"Our chairperson has a client and won't be here tonight. We'll have to express God without her input."

"Well, first of all isn't it great to have a client? I mean church should happen wherever we are. I know she's expressing God right there, right now."

"I'm always forgetting I could be expressing God every moment."

"I think we all do. It's the pride of priesthood that'll keep us bouncing between supposedly secular activities and those deemed spiritual. Also when I'm in my ersatz spiritual mode I'll wax greatly in spiritual talk and forgo the slightest amount of love or healing thought."

"What venues do you all have to express your godliness?"

"I don't belong to a church but I go to services Sundays and Wednesdays. I pray and give testimonies. I come to this group and also a 12-step program."

"Hey that's a lot. I just come here and occasionally to church. I go to Unity when a minister I like is due to give the sermon. I love the Christian Science chat boards and online study groups."

"Well I can't endure church services. If for some reason I have to go, I fall asleep right away. But I see myself in the constant practice of Science and engage clients and even street preachers in spiritual dialogue. I particularly like to engage young people in discussions of spirituality. I try to keep cultic language to a minimum and update Mrs. Eddy's words where possible."

"I'd like to be in the full time practice — in the sense of always seeing the divine idea of every person and activity."

"I've heard people say we should lead by example and I agree that's preferable to leading by exhortation. But as students of Christian Science we can do more. We can make it known that we'll pray, if asked, for anyone. And probably more powerful than that — we can provide our simple prayerful presence in the lives of others."

"My sister surprised me the other day by saying I'd said something a month ago that really gave her a boost. She's not a Scientist, so perhaps my remark, which I'd totally forgotten, was particularly potent to fresh ears. She'd been struggling to deal with a lot of the physical and emotional baggage surrounding our aunt's terminal illness. Others in the family weren't helping to the extent she thought they should. I said something like, 'no bad can come from good.' Plain vanilla to us but double fudge extravaganza to her."

"You never know when a simple statement of Science, arising from conviction, will heal."

"Sunday night I almost got into a dangerous situation in Harlem. It was midnight and I needed to get on a bus to go home. I asked a couple standing at a bus stop about my bus and the woman launched into a racist diatribe like, 'You dumb-ass m..f..ing whitie. Why bother us? You should just kill yourself you're so stupid.' I immediately apologized for my modest skin pigmentation and said I couldn't help my deficiencies. Perhaps she could see her way to have mercy on me. With that she and her husband both started laughing. I looked them over carefully to make sure this wasn't some kind of mental collapse and ventured a giggle or two myself. Finally we were overcome by knee-slapping hilarity and parted, when their bus arrived, as friendly fellow citizens."

"Whew! You let your light shine. Were you praying underneath the diatribe and your rejoinders?"

"I suppose — but not consciously. I was just so amazed at that woman's volcanic explosion and her husband's mousy rigidity."

"Good work. Sounds like you helped sweep away some racial tensions and loosen the couple up."

"Yeah. Think of living with all that anger. Poor woman, poor mouse."

"But he loosened up too?"

"Oh yes — if anything, more than she did."

"I had trouble finding quotes from Mrs. Eddy about man expressing God — or the synonyms. Do you suppose she avoided statements like that and favored the idea of God doing the expressing? We just let God express through and as us, if we're practicing Science."

"But then you'd effectively be expressing God, right?"

"Well yes, but it's God doing the originating — I'm just a channel or vessel. I'm interested in this point because Mrs. Eddy says the word ' in' is obsolete in Science and the tendency among religious folks is to imagine God as dwelling in us. A mortal with an indwelling God isn't Science."

"If God expresses in man the infinite idea and I'm trying to contain and control that for my personal benefit — why, I'm dealing with dynamite. A finite belief of man will have his sides blown out....."

"So just be the infinite idea which God is expressing!"

"I see it as a balancing act. Yes, I'm infinite eternal idea — but I also have to manage the human belief of myself and others. And Christian Science and presumably other spiritual practices help us do that. Isn't my main job as a Christian Scientist to understand the divine idea of whatever the material senses behold? If I can do that, I'll see we're all expressing God all the time and disharmonies will be resolved."

"The branch church I attend has been so supportive since I came out as Gay in a testimony a week ago. I told of my paranoia around living in this country with all the religious hate speech rampant. The readings yesterday included Daniel in the lion's den. Then a man gave a testimony about being tormented as a kid by gangs of boys at school."

