A Letter Home

D. Michael Day

On page 16 in the Science and Health Mrs. Eddy gives us the spiritual sense of the Lord’s prayer. She takes each individual idea and interprets it from a metaphysical basis to give us a clearer sense of Jesus’ words. Recently many of our branch churches and even The Mother Church has included citations from some of the newer translations of the Bible which are helpful in putting these important passages into a clearer context for us to understand in modern language. I thought it be interesting to do the same thing with the Lord’s prayer and wondered how a college student, perhaps away from home for the first time, might be writing to stay in touch with their parents. Perhaps their letter sent home to their parents might go something like this:

Our Father which art in heaven,  

Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious,

Hi Mom and Dad, Thanks for staying in touch. I’m glad to hear everything is going so well at home

Hallowed be Thy name.  

Adorable One.

Being away for the first time, I realize how grateful I am to have such wonderful parents as you.

Thy kingdom come.  

Thy kingdom is come; Thou art ever-present.

It’s so easy to close my eyes and know that my home and family are always with me in my heart and my consciousness no matter where I go or how far away I travel. It’s like you’re always with me.

Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.  

Enable us to know, — as in heaven, so on earth, — God is   omnipotent, supreme.

I just wanted to say how grateful I am for my upbringing and the values you instilled in me. It’s almost like you are with the each day guiding me when I am gone the same way you did when I was there.

Give us this day our daily bread;  

Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections;

And thank you again for my allowance. The check really came in handy and I know it was sent with love so I could purchase those extra goodies whenever I seem to run low. I never lack for anything.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.  

And Love is reflected in love;

I know I can never repay you for all the wonderful things you have given me and for setting me on the right path so I am paying the debt forward to everyone I meet, just as you would want me to.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil;  

And God leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth   us from sin, disease, and death.

The kids up here are doing a lot of questionable things which seem to be popular, but I can clearly see past the influence of such destructive behavior. The spiritual foundation you gave me shelters and protects me and my friends from anything trying to disrupt our good relationship.

For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.  

For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over   all, and All.  

I realize now that the upbringing you gave me at home is more important to my life and career than anything I will learn in college. The basis for happiness is not formal education, but the power of infinite wisdom, a clean mind and heart, living a life of which I can be proud without regret, never lying, cheating or being deceitful, and learning to see loving qualities in everyone, not just my friends, but all with whom I come in contact. College doesn’t make you smart, good choices do. I love you and feel your presence with me every day. 

Thank you forever. Well I guess that’s All for now. Your loving son, J.

No comfort, no healing

by Anthony Whitehouse CS

There is an aspect of Love which we forget at our peril and without which healing hardly ever appears.

It is the aspect of Comfort.

When we feel love we should also feel comforted. It is therefore true to say that unless we feel comforted we have not really felt the power of love.

And yet how often do we make protestations of Love and worship at its altar and yet overlook that unless comfort is also present we have worshipped in vain?

Do you have a sense of Comfort? Then if you do, you have understood the meaning of love and you are in God’s presence.

If we are in great distress, looking for healing that healing is never going to appear unless we address the discomfort that illness, sin or error has carried with it into consciousness. It does not really matter what the error is, whether it is a heart problem or general disenchantment with church affairs. Both challenges have the same effect. The rob us of mental comfort and introduce a sense of mental discomfort.

So, does the divine Mind operate with a sense of discomfort? Obviously not! Divine Love, Mother love always brings with it a sense of comfort because Mother love is always comforting. We need to understand this in order to do away with the discomfort and allow that sense of comfort to permeate our being and thinking. No amount of meditation on any metaphysical truth will heal without a comforting sense of God’s presence because God’s presence IS a comforting sense.

If we find ourselves under severe mental attack, in mental distress or paling under the stress of some job that needs to be done and which we find we cannot do, again it is because we have not nurtured and cultivated enough the “ comfort” which is the principal component of spiritual sense.
How can you feel troubled, stressed, distressed, tormented, hate and fear if that sense of comfort is there? It is a hard to actually demonstrate the value of harboring comfort unless you actually take the trouble to do it. You know you are not doing it because of the legions of evil which appear without it.

So take time today to cultivate a sense of comfort. The Mother Love which is God will appear with it because that is exactly the identity of comfort. When evil appears in the form of a “ an imaginable evil such as looming tornado” you can look it in the face and have such a robust sense of comfort that the evil will melt away. You will have found your God.

Hymn 174 (from the Christian Science Hymnal) really nails the question in just a few words

Like as a mother, God comforteth His children,
Comfort is calm that bids all tumult cease
Comfort is hope and courage for endeavor,
Comfort is love , whose home abides in peace.

God or Good is ALWAYS true

By Anthony Whitehouse CS

If we forget that

•  the nature of God /Good is always good
• Man is always the likeness of God and perfectg
• Harmony always reigns
• Supply is always at hand
• God is always present

then what happens is that existence then takes on a temporary sense of being material and human. To destroy the temporary nature of human existence and the temporary sense of evil we must insist upon the truth that God is ALWAYS present.

The only reason mankind has gotten into trouble is that in defining God ( and man is quite capable of accurately defining God ) man has forgotten or set aside the critical issue of God’s nature i.e. that the nature of God is ALWAYS true.

Forget the ALWAYS bit and immediately you are plunged in a temporary human framework.
All of which makes the attainment of the kingdom a lot easier , does it not ? Just keep the ALWAYS bit in mind

God bless

Humility – Humanly or Divinely Directed?

By Stirling Watts CS

Humility – Humanly or Divinely Directed?

