Honoring Where We're At

December 10, 1998

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

Psalms

Last week, some members suggested our topic based on their own Odyssey of attempts to secure understanding and help in Christian Science and finding instead torrents of platitudes and little real engagement. They felt preached at with, as Mary Baker Eddy puts it, "hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love." (Science and Health, pg. 367:6-9)

Others in the Group hastened to add that Christian Science needs to be practiced from the standpoint of perfection.  ("Unless you fully perceive that you are the child of God, hence perfect, you have no Principle to demonstrate and no rule for its demonstration," Miscellany, pg. 242:8-10). One member quoted a practitioner who said to a patient who had gone on and on about his problem, "If you convince me, I won't be able to help you!"

As we thought and prayed over our topic during the week some startlingly appropriate conclusions and demonstrations emerged and we shared them at our meeting:

  • One member, who has felt great abuse not only from Christian Scientists but also from other friends and helpers, asked, "Why can't a practitioner let you state your problem, describe the feelings and say something like 'I hear what you're saying. I know it feels very dark for you right now but I'm here to pray with you to see through this difficulty' ?"
  • Another, one of our "absolutists" last week, initially approached the topic by asking the question "Adam where are you?" He could appreciate the duality of the "Where" that we were honoring — a Christian Scientist could see the blossom shining through the bud of belief.  As the week wore on he came to value human beliefs in a new and vibrant way — whether so-called pleasant or unpleasant, each is a fantasy about reality based on a suspension of disbelief. For instance, as he walked to church, a bit on the late side and not at all honoring where he was at, he reached out for the Truth about this action and the fact shone through that Truth and Love declare the oneness and allness of I, Us. He walked along living this light — or more properly being lived by it — and found himself fully engaged in being church.
  • Another member had breakthroughs on two career fronts (one in his historical employment area, the other in newly reactivated arts interests) both of which involve appearances in front of large audiences. He saw clearly the here-ness and now-ness of Truth, that he is the full reflection thereof and consequently does not need a lot of cramming and practice, but can just go out there and do what's called for as reflection. (He pointed out that he's done much of this in the past; so he is quite proficient at what he does.) He has never felt so free about career engagements — it's like the "zone" that some athletes and performers talk of, but it should be an everyday practice for students of Christian Science, thinking and acting out from divinity.
  • Another member found himself suffering from a very painful back problem during the week. He was hardly able to move for two days. On the third morning, as he lay helpless in bed, he became furious about his seeming inability to demonstrate Christian Science. But something opened in his thought and he declared with conviction, "God goes before me." Without delay he swung his legs to the floor, got up and was totally free. The problem tried to come back several times during the day but each time he put it down firmly with a few moment's realization of his spiritual nature.
  • A member has tried for years to get appropriate help with paperwork and organization and the emotional bars seemingly standing in the way. This week the thought came that this need was as legitimate as the need for food and shelter; it is not a sin to pursue the answer to a need, based on the Bible stories about just this kind of thing. (See for instance the interaction of Elisha and the Shunamite woman and her son at II Kings 4 18-37.) The need was met this week through the arrival of an empathic helper, from sources previously untapped.
  • A member at a 12-step meeting, having heard of people beating themselves up over needing to do this or drop that or improve something else, stated in the final "affirmation period", "I'm perfectly OK just as I am." Those at our meeting marveled at the levels this could be lived at. Yes, I'm OK just as I seem to be based on my complex of human beliefs. And I'm certainly OK — infinite, eternal, unique and perfect — as I AM.
  • Two of our members, devotees of depth psychology, helped each other with observations of how events in their lives re-enact early developmental incompletions which can be handled now with Science. But it seemed important that the true human picture is accessed and felt, or honored — given its due import to enable us to take it thence to the divine. One described to the other how he wanted to cling to the physical therapist after an injury; how much sadness he felt upon their separation — but accompanied by a gathering enthusiasm for life independent of this engagement. Based on his understanding of developmental psychology, he spotted the work left undone in childhood now screaming for completion and through the Science of Father- Mother- Son as one Being, he saw his way on to completion. He could then render help to the other member who is stuck with similar blocks, albeit at a different stage.
  • A member brought in this quote from Clarence Steves' Association Address of 1952 on the Scientific Statement Of Being, "If your study is difficult, it must be because you are trying to understand Christian Science from the standpoint of personal sense....let us go into the closet and shut the door on the satanic suggestion that we are persons trying to understand our divinity. The more we know that we do not go anywhere to find our sonship, makes the books more available, makes them better understood. We study spontaneously. Man is the spontaneity of being."
This next week we'll look at Criticizing the Church. We don't disfavor constructive criticism, but we want to heal some of the destructive feelings we have about church, not only ours but all religions. We've just put a link on our site to all the destructive criticism various religious organizations are pushing about Gay people, so we've much correct seeing to accomplish. One thought, borrowing from this week, "Church, where are you?" Some dualistic groups of people with personal thoughts or the Structure of Truth and Love?

The Bible

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:

And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy

Born of a woman, Jesus' advent in the flesh partook partly of Mary's earthly condition, although he was endowed with the Christ, the divine Spirit, without measure. This accounts for his struggles in Gethsemane and on Calvary, and this enabled him to be the mediator, or ^way-shower^, between God and men. Had his origin and birth been wholly apart from mortal usage, Jesus would not have been appreciable to mortal mind as "the way."

Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress. The age seems ready to approach this subject, to ponder somewhat the supremacy of Spirit, and at least to touch the hem

Evidence drawn from the five physical senses relates solely to human reason; and because of opacity to the true light, human reason dimly reflects and feebly transmits Jesus' works and words. Truth is a revelation.

Jesus bade his disciples beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees, which he defined as human doctrines. His parable of the "leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened," impels the inference that the spiritual leaven signifies the Science of Christ and its spiritual interpretation,—an inference far above the merely ecclesiastical and formal applications of the illustration.

Did not this parable point a moral with a prophecy, foretelling the second appearing in the flesh of the Christ, Truth, hidden in sacred secrecy from the visible world?

Ages pass, but this leaven of Truth is ever at work. It must destroy the entire mass of error, and so be eternally glorified in man's spiritual freedom.

In their spiritual significance, Science, Theology, and Medicine are means of divine thought, which include spiritual laws emanating from the invisible and infinite power and grace. The parable may import that these spiritual laws, perverted by a perverse material sense of law, are metaphysically presented as three measures of meal,—that is, three modes of mortal thought. In all mortal forms of thought, dust is dignified as the natural status of men and things, and modes of material motion are honored with the name of laws. This continues until the leaven of Spirit changes the whole of mortal thought, as yeast changes the chemical properties of meal.

The definitions of material law, as given by natural science, represent a kingdom necessarily divided against itself, because these definitions portray law as physical, not spiritual. Therefore they contradict the divine decrees and violate the law of Love, in which nature and God are one and the natural order of heaven comes down to earth.

This human sense of Deity yields to the divine sense, even as the material sense of personality yields to the incorporeal sense of God and man as the infinite Principle and infinite idea,—as one Father with His universal family, held in the gospel of Love.

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