Spiritualizing thought and life

My mother and I took our first hot air balloon ride this past week. The pilot was a master at controlling the balloon, raising us up and dropping us down, seeking the air currents that would take us where we needed to go. The pilot controlled the altitude with the hot air generated by his burner. More heat and up we'd go. Turn it off and we would descend.

What is remarkable in a balloon flight is the lack of resistance and the peace that is found at high altitudes.  The balloon moves with the wind. You feel no breeze. Really, there is no awareness that you are even moving, except that you see the scene shift below.

I was surprised that our balloon had no sandbags attached to the side. I later learned that it is gas balloons, not hot air balloons, that use sandbags. And the removal of even a little bit of sand allows the balloon to rise.

I think the relation of sandbags to gas balloons provides a good metaphor for spiritual growth. Every handful of earth-weight (a material sense of persons and things) that we let go of, allows us to go higher and to experience true being as God knows it - resulting in steady ascension.

One of Mary Baker Eddy's pupils who was an editor of the Christian Science Journal, Annie Knott, once wrote:

"We should not overlook the fact that so long as we regard anything, or any relation of life, materially, we shall be subject to varying phases of discord, until every effect, motive, and endeavor is spiritualized, and we see things as they are in God's sight." (CS Journal, Vol. 23, 395)

I am not offering any brilliant insights today as to how to change our regard from a material sense to the spiritual sense of persons and things. I trust the angels, God's thoughts of light and life and love, to do that for each reader. But I do think Annie Knott's words, won from her own experience, are worth a good and serious think.

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Well dear one, you have no cause to doubt God's love for you and your child. And if He loves you He doeth all things that is (sic) for your good. But He does not destroy the work of His hands. You alone and all mortals are responsible for mortal conditions. They make them and they yield them up. Why do they give up what is so dear to them? Because they know not yet how to retain them as reality.

Therefore wait on God and Love will teach you how and do not mourn over the lessons of Love but rejoice. For Love knows best and you and I wait to learn what is best.

Lovingly thine in sorrow or in joy...  M B Eddy

(From a letter to Annie Knott sent by her teacher, Mary Baker Eddy, on June 16, 1896. Knott typed a duplicate to the letter, to which she added and initialed the comment: "This I value more than any other. A.M.K."
The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, L04744):

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