many respects, one of them being that I more frequently get out of God’s way” (p. 531).
I think that’s so great, because you have to let God lead. Is God leading our thought? Is love for God leading your thought? I’ll often ask someone, “Are you wanting to put your love for God ahead of everything?” “I’m not sure I know how to do that,” they may say. And so, I’ve been sharing—and nurturing in myself—a sense of loving God in an active way. It’s easy to say, “Oh, I love God,” but to actively be loving God, how do we do that?
It was so deeply a part of all the biblical figures. They had their relationship to God.
Communion with God—it’s ongoing—it’s a constant. Mary Baker Eddy had it all the time, and it’s why she was able to heal the way she did, because God and loving God was everything to her. One thing that I’ve been living with recently is in Mrs. Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “To ascertain our progress, we must learn where our affections are placed and whom we acknowledge and obey as God. If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit. The objects we pursue and the spirit we manifest reveal our standpoint, and show what we are winning” (p. 239).
There are three basic sentences in this paragraph, but the middle sentence is the one that I’ve thought of most often: “If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit.” To me, that is shifting thought from concern about a physical or a relationship problem, or the progress of the church, or whatever, to “Is divine Love becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us?” Then matter is going to submit because human consciousness is yielding to God—to the love of God. People who have been studying Christian Science for a long time have read that many times, but it’s wonderful to cherish it. What does it mean, for example, to see where our affections are placed?
Whom do we love? What do we love?
We say we love God, but is God at the front of the line? As Jesus said—and this embraces the whole thought, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). So, putting God first is something we need to be working with mentally, daily, and bring it down to size, so it’s not “such a big thing.” Just today, is going to a movie this evening more important to me than loving God? Can I combine the two? Can I go to the movie to glorify God, and how would I do that? By looking for the goodness in the message, even if it’s a movie with a lot of crash/bang.
What is my object in what I’m going to do today? Is it to glorify God?
But just being conscious of God, and not getting in God’s way as Mrs. Eddy was talking about, by quieting all the “what if this?” and “what if that?” and “what’s happening here?” Just quiet our thought and cherish that sense of being aware of the spiritual ideas, simple things, in everyday life. One thing I shared with a patient not too long ago was, “Well, maybe you can do something simple. If we love God, we’re loving man. And so, nurture little ways of seeing where our affections are placed, and what we’re thinking of as God.
Barbara, how does that work out in your everyday life, waking up and just loving God, being conscious of God first thing?
It’s something you have to nurture all the time, but one of the things I love is when I wake up thinking, “This is the day to prove that God is the only power, and the only presence,” and then look for opportunities to do that. The last sentence in that paragraph is interesting. It says, “The objects we pursue and the spirit we manifest reveal our standpoint, and show what we are winning.” What we are winning! What about the objects we pursue? When we read that, we often think of material objects, but I’m thinking more in terms of objectives.
What is my object in what I’m going to do today? Is it to glorify God? Is it to look for goodness in someone who’s expressing impatience? Am I doing it with a genuine sense of unconditional love? These are not things that you can just say, “Well, I’ve reached that point,” or “I haven’t reached that point.” They’re things you nurture every day, and treasure, and so I keep going back to these ideas that Mrs. Eddy has given us and strive to learn more from them.
I love what you pointed out about Mary Baker Eddy’s getting out of God’s way. She had a lively sense of God’s presence and of her relationship to God, so I hear you saying we need to love God actively. Not that we’re just applying God to our everyday lives in a mechanical way.
One of the people who took class from Mrs. Eddy said that the first words she heard out of Mrs. Eddy’s mouth were when they were saying the Lord’s Prayer, and she said, “Our dear Father,” instead of just “Our Father.” “Our dear Father,” which showed her constant relationship and communication with God—that He’s a living being (C. Lulu Blackman, We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, Vol. 1, p. 133).
Was there a time in your practice, or in your experience as a Christian Scientist, where you tangibly felt God’s presence in a deeper way?
It really came before I was a Christian Scientist. The church that I was raised in was always open so that people could go in and pray. I was troubled as a teenager about something one day. I went into the sanctuary—there was a sense of holiness, of reverence there. I felt God’s presence. God seemed very real to me. That’s always stayed with me, but I really searched for an understanding of God, because while I felt this reverence, I wasn’t really sure what God was, or what He was all about. That’s what led me to explore Christian Science.
