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6/6/2013

Spiritual sense: You are equipped

A number of years ago, I spoke to an association of atheists on Christian Science. I’ll admit, I was prepared for a debate. Instead, I encountered a thoughtful, respectful audience cherishing the universal desire to experience lasting good.

While the word “God” was loaded with too many unhelpful connotations for them, we could dialogue on intelligence, on Life, Principle, Truth, Love— all terms used in Christian Science to describe the universal Good that is God.

I learned from that encounter that we all have spiritual sense – the capacity to break through restrictive barriers and beliefs to discover and understand God as He really is. Mary Baker Eddy called this spiritual sense “a conscious, constant capacity to understand God.”

In the Glossary of Scriptural terms in the Key to the Scriptures part of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy gives a definition for God that exposes the divine from many angles.

“God. The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence." p.587

That one definition alone gives everyone a jumping-off point to understand God.

The Bible speaks of God as an unchanging power, or law, in whom is “neither variableness nor shadow of turning.” (James 1). In Christian Science, the term divine Principle describes the invariable law of Good that is God. Principle is always expressed in good. Good doesn’t end. Love never quits.

Scripture also identifies God as Spirit. So God that is Principle and Love, is also everpresent Spirit. This means that God’s creation – you and I and everyone, really - are spiritual – that is, we are made by, and of, the substance of Spirit. Love equates to unlimited goodness, Principle to invariable law, Spirit to true substance. Do you see the expansive nature of the God vocabulary of Christian Science? And it is practical, too.

The facts of God are like the facts of math. You just can’t know too much. The more math facts you know, the less of a problem you find in daily calculations. Who is afraid of a multiplication problem, when they have learned their multiplication tables? A kid who knows his 9’s table isn’t afraid of 9 x 9. Just the opposite. He can’t wait to use his 81 every chance he gets!

Considering the true nature of God from so many angles, can actually change the way one deals with life problems, because an expansive sense of God gives ready answers to any issue that may arise.

Now some may be tempted to think, “But I have always been bad at math!” Whether it is the truth of math or the Truth that is God, we are all equipped with the spiritual sense necessary to know what is true.

Christ Jesus used the term “kingdom of God” to describe spiritual sense.

"The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Luke 17:20,21

"This kingdom of God 'is within you,' — is within reach of man's consciousness here... In divine Science, man possesses this recognition of harmony consciously in proportion to his understanding of God." Science and Health 576:21

The kingdom of God describes God’s revelation of good to His creation. Spiritual sense is a term used in Christian Science to convey our capacity as God’s children to understand what God is. Spiritual sense lets us experience the divine in everyday life. We all have it, but we don’t all use it. Why?

Jesus answered that. He knew that we often become buried in, preoccupied with, material sense – what I call the “Eat, Drink, Clothing syndrome” of a focus on material comforts and discomforts.

Material sense pulls the attention to externals, instead of to seeking the kingdom of God within. Material sense is the backward, downward drag of the perpetual, mistaken belief:

that life is exclusively physical;
that intelligence is personal and limited;
that good is fragmented and temporary;
that identity is a transient flash of consciousness bounded by birth and death;
AND that this material sense of life is an inescapable drag on all human thoughts and acts.

Jesus challenged this:

"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? ... But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Matthew 6, King James Version

In The Message, I think Eugene Peterson has a helpful take on Jesus' words, showing the contrast between the masters of material sense and spiritual sense, when he paraphrases:

“You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other...There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body...People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met." Matthew 6, The Message

And the rest of Jesus teachings show that when you put first things first, and exercise your spiritual sense, human needs are met without the drag of limitation, risk or fear.

“Take no thought” is not a Pollyanna approach to life that ignores problems. It’s work. Hard work! Christian Science makes strong moral and ethical demands on one. It’s not enough to know God’s law of good if you don’t obey it. It’s not enough to know math facts if you never work an equation. We must take what we learn of God and live it through honesty, purity, selflessness and love, even when it is difficult. This is the spiritual and moral sense that gave Jesus the power to heal sickness and sin and to supply human needs. It can do the same for us.

Mrs. Eddy once wrote – “The talent and genius of the centuries have wrongly reckoned. …They have not accepted the simple teaching and life of Jesus as the only true solution of the perplexing problem of human existence.” Unity of Good, Eddy, 9

Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is within us. God’s kingdom of health and harmony is with us, within all of us, already, right now. We all have the spiritual sense that allows us to understand and experience God and His marvelous creation.

