Music on the island

As a child, I struggled with homesickness at various times. This went on for years. Then, in my teens, on an eighth-grade school camping trip, we traveled to an uninhabited island where there were no phones. One evening, I suddenly became ill. I left the group and went back to the tent. I would have liked to be comforted by my family and call a Christian Science practitioner, but on the island that wasn’t possible.

So I relied on what I had been taught in the Christian Science Sunday School I attended, and prayed to feel God’s presence. I remembered the Lord’s Prayer, given to us by Christ Jesus, and its spiritual sense given in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. On page 16 of her book it says, 

“Our Father which art in heaven,
Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious.”

As I slowly pondered the lines of this prayer, I heard beautiful music and assumed that the group was playing music around the campfire. I also felt a wonderful peace and love surrounding me as I fell asleep. 

When my tentmates returned to our tent, I woke up completely well. I also found out that there had been no music around the campfire that night or anywhere else on the island. What I had heard had actually been in my thought! I was so conscious of harmony, and this came to me as music. This experience showed me that God, divine Love, is palpable and is always with us. 

The additional blessing was that I was completely healed of homesickness. I realized that I had often missed or wanted the love and comfort of other people, rather than recognizing the impersonal, yet tender and specific, perfect love of God, unlimited divine Principle, which is everywhere, and had cast out the fear of homesickness. Science and Health tells us, “The Apostle John says: ‘There is no fear in Love, but perfect Love casteth out fear. . . . He that feareth is not made perfect in Love.’ Here is a definite and inspired proclamation of Christian Science” (p. 410).

I went on to travel all over the world, making my home in far-off countries, sometimes for years at a time. It even seems funny to look back now and think that I had ever experienced a fear of being away from familiar surroundings. 

I caught a glimpse that night on the island of the perfect love of Love that is so beautifully described in this verse from a comforting hymn: 

For God, immortal Principle, 
Is with us everywhere; 
He holds us perfect in His love, 
And we His image bear.
(H., Christian Science Hymnal,
No. 144, adapt. © CSBD)