Through the synonyms for God, and the qualities of God, and so forth, and then taking Primary class instruction, God became very real to me. I think that as we continue to progress in our study and practice of Christian Science, it can become less of the spirit and more of the letter if we don’t watch for that. Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health, “God expresses in man the infinite idea forever developing itself, …” (p. 258).
That development—really feeling it in the everyday things, and through the practice, too—is so helpful to break people free of their mesmerized sense of what the problem is, and how they can pray about it. To just step back and cultivate that sense of being still and knowing that God is here. Just nurture that love for God, to encourage them in that. Sometimes they’ll call back and say, “All of that worry, and all of that stress just drained out of me when I started thinking about actively loving God.”
In a recent article you said we’re familiar in Christian Science with argument—mental argument—that you’ll argue on behalf of the spiritual facts. You’ll go over the truth, and you’ll deny the false evidence, or the errors of thinking, but you said that ultimately, it isn’t the argument that heals. [See “Understand, be firm, and yield!” July 2013, The Christian Science Journal.]
No, it isn’t. Mrs. Eddy said she didn’t do that, but she found it was the only way to help people rise to the level of an awareness of God, and a yielding to God, because it isn’t the human mind that heals. It never was, and it never will be, but we do need to bring our thought into that awareness of God, that He’s the living, moving, presence and power, and that there is none other. He has no opposition, and when we get to that point, we just can let the argument go. Sometimes people just keep on and on with the argument, and I ask them, “What you’re saying is wonderful, but have you ever thought about just stopping and thinking about what it is you’re arguing for?”
We do need to bring our thought into that awareness of God, that He’s the living, moving, presence and power, and that there is none other.
The other day I was saying to someone, “What if you had a friend who was the epitome of integrity, of love, everything beautiful in human character, and all of a sudden there were all kinds of lies being circulated about this individual. What would you do?” And the first response was, “Well, I wouldn’t believe it because I know that person.” And I said, “Well, what else might you do? Would you stand up for that person, and bring out the truth? That’s what we need to be doing mentally with God, because God has a very bad reputation among humankind.”
All kinds of lies are circulating about God, His creation, His care of people, and so forth. We need to mentally be standing up for Truth. And so, instead of arguing to have this healing, or to correct this circumstance, or whatever, you’re just standing up for Truth and improving God’s reputation among humankind. And when you do that mentally, and when you feel the release of all that worry and all that fear, that’s when healing takes place. And others feel it, too.
Say you’re in a family, and you’re the only Christian Scientist. Your friends aren’t Christian Scientists, and you live in a community where there’s not much in the way of Christian Science. You can feel so alone until you realize that you don’t have to talk everybody into being a Christian Scientist. You can share with them as you feel guided, but if you just live that love, it’s felt—it’s not only felt, mentally; it brings healing. Sometimes, people can be very surprised and say, “What did you do?”
You’ve mentioned the words Christian Science quite a bit so far, and I just want to pause for a minute and ask what that means to you—Christian Science?
I have an office in downtown Toledo. It has a glass door to the reception area, and I have my name lettered on the front of it and I put on it, “Practitioner of Christian Science Healing,” instead of “Christian Science Practitioner,” because when I think of Christian Science, I think of the law of God that Jesus practiced, but if people read “Christian Science Practitioner,” they’re going to think more in terms of a denomination. It’s true, Mrs. Eddy founded a church, but she didn’t discover a church. She discovered Christian Science, the divine laws of God that Jesus practiced.
When people are on my floor, which has an office that handles bankruptcy claims on it, they will sometimes wander around and they’ll see my door. They’ll knock or come in, and they’ll ask me, “I know what Christian is. I’m interested in healing, but what is this Science?” I just say, “It’s the laws of God that Jesus practiced and that are given to us in the Bible, and I’ve learned how to understand them.”
Sometimes, I’ll share the textbook with them and tell them that for over 50 years I’ve been reading this book which helps me understand these laws that are in the Bible, and I haven’t had to have any medical attention for all those years. I haven’t taken a pill. They look at me, and say, “Oh my goodness!” And I say, “You’re welcome to take one of these books if you’d like.” They never say no. Yes, it’s just the laws of God. There’s nothing mysterious about it, but they’re understood through the textbook.
