A close family member passed away quite suddenly over a year ago. It was completely unexpected, and it left us baffled and disbelieving.
After receiving the phone call, I didn’t know what else to do but open my copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. My teary eyes landed on these two sentences: “Is man lost spiritually? No, he can only lose a sense material” (p. 311). In those moments of tremendous loss, that was about all I could hang on to. Striving to make sense of the situation, I kept repeating to myself that man “can only lose a sense material.”
We can’t truly lose anything—or anyone. Mrs. Eddy explains in her writings that the source of life is Spirit, not matter. All of the happiness, intelligence, comfort, and love we each express are completely independent of the material world. As we realize and acknowledge this fact, we find that we have all we need. The only thing we can ever lose is the burdensome misunderstanding that we exist in matter—our “sense material.”
