Our topic was requested by a member who remains stricken with grief over the death of several loved ones. He knows intellectually what Christian Science teaches about death but has been unable to feel it and move towards healing. He didn't even want to chair the meeting; so another offered to do it.

Members immediately wanted to discuss one of the readings from Science and Health (see p. 429: 19-12) particularly the point that deathless life applies not only to spiritual life, "but includes all the phenomena of existence." Does this mean that physical life is to be preserved by adherence to the Mind that was in Christ Jesus? Apparently so. One member said there's just one existence, whether we call it material or spiritual, and that one existence is the ongoing presence of God.

This brought on a discussion of Jesus' raising of Lazarus and his own resurrection. In both cases deep unremitting work in Science was required — probably not because of the innate difficulty of the cases but because of the personal senses involved. Yes, Jesus loved his friend and also felt betrayed by friends and foes. All this had to be transcended in order to raise the dead.

Both cases show that we do survive death, either here or in some hereafter. These were practical demonstrations of the work required to get the human back into a living state at least as perceived by mortals. The resurrection also points to the additional work needed to go beyond a restored human to full at-one-ment with God — the so called ascension.

Does death release us from anything? Christian Science teaches that it does not. Whether we awaken in the full agonies of pain that occasioned our departure or whether we have a kind of refreshment and respite before it sets in again probably depends on the individual. To be free requires getting off the mortal basis of belief or undergoing the "second death".

We focused on what we can do right now to get beyond the merry-go-round of materiality. Most agreed we must live ourselves and others — including the "departed" — as the conscious infinitude of existence. We all live in Heaven right now and are God's Self-knowing; so we might just as well act out the Truth of being.

Another reading sent in by an internet friend of the group (see Science and Health, p. 598: 23-2) stopped us for comments. Our friend referred to death as the last frontier and this reminded one member of the quantum mechanics experiment known as Schroedinger's cat, where a cat is locked in a box with a poison pellet. If the cat moves in such a way as to release the poison, he will die. If he does not move that way he will live. Someone outside the box not knowing what the cat has done, would have to conclude that the cat is 50% dead, 50% alive — or perhaps both alive and dead. Our member asked, "Does God (looking upon us, or living us, as His ideas, from outside our self-imposed lock box of mortal belief) know whether we're alive or dead?" We quickly worked out that if we are to have the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, the Mind that is God, then we too should and ultimately will be unable to tell whether someone is depicting himself as alive or dead.

A couple of interesting amplifications came from this. A member told of what he'd heard of how Judy Collins was healed of long-standing grief over the death of her son. A friend asked her what the opposite of death was. She replied, "Life." Her friend said, "No. It's birth." She saw that life goes on whatever the divisions insinuated by birth-death.

Taking the quantum physics experiment further, a member remarked that before we arrived at the meeting, we were to each other just abstract ideas. Now, with observation, we had bodily existence. Is there a hint in this as to how we might be able to access the presence of those who have "passed on"?

The loss of loved ones and how to deal with it was still deeply troubling to some members. One member described how his mother's death seemed to him completely unreal. Why? He could only conclude that on some very deep level he sensed the facts of being which annulled the picture of death. Another talked of the healing of grief at his grandmother's funeral when a Christian Science practitioner reading the service concentrated on Life. Another spoke of the lifting of deep sadness over the death of a beloved cat as he wept openly with a group of caring friends who just allowed it all to go forward, without false comforting and a lot of interventions.

One member felt loss of a friend or loved one could be treated with the thought of overcoming personal sense. Mrs. Eddy's statement about life being a blank without personal friends (see Science and Health, p. 266:7) applies here. When someone disappears do we quickly go forth to find a replacement or use the tragedy to work out our divinity, our oneness with and as God? If we could do this work, the next relationship would be far less desperate. Another member confirmed this idea by describing his prayerful work one day to just draw close to God and feel His Love. He got a "pleasant, subtle sense of well-being".

This brought us to a few experiences of what might be called spiritualism. One member speaks often with departed friends. Sensing perhaps that some of us might be a touch dismissive of these communications another member startled us with this quote from Science and Health: "Though individuals have passed away, their mental environment remains to be discerned, described, and transmitted. Though bodies are leagues apart and their associations forgotten, their associations float in the general atmosphere of human mind" (p. 87:7).

This reminded another member of a testimony he had heard years ago in a branch church. A man who had been studying Christian Science for only two or three days said he had been healed the night before the meeting of what must have been pneumonia from the description. As he lay on his bed in great suffering the ghost of Mrs. Eddy entered and healed him. He wanted to give gratitude to Mrs. Eddy. He sat down and immediately the chairman of the board jumped up to warn us that Christian Science does not allow for ghosts. The healed man — for his own good unquestionably — never came back. Our member wondered how often we are dealing with friends and practitioners as ghosts, as dualistic entities that are supposed to do something for us? Aren't we and they divine ideas?

St. Paul's notion of dying daily (see I Corinthians 15: 31) came up. Margaret Laird fleshes it out this way: "The Life-Principle that is Love functions self-consciously as the ceaseless birthing of ideas and the dying of outworn and valueless concepts" (Government is Self-Government, p. 108). The conclusion of our group on this most fundamental point could be summarized as: Man is the living presence of God and as this becomes increasingly apparent there's a thinning out of the cruder concepts and fictions claiming to portray the facts of being.

This process is illustrated in the near death experience of one member. For some time he and his lover had been fighting. One day as they sat in church, our member was so despondent that his only escape seemed death. He wished for it, prayed for it and started losing consciousness. He slipped to the floor. The lover made no move to help him but ushers lifted him and carried him to the basement where they worked with statements of Science. He seemed to come out of his body and float up to the ceiling, looking down on the scene. Eventually a dark tunnel with a light at the other end and someone beckoning appeared. At this point he realized he could face the difficulties in his life and wanted to return. He was soon conscious and able to participate in the church service. The lover? History.

For next week, after surveying the news stories coming up — Inaugurtion, Ashcroft, El Salvador, California power crisis, Jesse Jackson to mention a few — we'll look at how to handle The News.