And that textbook is Science and Health. That’s Mary Baker Eddy’s primary text, which you mentioned earlier.
Exactly. Christian Science wasn’t a human invention. A lot of people throughout the centuries have been healed through prayer, but Mrs. Eddy wasn’t satisfied with just saying, “I was healed, and I know it was through prayer.” It means so much to me that she spent three years right after her initial healing, where she pondered those laws and felt the Bible really was the living Word of God, and it was speaking to her. And so, it is something that can be proved.
There isn’t a single problem, no matter how long it’s gone on, or what the nature of it is, that can’t be corrected by understanding the laws of God.
Anyone who is open to understanding these laws is open to them being proved in their experience, and that’s what I found right away when I started studying Science and Health, and it’s never stopped. It’s lifetime learning because the infinite laws of God are always new. Something I’ve liked to compare it to is the laws of mathematics. They’re established. They’ve always been there, so they can’t be contested. They only have to be understood and put into practice. And how those math laws can be used in working out solutions is unlimited. The laws of music also exist—they’ve always been there. They’re always going to be there. No one is ever going to say, “I’m sorry, there can’t be any new musical compositions. They’ve all been used up.”
The laws of God are like that. There isn’t a single problem, no matter how long it’s gone on, or what the nature of it is, that can’t be corrected by understanding the laws of God. Whatever is inharmonious, destructive, or limited is simply a lack of understanding.
Something that Mary Baker Eddy talks about a lot, and is taught through the Christian Science Bible Lesson, is handling animal magnetism. For instance, we have the Bible Lesson, “Ancient and Modern Necromancy, alias Mesmerism and Hypnotism, Denounced,” and I like my title of it a little better—“How Not to be Fooled.” Animal magnetism is being fooled into believing in some discord, some physical evidence, some sense of limitation, and we’re mesmerized by it—we’re drawn to it like a magnet in our thinking—and we just can’t break free from it.
In Mary Baker Eddy’s time, animal magnetism was a term that was commonly known and used. It referred to a kind of hypnotism, and she began to see that evil itself was really a suggestion.
So how do we resist that? Well, gold is not magnetic. The gold of human character is the God-likeness that God creates in His children. We cherish that, in a simple way, like the love of God, the love of what He creates, the love that loves God too much to let our thought be pulled toward that which is not in accord with His goodness and His love. Sometimes, people think animal magnetism is a very fearful thing and is surrounding us all the time. It seems so big, but it’s just a lot of zeros that add up to zero!
The remedy is to understand that there really is only one Mind, and that’s God, and it’s good, and loving, and unconditional in its love. That means I don’t have to handle anybody’s thought but my own, and bring it into accord with the love of God.
Having daily communion with God, loving God, letting Him lead our thought, nurturing that idea so that God is a living presence to us. Science and Health tells us, “At all times and under all circumstances, overcome evil with good” (p. 571). Sometimes we think, “all times, and all circumstances, overcome evil,” and we think we have to overcome evil, like it’s some big reality, but she says, “overcome evil with good.” So let good be dominant in our thought, realize that God is good—not just a good God, but God is good itself.
Let good be dominant in our thought, realize that God is good—not just a good God, but God is good itself.
Whatever the challenge seems to be, quiet your thought—remember God. Let God tell you the truth. Now, we could think, “OK, I don’t know if I know all that truth,” but we really include every idea that the divine Mind is expressing because we are “the compound idea of God, including all right ideas,” as Mrs. Eddy states on page 475 in Science and Health in the answer to “What is man?” When I feel challenged by something, I quiet my thought and say, “OK, I don’t right now know the answer, but as the spiritual idea of God, there’s nothing I can’t know the truth about. The all-knowing God is going to reveal it to me.” Pretty soon, an answer comes you just never thought of before, and you just say, “Thank you, God!”
It had to be God; it didn’t come from your own head.
Right, and she also says “Know thyself, and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil” (Science and Health, p. 571). Sometimes you think of your human personality and think, “I don’t know that I want to know myself.” What Mrs. Eddy is really saying is, “Know who you really are. Start with your real identity—start with what God is revealing of you.”