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6/1/2013

Heaven and hell - What the heck?

British author Susan Ertz wrote, “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

Immortality, or eternal life, is often confused with prolonged mortality or endless humanhood. But immortality describes life without any mortal limits, not an extension of limited being. It’s the progression beyond mortal beliefs about life where immortal life, inseparable from Life as God, is fully understood.

Eternity is the experience of total freedom in infinite good. Eternal mortality would be the hell that many, whose faith is rooted in Calvin's teachings, fear awaits us. But Eternal life is heaven, and heaven is the harmony of life that is ours to experience both now and forever.

Christian Science makes a distinction between human experience and mortality. Mortality is not a state of life moving towards death; it is belief in life as already material and therefore already at least partly dead from the start. Matter is lifeless, dead. Death is a consequence of materiality. It’s a product of mortal belief. If you believe yourself to be material, you believe yourself to be mortal. And a mortal can’t avoid death - that is, he experiences the limits of his own belief.

But what if man as God creates us– you and I – are not really material or mortal? What if real life never actually ends?

Take a deep breath. This is an important point: The human experience of death is a perspective of the observer. It is not the experience of the one believed to be passing through it. Death is the product of a mortal belief. It is a false perspective. Even if one believes himself to be mortal, this belief will only last so long as its limits are tested and life is proven to go on. Man is not for a minute actually mortal. And the sense of mortality will fade out as the false belief in it is swallowed up by the understanding that God’s man is spiritual and that real life was never mortal in the first place.

"Man is more than physical personality, or what we cognize through the material senses. Mind is more than matter, even as the infinite idea of Truth is beyond a finite belief. Man outlives finite mortal definitions of himself, according to a law of "the survival of the fittest." Man is the eternal idea of his divine Principle, or Father. He is neither matter nor a mode of mortal mind, for he is spiritual and eternal, an immortal mode of the divine Mind. Man is the image and likeness of God, coexistent and coeternal with Him." MARY BAKER EDDY, No and Yes, 25

The words mortal and human are not synonymous terms. Mortality is a misconception about life as material. Mortality is a belief in death and darkness as inevitable. Human experience is the testing ground for mortal beliefs where mortality yields to the truth about real life.

Whether human experience seems more like heaven or hell depends on the degree to which we cling to self-limiting mortal beliefs about life. But we can outgrow the confines of mortal and material beliefs. We are capable of yielding to a life free from limits.

How to do it involves spiritualizing thought and daily life through honesty, unselfishness and purity rooted in an understanding of God. And we can do it. We are all capable of growing spiritually. We can shake off false mortal concepts about life, and progress out of limitation, fear and hellish conditions.

At the age of 12 I had a healing that illustrated this.

I impaled my foot on a rusty nail and was in a lot of pain. But I prayed for a better sense of my life as God made me. I vigorously challenged the belief that I was even a pinky toe, or one foot’s worth, mortal or material. I had learned in the Christian Science Sunday School that “there is no life, truth, substance or intelligence in matter.” I reasoned, “But there is life, truth, intelligence and substance in me!” I accepted my being to be presently spiritual. I knew I could experience the heaven of healing. This wasn’t theory to me. It was fact.

Looking in the bucket of bloody water, I thought, “That is not me. My substance is spiritual and has never been hurt.” I bandaged up the foot and got on with my day. When I went to bed that night, the bandage fell off. The openings on the top and bottom of my foot were closed and were nearly healed. By the next morning there was no wound at all. All evidence of the accident yielded completely to the spiritual fact and my human body conformed in perfect health.

Whatever beliefs we may currently hold about heaven and hell, life and death, mortality and immortality - these beliefs can and will ultimately yield to spiritual understanding. No one will be left out of heaven. Christian Science discoverer Mary Baker Eddy wrote, "The admission to one's self that man is God's own likeness sets man free to master the infinite idea. This conviction shuts the door on death, and opens it wide towards immortality. The understanding and recognition of Spirit must finally come, and we may as well improve our time in solving the mysteries of being through an apprehension of divine Principle. At present we know not what man is, but we certainly shall know this when man reflects God." (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Eddy, 90)

2/18/2013

Reaching someone who seems beyond help

QUESTION: “How does one heal someone who has lost their sense of orientation, who is 80 percent deaf, who doesn’t know who he is, or with whom he is, anymore? I believe in spiritual healing. I want to see such healing for this man.” (Question originally asked in French.)

