Why the word Romance for a love affair? We could only speculate, but its older meanings of "fanciful tale" or "chivalric adventure" do suggest a way to frame ardent emotional attraction for deeper appraisal in Science. Romance then is a particularly rich, hopefully mutual, dramatization of divinely based ideas boiling up through the senses and moving us to places unimaginable in our more mundane mind-set. It is an early warning of the oneness and allness of God as ourselves. Here's a quote from Mary Baker Eddy: "We live in an age of Love's divine adventure to be All-in-all." (The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany, p. 158:9-10)

A suspension of disbelief may be necessary to let us fall under the spell of romance; but some kind of intellect must also be present if we're hoping to get any insight out of the event. It's a tough balancing act, but it's surely what Socrates was hinting at in his discussion of romantic involvements. Furthermore, one member remarked that the Romantic poets — such as Blake, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley — noted mainly for their feeling, are also quite acute metaphysicians, in depicting the oneness of being forged through love. Is this not an early form of Mrs. Eddy's proclamations later in the century?

Fully engaged, romance brings up everything. It's untidy and seemingly irrational — a divine madness, evoking chemical (adrenaline and endorphins), poetic and psychological reactions. One member told of his glorious and wrenching affair with someone who was quite resistant to his advances. One-way passion, pining and protestations of love together with sleepless nights and weight loss were the results. The final irony was that the beloved said to him, "I love you," and appeared to accept him as his lover one day before he slipped into a coma, in preparation for death.

On the human belief level this was a tragic outcome for all the love and energy invested. But the trauma of it all was so great that our member could go no other way than into the arms of divine Love, there to learn wholeness at the source. It was an opportunity to reassemble his world.

Over and over Mrs. Eddy shows us how to transmute the dross of mortal belief into the gold of divine-human life experience. Here's a clear statement of this from Science and Health: "When examined in the light of divine Science, mortals present more than is detected upon the surface, since inverted thoughts and erroneous beliefs must be counterfeits of Truth." (p. 267:19-22)

No examples of fully functional love affairs were offered at the meeting, but we still had before our "enraptured thought" the vision of our visitors last week, arms flung about each other as they moved forward together into new adventures in the city.

Two members told of Hollywood careers and involvements with various icons of American culture. Their histories and the stories that can be recovered and teased out of them represent a great gift to our group, where Christian Science can be brought into play to find hidden treasure. Here's our other sense of romance — in these emergent tales of heroes, villains and wondrous events. And as with amorous romances, they're all dualistic representations of underlying divine ideas awaiting discovery.

As he was working on the topic, one member realized he was obsessing about a family member in a very negative way. He remembered a book he had read "Romancing the Shadow" by Connie Zweig; in it she shows how to derive a mental figure representing the one being obsessed about and how to dialogue with it. He did so and got a lot of psychological information about himself. Then he used the material to take the quantum leap into Science, where he could see the "family member" — really his own shadow — as a demoralized version of God. For instance, the family member's vanity — i.e., his own vanity — i.e., the allness and omnipresence of God as man and the universe. He surrendered to realities thus uncovered and, of course, the problem vanished.

Another member realized at the meeting how much of his life is consumed by comic book heroes. He was berating himself when another member described the character Michael on Queer as Folk and how his similar relationship with cut-outs is being handled in a loving relationship with a realist (David), who has even begun to get a bit turned on by the fantasies himself. A nice integration of mythic and mundane energies is underway.

Here are some recent healings reported at the meeting.

1) One member fell badly in his dance class. Others were concerned but he got right up and continued. Soon he felt a severe pain in his hand and saw that he was going forward on human will alone. As he applied Christian Science — that accidents are unknown to immortal Mind and his whole being is divine idea — the pain ended quickly.

2) A member was low on money and decided to skip dinner. She went to the group's archives and studied some entries on abundance etc. A little while later a neighbor arrived at her door with a full meal for her. The mesmerism was broken and money flowed in the next day.

3) Another member was stricken with diarrhea. As he worked in Science he thought of all the biblical passages referring to bowels of mercy and compassion. He saw these as indicating the harmonious stasis between Freud's two extremes of anal characterization — retention (greed and control) and expulsion (rejection and squeezing off). He saw how expulsive he'd been lately, dropped it in the light of Science and the problem ended.

4) Two members had been very cool towards each other for over a year, based on a misunderstanding. During our Romance week, they suddenly found themselves together for lunch — another member who usually accompanied them and acted as a buffer was not available. Their relationship came out of the hour considerably repaired.

5) A member told of his dealings with a woman on the subway. They bumped into each other; she said some awful things and stared at him threateningly. He apologized profusely, then romanced and cajoled her back to sanity. They were so bonded by the time they got to his stop that she seemed heart-broken to let him go.

All in all, romance was seen and experienced by members as God revealing Himself in variegated form as all of us — as boundless thought walking enraptured, and conception unconfined, winged to reach the divine glory (see Science and Health, p. 323: 11-12).

For next week we'll work on Trust. What or whom do we trust?