God knows us only as His reflection, and so, like a lake on a quiet night when there’s no breeze at all, it’s just like glass and reflects all the beauty around it. We need to let our thought get quiet like that. Then we know ourselves as God’s reflection. She also says, “Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you” (Science and Health, p. 571). Just know that you’re clad in Love, not human love—not my love—but the love of God that we reflect.
Also on that page she says, “The cement of a higher humanity will unite all interests in the one divinity.” That’s really what the progress of Christian Science is all about—people getting to understand what God is, because when they understand what God truly is, they won’t have any resistance to Christian Science.
And so, the “cement of a higher humanity” is that reflection of Love in whatever relationship you have. Say you have a physical problem you’re working on, and it’s visible to other people. If you’re really concerned about what other people think, they’ll pick up on that really quickly. But if you have this quiet sense within yourself of God’s presence and power, that can be a real encouragement to them that you have confidence that this will be met, and it quiets their resistance. That’s an important part of loving God.
Why do Christian Scientists rely exclusively on prayer, or not generally turn to medical means? What’s the point?
I like to, first of all, make clear that the Church, when you become a member of it, is not dictating what you can and cannot do. The Church is never saying, “You can’t take medicine and be a Christian Scientist or a member of this Church.” That’s not at all the case—it’s up to the individual. So, why do I make that choice?
Because I’ve never had to make any other! It’s met my needs. That doesn’t mean that every healing I’ve ever had, every problem I’ve ever had to work out, has been instant. That it’s effortless. But I know that if “divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real” to me, my thought is becoming more and more aware of God’s allness, that He doesn’t allow evil to exist. That can seem like a strange thing to say to people who aren’t familiar with Science, but it’s like light does not allow darkness. Where there is light, there is no darkness.
And the nature of God is pure light, pure Love.
So even if a challenge seems difficult, we have to be persistent, shifting thought to being more concerned about loving God. There’s a hymn that ends, “Henceforth, my great concern shall be to love and praise Thee more” (John Ryland, Christian Science Hymnal, No. 224). I find that so helpful because it shifts thought away from concern about the problem, and to loving God more, to living these words from Mrs. Eddy, “If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit” (Science and Health, p. 239).
It’s happening! You don’t have to look at matter, or look at whatever the problem is, to see that. If your thought is becoming nearer to God, if God is becoming more real to you, error is becoming less of a concern, less real, until it just disappears from thought entirely. You forget there was a problem, and then somewhere along the line you say, “Oh my goodness! I forgot all about that,” and it’s been healed.
So, in answer to that question, “Why do we turn to prayer for healing?” we can ask, “What’s our objective?” For a Christian Scientist, isn’t the objective to know and love God more deeply, and hasn’t experience borne out that disease in any aspect is always mental? It’s never physical.
That’s right. I think of it as working out my salvation with the Christ, Truth, that Jesus practiced, to become more Godlike. It’s not just to be a better person, though that’s a big part of it. It is the love of God shining through. It makes life a lot more pleasant. It’s what makes life worth living.
It’s working it out with God rather than just getting a temporary fix that might have the possibility of side effects that aren’t very pleasant. The only side effects of Christian Science I’ve ever found are in improved character, more peace of mind, more harmony in my relationships, and so forth.
There’s so much benefit from it, beyond just solving a problem. It’s not something I’d ever want to be without. I’ve heard people say, “I don’t know how I’d live without Christian Science,” because it’s meant so much to them.
Barbara, you said, too, that the progress of Christian Science in the world today is measured, maybe not by the size of the churches, but by the advancement of humanity’s thought, in terms of a better understanding of God. From that perspective, we can see that there is a lot of progress going on. I mean, if you look at where the definitions of God were a century ago, and where they are today …
In all the fields, in theology and medicine, we see so much emphasis on materiality, material medicines, corrective surgery, and all those kinds of things, but nevertheless, there is this current of thought, of seeing more of the mental aspect of healing.
When I was living in Minnesota, many years ago, the Christian Science Committee on Publication, who works with the media on the correct understanding of Christian Science, came to speak to our branch church. He said, “We think we have two services at our church each week, one on Sunday, and one on Wednesday, but I think we have one in two parts. Sunday is a presentation of the laws of God, the absolute truth about God and man, and the nothingness of evil, and on Wednesday, that’s the demonstration. People are giving their testimonies of healing, how they’ve put this law into practice.”
