This week's favourite thoughts

From the Bible:

For the LORD taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the meek with salvation.

There is much in this verse to bring comfort.  I love the idea that the Lord takes pleasure in His people... in us... in me.  God is my Father, so I'm glad I please Him.  My earthly father was of the type to help me look away from earth toward God.

"He will beautify the meek with salvation."  This thought has great value, I think.  An article entitled "Growing new, not old," published in the Christian Science Sentinel for May 22, 1989, started with this encouraging thought:

Many people these days seem caught up in an effort to avoid growing old.  We're offered products to make us look younger, products to make us feel younger.  We're even encouraged to act younger.  The underlying message is "Growing old is bad, so do everything you can to stay young." That message, thought, unthinkingly assumes that the opposite of "old" has to be "young." In fact, there's another way to look at it.  The opposite of "old" can also be "new." Pursuing this line of thought, we can do a great deal in the right direction and get beyond just trying to hang on to an elusive thing called "youth."

Salvation is here and now as we open our hearts to God's way and will, and quit making it up for ourselves as we go along.  As one woman wrote, drily, "The wisdom of man is not sufficient to warrant him in advising God."  (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 3)  Part of the "newness" we must strive for daily is the new sense of ourselves as God's dearly-loved ideas, His reflection.  It is a worthwhile project, and it makes us beautiful to the degree it results in us being as loving to others as our Father is to us.


From Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 506:

The calm and exalted thought or spiritual apprehension is at peace.  Thus the dawn of ideas goes on, forming each successive stage of progress.

This was of great comfort to me this week.  An event in a grown child's life opened my unguarded thought to the memory of the same kind of milestone in my life over 30 years ago.  Her experience was (thankfully) different from mine.  She had a party and spent a happy evening with the family and friends who had supported her throughout her extended quest for a college degree.  Mine was so different that, for the first time, I realized how humanly sad my experience was compared to the normal ways one marks such an event.  As the feelings threatened to overwhelm me, I reached for the Bible Lesson, and found the thought quoted above.

Calm and exalted thought is that which has lifted its perception up from earthly seeming to spiritual truth.  Ideas dawn in their order, unfolding as they are needed or we are ready.  When one's thought is attentively fixed on God, His ideas can be absorbed, and progress immediately ensues.  In meditating on that idea, I realized that my experience so many years ago was valid, and that it had led to this moment when I was ready to see it and counter its mortal effects with "spiritual apprehension" of divine Love.  The emotional sadness I felt was keen, but temporary.  God was right there, comforting me and lifting me up to see that the unhappy experience which was not what I would have humanly wanted  never really happened to my true self, which reflects God and His love.  The truth is, I did graduate, with honors, and my family was proud of me.  My education has served me well in the intervening years, giving me the ability to work and earn money, as well as to learn and comprehend more than I might have without the education.  There were experiences I never had, but God was not missing from my life, even so.  As I learned to sit at His feet and listen, I have known more love and more hope than I ever could have gleaned from even the best of my family and friends.  And, today, I can celebrate with this adult child, who is not mine but who is just as dear to me as if she was.  My sadness is healed as I become absorbed in God, divine Love.

Where wander the sheep?

Shepherd, show me how to go
O'er the hillside steep,
How to gather, how to sow,--
How to feed Thy sheep...

This is the first stanza of a poem by Mary Baker Eddy, "Feed My Sheep," part of Miscellaneous Writings, page 397.

I'm not a Christian Scientist.  I was brought up in its philosophy, and learned about it only in my 20s, when the church I'd entered some years previously had been transformed into something entirely different from what I thought I was signing up for.  One of the main attractions for me with Christian Science was that it had not changed.  Its services were the same, it used the same textbook, it even continued to rely on the beautiful King James Bible.

However, with the Internet, it becomes clear that today's Christian Scientists are sometimes of a type Mary Baker Eddy would certainly rebuke, if indeed she understood Christian Science to define man as spiritual, not sensual.

