The member who suggested our topic led the meeting. After readings she recounted the shock she felt a week ago when she reached for some valuables she had hidden away last year and found nothing there. She stabbed at the problem with some scientific statements but had neither found the objects nor secured any peace about the loss. What would we recommend? Responses ranged along the following lines:

• Mary Baker Eddy's poem "Mother's Evening Prayer", includes this stanza: "O make me glad for every scalding tear, For hope deferred, ingratitude, disdain! Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear No ill, — since God is good, and loss is gain" (see Miscellaneous Writings, p. 389, or The Christian Science Hymnal, pp. 207-212). If one could "use" the human belief in loss to locate the constant outpouring of divine Love's provision of good, the apparent "loss" would quickly be converted to a gain and any disappointment to spiritual satisfaction.
• Since nothing is lost in divine Mind — the Mind of man, including our member — the objects will be "found".
• A visitor to the meeting observed that our member was totally engulfed in the belief of loss. She needed radically to rouse herself from this false state. He recalled a quotation that one of the first practitioners he went to as he came into Science used with him: "Rarely does one door close that another does not open if we will but see it through eyes not blinded by bitterness and regret."

Our suffering member then challenged us to describe how we had used some of these principles in actual healings. One remembered an incident where he had lost valuable financial statements and while pondering the idea that "..loss is gain" saw that he needed desperately to lose fear, paranoia and belief in dishonest people and gain a sense of God's unerring control of all. The papers were located undisturbed two days later in a public place.

Our visitor related a healing based on the quotation from his practitioner, as set out above. One morning, a guy he had been dating and fallen for in a big way coolly advised him it was over. He was plunged into the depths of agony but had the wisdom to go see his practitioner — yes, a Journal-listed practitioner — who tended to his misery as compassionately as he could but then quoted the line about a new door opening. Our friend saw he needed to eradicate bitterness and regret, and he did so as best he could. That evening he renewed a friendship with a straight friend. In the months that followed they became very close and began to see each other in a romantic light. They became lovers and are still together thirty years later.

A member noted a technique he uses to break a sense of disappointment or any error. He will dig through the rubble to find the divine idea which the human belief counterfeits. He seldom remembers to do this when things are going positively but at least finds himself able to do so when things go awry. Once the divine idea is found, he concentrates on appreciating and living it rather than its demoralized human representation. Once this is done the human representation is no longer found to be at odds with the underlying divine idea. Harmony reigns.

Expectation came up. Should we expect good? Or is that outlining? There was a vociferous exchange. At the end we seemed to agree that we most certainly should expect good, but must be careful not to outline too rigidly what that good should look like. We were all willing to be surprised on the upside. What of some seeming downside? Well, although this is more difficult we do have the tools in Christian Science to turn this around. Think of the two demonstrations set out above and the huge forward movement experienced by those who were momentarily stunned by error.

One member brought a new sense to this line from the Textbook: "Disappointed in love in her early years, she became insane and lost all account of time," (see Science and Health, p. 245: 5-6 — an account of a woman who preserved her youthful appearance into her seventies). Our member feels we've all been disappointed in love in our early years whether vis-a-vis parents, peers, teenage romances or more adult relationships. Do we handle the disappointment with Christian Science or merely push it down and hobble through life thinking we're just fine, carrying the wounds to our graves? One of our readings included this statement from Retrospection and Introspection "The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged." How might this be done? He feels the tools we've discussed at the meeting are all valuable — he summarized this way: "Close the door on dualistic assessment of past difficulties and resultant pain, locate the divine idea just at hand and live that into new and fresh ways of representing God in our individual lives."

Some of our members have seen the new teenage Gay movie, "Edge of Seventeen". It covers some of the territory already handled in the movie "Get Real". Both explore the difficulty teenagers have in discovering and getting some experience with their homosexuality. One member, traveling in the Deep South e-mailed his impressions. He said the movie depicts accurately the realities of Gay life — being ditched by your love interest, abused by school peers, teachers, coaches, abandoned by family and close friends — left finally to make contacts with perhaps unsuitable people at the local Gay bar. But those at the meeting felt that this horrendous scene, which most of us have gone through and to some extent still experience, needs radical attack with Science, which is most adequate to the occasion. There were several suggested lines of thought. Each will have his or her own ideas to see and live, according to local conditions, but one member said he'd been using this thought for Kosovo and other trouble spots: "I'm a divine idea, including all right ideas." Perhaps this could also be pressed into service on this problem; it has the advantage of envisioning one's whole universe as an intimate, cared-for heavenly reality.

We had a bit of trouble with a topic for next week but settled over dinner on Hospitality.