So, you can’t say, “Well, I go to church on Sunday, but I don’t go on Wednesday.” It has to do with what Christian Science is all about. It’s not just telling what the truth of God is—it’s demonstrating it. I was reading in one of our periodicals where somebody used the expression, “I love learning about God,” and I thought to myself, “I love learning from God.”
If your thought is becoming nearer to God, if God is becoming more real to you, error is becoming less of a concern.
That’s part of being in communion with God and knowing that He’s speaking directly to us, giving us ideas. It’s not so much, “I’ve got to be reading the Bible and Science and Health and periodicals all the time.” We’re grateful for them—but do we have to be reading them all the time, memorizing quotations? We can just say, “I love this. This is God speaking to me. He’s giving me new understanding as I read this, and it’ll be with me as I go about my day.”
Ideas come that we never thought about before. I’ve had it happen many times. I’ll be on the phone with somebody, and they’ll be telling me about their difficulties, what they need me to pray about, and I’m mentally saying, “God, I need an answer.” I generally don’t talk a long time to patients because I know it’s the Word of God that I’m praying with that heals them, but you want to respond in a loving way that’ll help to relieve their fears. I’ll find myself saying something, and I’ll get off the phone and I think, “Thank you, God! I’ve never thought of that before.”
It’s just such a wonderful, daily communion. And in regard to the progress of the Church, too, in the same way that we can become mesmerized by our human personal problems, we could look at how many people are coming to church. “Fifty years ago, this church had all these numbers of people, and now it has just these few.” There’s nothing relevant about those numbers. They don’t say anything about how the leaven of truth is working in human consciousness.
In Africa, maybe there are larger congregations, more people coming to lectures, and all that sort of thing. Does that mean there’s been a shift of Christian Science to other countries and away from the United States? If you look at all that human evidence, you can become confused and worried about the Christian Science movement, but Mrs. Eddy was so wise to talk about not measuring things by numbers.
For instance, at our Wednesday church service, there was a testimony where an individual was facing things going wrong with their home—water coming through the roof and through the shower area, and all kinds of things. How to respond to it? Another one is settling an estate of a loved one and asking, “How am I going to do this?”
Both of them had this quiet sense: “OK, let’s stop all this worry, and what if’s, and just quiet thought, and let these ideas come. God will show me which steps to take and when to take them. It’s going to get taken care of.” And I thought, “That’s the leaven of Truth; that’s the living Christ talking to human consciousness.” Now, when those individuals are out in the community, it’s felt. You just can’t measure that by looking at outward signs. But it does appear in healing, as it did for them.
It doesn’t make any difference how many members belonged to a church 20 years ago. All that matters is, “What are we doing with what we have today?” I think Mrs. Eddy said in one place that church was just a matter of doing things by working together [see Clifford P. Smith, “An Interview with Mrs. Eddy,” in “Permanency of The Mother Church and its Manual,” The Christian Science Publishing Society]. And so, if we just have a few, and we’re cherishing our community, we’re loving God, we’re endeavoring to live this truth, we’re finding ways to present Christian Science when the opportunity occurs, whether it’s sponsoring the Sentinel Radio program that is still available for broadcast, or giving a lecture. We gave a lecture a couple of weeks ago on human relationships and love. A person who has a media blog on things that are going on in the community came, and she wrote the most beautiful article about how her misconceptions of Christian Science were blown away, and how she loved what she was learning. This is the leaven at work.
I love, Barbara, how you said, maybe just kind of bringing this full circle, that early on, we really measure progress with ourselves.
In our hearts.
And could we say that the progress that we’re measuring comes down to this deepening love for God?
It does.
Am I loving God more, am I feeling more of God’s love for me? Is a part of that love the measure of progress, the love that turns us outward?
It definitely is. That’s the love that caused Mrs. Eddy not to be satisfied just with her own healing, but to explore and understand the laws of God the Bible was communicating to her, so that she could give them to the world. So, the progress of Christian Science isn’t just in what’s happening in our churches. Mrs. Eddy didn’t envision every church becoming a Christian Science church. She envisioned all of humanity finding freedom from the enslaving beliefs of the material senses that deny the truth of God and that bring sin and disease. She knew what she had discovered.