"Was he Gay?"

"I don't think so, but I'm not sure. Anyway, he was a Christian Scientist and decided to go to a practitioner about the problem. They prayed and in two days the whole picture turned around. He actually went on to become good friends with some of the boys in the gangs."

"I wish I'd had Science as a teenager to handle all the beatings and verbal abuse."

"I didn't get to thank the testifier after the meeting but the main point I took away from his testimony was that I can now heal both the pain of my teen years and the homophobia currently claiming to inhabit religious people and others."

"How would you heal the homophobia infecting religious people?"

"What occurs to me is stick with the definition of Church in the Glossary of Science and Health. It applies to fundamentalists too! Truth, Love, Principle can only produce good. Let's expect to see it. Truth, Love, Principle are motivating all thought and action."

"That's true now and it was true when we were teenagers."

"There was a lot in the news this week about embryonic stem cells. As I heard more and more about them I became a bit queasy whether experimentation on them involved the destruction of life."

"What do you think?"

"Jerry Springer on Air America helped me see that experimenting on embryos that would otherwise be thrown out was like the dying donating their organs. It could save lives — per current medical beliefs anyway."

"Also I understand all this business about adopting an embryo and raising it has the original donors antsy — having their offspring running around as someone else's child."

"Poor donors. If my biological child isn't raised and molded by me, then let them die."

"Well, what opened up to me metaphysically was a phrase from Science and Health: 'where the young child was.' Mrs. Eddy is quoting Matthew about the Wise Men being led by the star to where the baby Jesus lay (see readings). Here's the quote from Science and Health: 'As a material, theoretical life-basis is found to be a misapprehension of existence, the spiritual and divine Principle of man dawns upon human thought, and leads it to "where the young child was," —even to the birth of a new-old idea, to the spiritual sense of being and of what Life includes. Thus the whole earth will be transformed by Truth on its pinions of light, chasing away the darkness of error.' (pg. 191:8) I see this as inviting us to tap into or retreat to our pre-existent divinity in order to regenerate, transform and renew human concepts. This is much more powerful than any material tinkering with embryos."

"And by the way, it's available now. Embryonic medicine is way in the future and probably in some other country, like Korea."

"I think the parable of Christ as the vine and mankind as the branches would apply here too (see readings from John). As long as we center ourselves in Truth, our primal existence, our whole being is renewed."

"Expressing God made me think of our infinite or quantum individuality. Each of us in reality extends infinitely and eternally. Every day we get to see and incorporate more. Instant communication and rapid travel hint at our infinity."

"So do terrorism and epidemics."

"And identity theft."

"We skidded downhill fast on that one. But I have to agree — anything's possible as belief expands to mimic the facts of being."

"So let's take the dualism out of the picture and leave all as the idea of God, held in the gospel of Love. Every person, animal, plant and mineral is a divine idea. None of us is a dualistic belief. We're infinite, eternal, interpenetrative."

"Oh today on the Christian Science chat boards there was a discussion of Chinese stenchpots. Mrs. Eddy mentions them in a passage in Unity of Good (see readings)."

"Well, of course we'd never say something like that today. It breaks the rules of getting along in a pluralistic society. In short it's a sin! What are they anyway?"

"Aren't they some kind of medical contraption like the inhalers we had to deal with as children?"

"They could be potties for excrement — or spittoons."

"Is this our topic for next week?"

"Hold on — we still have a couple of minutes."

"I think it's great we have this quote from Mrs Eddy. Picking on an ethnic group was no sin in her day, but it most certainly is today. This shows the evolution of morality!"

"Now we need a topic."

"Well if no one cares for stenchpots, remember last week we had the idea of a series of challenges."

"Should we continue that?"

"I have a topic I'm interested in. There's an article in Miscellaneous Writings titled 'One Cause and Effect'. It runs from page 21 to page 30. I'd like to see us study it and apply its ideas in our daily rounds."

"It sounds pretty absolute, but I'll give it a try."

"I know the article and like it a lot. It'll fit in with study for my Association which is coming up soon."

"So our topic would be the title of the article?"

"Yes."

"It'll have to be for two weeks. Our webmaster's away till June 11th."

"Okay. Let's do it."