When we identify ourselves by any term which can refer only to a characteristic of material selfhood, and specifically to a term used equally to describe a way of life and sensual behavior, and then say we are Christian Scientists, it shows we need more study and prayer to find our true identity.

There may be a time in our lives when, as we are beginning to understand Christian Science, we still self-identify as the child of an alcoholic, an epileptic, an overeater or an addict.  As we progress in the understanding of our true state as a child of God, reflecting His perfection, we can let go of the labels and just be what we are, Christian Scientists, and God's men (and women).

Let us beware of labeling ourselves in ways which not only limit our thinking, but lead others to focus on our material limitations and practices instead of the spiritual truth that man is not material, but spiritual.  Those who are our "shepherds" need to be loving, but firm in their encouragement to aspire and strive to reflect God.  In our practice of the last tenet, let us solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.

The Mythology of Science-Based Medicine

This is a year-old article which I just found linked here.

If a pill or surgery won't do the trick, most patients are sent home to await their fate. There is an implied faith here that if a new drug manufacturer has paid for the research for FDA approval, then it is scientifically proven to be effective. As it turns out, this belief is by no means fully justified.

One might think this article was written by Christian Scientists.  Actually, it wasn't.  It was attributed to Dr. Larry Dossey, Deeprak Chopra, and Dr. Rustum Roy, and it was posted at the Huffington Post.

The article cites The British Medical Journal:

Of 2,500 treatments,

• 13 percent were found to be beneficial
• 23 percent were likely to be beneficial
• Eight percent were as likely to be harmful as beneficial
• Six percent were unlikely to be beneficial
• Four percent were likely to be harmful or ineffective.

So 46 percent, the largest category, has unknown effectiveness. A hospitalized person has only a 36 percent chance of receiving a treatment scientifically demonstrated to be beneficial (or likely to be!).

At another point, the authors write,

We all marvel at the technological advances in materials and techniques that allow doctors to perform quadruple bypass surgeries and angioplasties without marveling that recent studies indicate that coronary bypass surgery will extend life expectancy in only about three percent of cases. For angioplasty that figure sinks to zero percent. Those numbers might be close to what you could expect from a witch doctor, one difference being that witch doctors don't submit bills in the tens of thousands of dollars.

My father was rushed into a heart bypass operation.  He contracted a serious infection which lasted the better part of a year.  Following that, he developed pulmonary fibrosis.  He and I were estranged, but I wouldn't wish his death, by slow, inevitable suffocation, on a dog.

The medical industry does seem to take itself very seriously.  It is based mainly on fear.  It touts horrific treatments which may or may not work, and for which enormous bills are submitted.

The health care reform law - "Obamacare" - might just be a good thing, after all.  It will jack up premiums, so fewer people can afford insurance, medicine, or treatment.  It employs "death panels," so people will rightfully avoid depending on it.

Are there any options?  Certainly.  Christian Science is one.

No, it isn't an oxymoron.  Scientific Christianity is a system of understanding the Scriptures which often results in healing.  The work which reveals Christian Science is Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy.  It is one of those books that everyone should read, if only to know about it.  It's a unique work which has comforted and helped millions of people.  Read the first page of the first chapter ("Prayer"), and see what you think.

I am not a member of the Christian Science church, but I study Christian Science.  I'm a student of Christian religion and thought.  I see tendrils of Christian Science thought throughout many writings of saints ("The science of love! Ah! sweet is the echo of that word to the ear of my soul! I desire no other science than that.") and wise preachers. ("When we touch the cosmic force apart from the “blinkers” of intellect, there is a wild problem in it. Nature is wild not tame. Modern science would have us believe it is tame, that we can harness the sea and the air. Quite true, if we only read scientific manuals, and deal with successful experiments; but after a while we discover that there are elements which knock men’s calculations on the head and prove that the universe is wild and unmanageable and yet God in the beginning created man to have dominion over it! The reason he cannot is because he has twisted the order and become master of himself, instead of recognising God’s dominion over him.") [emphasis added in both quotes]

Christian Science is the science of Love.  God is love, St. John assures us.  What does that mean to daily life?  Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Christian Science textbook, is a good place to start.