I’ve been thinking, for instance, about Jesus’ ministry. First, Jesus was humble enough to go and be baptized by John, and then he heard those words, “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). And essentially, that is the message that God is saying to each of us: “You are My beloved son (or daughter) in whom I am well pleased.” After that, Jesus went into the temptations, and he overcame them by standing firm with his love of God, his honoring of God, his refusal to bow down to the temptation to get something material, to glorify himself, and so forth. But he told Satan—the lies and false beliefs— to just “Get thee hence; I’m worshipping God” (see Matthew 4:10).
I thought to myself, “I love learning from God.”
That was not the end of it—that was the beginning of his ministry. So with each one of us, I don’t think you really can progress in Christian Science unless you begin to think of yourself as being “in the ministry”; in other words, caring about the whole world. If you’re just trying to solve your own little problems, you’re not going to get very far.
But if you think, I’m here to demonstrate the universal law of God, not to prove for someone that Christian Science heals, but just to glorify God, because I want this available to all humanity. It’s much more holy (let’s put it that way) to be working out a problem through knowing that you’re demonstrating the universal law of God. This disease or this inharmony is untrue because God is Love. He is All-in-all, universal Truth. It’s true for everyone, and, therefore, it’s true for me.
And that’s a ministry! And so, in your family, or when you’re out with the community, and so forth, you’re not just trying to go with blinders on and think, “I don’t want to see or to hear that problem,” or “I want to be sure I can keep my holy purpose, my own oneness with God.” It’s just loving God, good. Wherever error presents itself—whether it’s something somebody says, or it’s something you observe—say right there, “I’m going to see that good is right there because God is right there. He’s the center and circumference of being.” That doesn’t leave any room for anything besides God.
At the end of the day, we might say, “Oh, I didn’t do that very well.” It’s a learning process—the more we cherish it, the more we succeed at it, and we’re not doing it for our own glory. We’re not doing it just for ourselves or our church, but for humanity. This ministry is something that each one of us should be cherishing, and then we don’t take on the stress of what other people are thinking, and what we see in the world. We are there to reflect God’s goodness.
In many ways, you could say that every problem we may be facing is an attempt to turn us inward and to make us think small about life, think small about God.
That’s right.
And what I’ve been hearing you say is, Let’s keep turning to this infinite God, loving God more, refusing to turn inward.
That’s true, right, exactly. Jesus said we should love God with all our heart (see Matthew 22:37). That means even when we love another person, we love them as God’s child, so we’re loving God with all our heart. And of course, the accompaniment of that is we’re loving our neighbor as ourselves.
Mrs. Eddy envisioned all of humanity finding freedom from the enslaving beliefs of the material senses.
People sometimes say, “But I really don’t love myself, so how am I supposed to love my neighbor as myself?” I say, “Well, if you’re loving God with all your heart, you’re being what God made you to be. You’re being the expression of Love, of divine Love. Now, what’s not to love about that?” So, if you want to feel good about yourself, and you want to really feel loved, love God.
Be that expression.
Love the goodness in your neighbor, love the goodness in somebody who seems totally unlovable. See that there really is love there, and if they knew it—who they really were—they would also be only expressing Love. And that has to be the ministry—because if it’s just loving Christian Science because it’s nice to think about, that isn’t going to be enough.
Make your life a ministry of love, and it might develop into the public healing practice. It might not, but if you’re in a professional business, or in a very menial job, it doesn’t make any difference; you’re going to be in contact with people, one way or another. Even if you’re in a job where you’re not actually working with people, you can do it for the benefit of others, and that’s love. And so, it’s how you’re thinking of it—that’s your objective, the object you pursue and the spirit of Love that you manifest.
That brings us right back to your theme, To progress, let God lead.
Yes.
Let Love lead.
In William Rathvon’s reminiscence of We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, on page 549, he quotes her as saying, “The Cause is not dependent on man or woman, and God will take care of it.” I like that because it doesn’t mean in any way that we don’t have anything to do with it, but let God lead. If we think, “I have to do this,” or “We have to do this,” “If our church members would only do this,” or “If my family would only do that”—it’s not dependent upon that. It’s upon God leading my thought, and embracing the church and embracing humanity. That’s progress, and when you put the leaven in the loaf, you’re never going to get it out again. Christian Science has been planted in human consciousness. It’s doing its work.