RESPONSE: Prayer is especially helpful in such cases because it bypasses broken down lines of human communication and lifts the case directly to God. Prayer involves engaging spiritual sense, which is the innate capacity we all have to discern spiritual reality. Through spiritual sense we can discern the true and present nature of God and man and prove that no one is out of reach of God’s care.

When the material senses break down, a case can seem unreachable. But this evidence of deterioration only points to a mortal belief about man as cut off from good. This is never the actual case. No one is without hope or help. Your prayers that seek out God’s perspective of His creation can lead you to the truth about the material senses – that they neither limit nor define a man’s capabilities. When we stop fretting over what seems to limit the person and discover real life to be limitless and free in God, the door opens wide to healing.

The identity and liberty of each one of God’s children are intact and safe. Never separated from the divine Life that is God, real life is completely free from limiting, material conditions. We don't have to wait for some hereafter moment to experience the freedom of spiritual being. This present state of existence is completely discoverable through prayer.

A marginal heading, “Identity not lost” appears twice in Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

“What is man? Brain, heart, blood, bones, etc., the material structure? If the real man is in the material body, you take away a portion of the man when you amputate a limb; the surgeon destroys manhood, and worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb or injury to a tissue is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more nobility than the statuesque athlete, — teaching us by his very deprivations, that ‘a man’s a man, for a’ that.’” (172)

“The material body and mind are temporal, but the real man is spiritual and eternal. The identity of the real man is not lost, but found through this explanation; for the conscious infinitude of existence and of all identity is thereby discerned and remains unchanged. It is impossible that man should lose aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his. The notion that mind is in matter, and that the so-called pleasures and pains, the birth, sin, sickness, and death of matter, are real, is a mortal belief; and this belief is all that will ever be lost.” (302)

If you are worried that your prayers “here” may not reach one in need “there,” don’t be. It has been scientifically proven that the discernment of the true nature of man in one human consciousness can set others free from their false beliefs about themselves. Christ Jesus discerned the perfect man that divine Truth, God, creates and maintains. He did this in cases where, to material sense, the patient seemed completely out of reach. (See the healing of Jairus’ daughter, Gospel of Luke 8:41-56; and the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Gospel of John, chapter 11) Jesus proved that no one cut off from the Love that is God. He discerned the kingdom of God within us – the spiritual capacity to know and express the Life that is God.

Mary Baker Eddy explained, “When speaking of God’s children, not the children of men, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you;” that is, Truth and Love reign in the real man, showing that man in God’s image is unfallen and eternal. Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick. Thus Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is intact, universal, and that man is pure and holy. Man is not a material habitation for Soul; he is himself spiritual. Soul, being Spirit, is seen in nothing imperfect nor material.” (476)

Jesus didn’t illustrate an exception to the rule. He showed that the power to heal belongs to each of us and can be demonstrated when we understand who we are as children of God. The divine perspective that heals the sick and raises oneself and others out of the oblivion of material sense is available to everyone who is willing to seek it out.

Your prayers are important. Let your search for healing begin with deepening, expanding, your understanding of the true nature of God. The Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health are indispensable tools to aid you in your prayers. Let them open your eyes to what God is, and to what he is doing right now for His creation.

I frequently receive questions from readers of this blog concerning the practice of healing prayer. Many questions are personal in nature, but occasionally I receive a question generic enough to be addressed for a wider audience. If you have helpful thoughts to share with this questioner, please feel free to leave them in your comment below.

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3/7/2012

Getting a handle on what we eat - Part 3 of 3

Are you tired of fighting with food? Tired of struggling over what to eat? Tired of fretting over whether you will have to suffer the consequences for your meal in the hours and days to come? Christian Science offers solutions that can transform your dinner table from a battlefield to a safe haven. And it all starts with a few simple words: "Take no thought what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink...Seek ye first the kingdom of God; and all these shall be added unto you." (Matthew 6:27-28)

When Christ Jesus said "Take no thought," this was not evasion. This was practical spirituality. He was making an unqualified statement about the value of seeking out Spirit and spirituality to meet human needs.

In the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN is defined as "the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme.”

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Spiritual sense: You are equipped

Heaven and hell - What the heck?

Reaching someone who seems beyond help

Getting a handle on what we eat - Part 3 of 3

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Spiritual sense: You are equipped

Heaven and hell - What the heck?

Reaching someone who seems beyond help

Getting a handle on what we eat - Part 3 of 3

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INFORMATION

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