We share the road with Muslims

By Anthony J Whitehouse CS

I have invariably found Muslims to be people of great grace. When I started looking into their scriptures I found them to be based on the Abrahamic and Mosaic tradition I found we had a great deal in common.

Visiting a young Muslim man in prison I found I did not have to resort to Christian stereotypes to teach him about divine science. He understood his relationship to God just as well as I did. After having introduced the science implicit in that relationship i.e. the sense that he should not let his mind be a place which harboured self-pity (irrespective of the circumstances) the healing was immediate. He was released from prison after only serving 18 months of a six year sentence for attempted manslaughter.

What was equally interesting to me was passing a morning with a young Muslim man on a beach near Colombo in Sri Lanka. His parents had the beach villa next to mine. We talked about God and he asked me very pertinent questions. I still remember his quiet demeanour , his white robes and skull cap. Here was a soul of great gentleness and devotion. He took in what I said and then gave me a back a succinct summary which he took pains to point out he agreed with in every measure.

He was a marketing specialist with a large multinational about to be transferred to work in Bombay for the same company. Our own church has a member whose husband worked for the same company. Some months later both he and my Muslim acquaintance were at the Taj Mahal hotel in Bombay when it was attacked by terrorists and they both escaped unharmed.

We should be more concerned with what unites us than with what appears to divide us !

Why Does Matter Exist?

By Anthony J. Whitehouse CS

Well we are certainly never going to answer that question if we rely on physics. If we are using the testimony of the material senses to probe the issue we are going to come up short because the physical senses are just not going to play ball on the question. The physical senses depend on matter for their manifestation so they are not going to cooperate in any rationale which unbundles their existence.

So, if we want to answer the question as to why matter exists we have to realise that the concepts we generally hold about God insist that God is infinite and omnipotent and everpresent. If God was not like this then God would not be God. But matter basically denies the nature of God by saying that matter is a somethingness besides God. And within the ambit of this pretense we can see that matter exists solely as the result of a belief in a dimension besides God.

If we hold that there is more than one dimension to life, a dimension besides the dimension of Spirit and Mind then we are going to be presented with the evidence of it i.e. matter is only the evidence our own conviction that there are two dimensions to life ; both the dimension of spirit/mind and the dimension of matter.

Herein lies to answer to our freedom from the material senses and from the exigences of material conditions: we must insist that there is only one dimension to our lives, the dimension of Spirit or God. In Deuteronomy 25:14 we find biblical authority for this monastic approach. " Thou shalt not have in thy house divers measures, a great and a small".

Obviously it does involve bit of pitched battle to stick to our guns on this. Pharaoh , or the material senses, does not like to lose it slaves. But Mrs Eddy points out that we have to work with this principle to gain our freedom. " We only have to avail ourselves of God's rule to receive His blessing, which enables us to work out our own salvation." It is clear we are not going to drown in Red sea. But we are going to have to be very determined and clear in our thinking. Even Jesus indicated that " strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it". Matt 7:14

We can take great comfort that the material dimension to our lives is illusory because God is the only dimension of consequence. We have to operate in the dimension of goodness because the cost of not doing so is to find ourselves in hell. There is no other word capable of conveying the cost involved of not operating within the sole dimension of goodness.

" In him we live and move and have our being" as the Bible tells us, unless of course we are going to take on board the illusion of a second dimension to life.

God reigns!

By Anthony Whitehouse CS

Yes ! you will say. God does reign. But I realised this morning that we problem we face in our practice of the Science of the Christ is that the physical senses are claiming to reign as well. We seem to have been caught on the horns of a dilemma..... and a painful one at that.

But if we are to avoid the confusion " of these latter days" we have to be quite clear that God alone reigns and the senses are just myths and delusions of no consequence.

The genius of both Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy was to instinctively understand that God reigned despite all human evidence to the contrary. Their conviction about the rule of God overrode the chaos that senses were seeking to impose. In the end they had enough humility to realise that only God COULD reign. It is only in having enough humility to admit that this must be the case that we can begin to figure rightly.

For those with seemingly incurable medical conditions this approach represents a stark choice albeit a glorious one. Who is reigning here ? Is it medical opinion or is it the decree of the Divine Mind which has made everything glorious like itself ? Obviously the answer is that medical and human opinions cannot reign within thought if we are going to demonstrate this wonderful science that we have been given.

The power inherent in the sense that God reigns must mean that we can totally disregard what the physical sense are telling us. Unless we can arrive at this point no healing will occur because we are effectively allowing those senses to reign and dictate our thought and action. Yet we are told " Thou shalt have no other God's before me!"

We are helped in this endeavor by realising that the physical senses are delusional.

Certainly it takes courage and persistence but we have the wonderful examples of both Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy. They have provided the precedents for us to follow.

Within the ambit of the up and coming elections the understanding that God reigns must require that we understand that political parties do not reign and neither do individuals preside. God does. That understanding must translate into opinions being correctly formed about who best to vote for because we detect which candidate best understands this.

There is a valid argument which would say that this postulate does not really hold water because the world has been in such chaos for so long. God only rarely has made an appearance on the human stage. This is not unsurprising bearing in mind that the physical world tends to objectify human belief. As long as human belief hangs onto the delusion that the stars foretell or the spirits of our ancestors impel or the God is subject to human foibles of anger etc then this is how our world is going to operate.

But change the sense that these beliefs reign and you usher in the kingdom of heaven " so will our material theories yield to spiritual ideas , until the finite gives place to the infinite, sickness to health, sin to holiness and God's kingdom comes in earth as it is in heaven" S&H 339:22.

All you have to do is give up the idea that you live under the jurisdiction of the physical senses