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LET'S GET OUR HEALINGS
Published by Oldhippie on 2008/2/28 (159 reads)
There are two recorded instances of Mary Baker Eddy predicting the end of the world; one for the year 2001, and the other for 2100. It is generally assumed that either Mrs. Eddy contradicted herself, or that one of the copyists erred. I would consider a third alternative. Mrs. Eddy evinced a growing conviction that the organizational aspect of her movement would dissolve, either because her students had outgrown the need for it, or because they had abandoned her teaching. By the year 2001, if Christian Science is synonymous with authentic Christian healing, the world--the environment--of Mrs. Eddy's movement had effectively ended. The old-time healers, filled to overflowing with healing skill and manifest Love, had been replaced by little old ladies going into fits of ecstasy over Mrs. Eddy's words on Love, while overflowing with manifest hate, and meanwhile unable to heal a pimple. By 2001, to introduce Christian Science as a once respectable topic for conversation among educated people, would elicit suppressed chuckles or mild frowns in polite society; and loud laughter or angry condemnation among the impolite. I believe that Mrs. Eddy foresaw a literal end of the human scene as taking place in or around 2100. The end of her movement as she established it has already occurred, as and when she predicted.
** The reasons for the decline of the Christian Science movement have been amply documented by both its friends and foes, and are beyond the scope of this article, except for one--the confusing, by her followers, of Mrs. Eddy's theology with her practice. ** Christian Science healing practice employs an unashamed focus on God. So do Christian fundamentalist healing practices, and to some extent New Thought or Religious Science. The difference between Christian Science and other approaches would hinge not only on what and how much one knows of God, but on how one goes about knowing it--at least if Christian Science actually qualifies as a science. For example, we all presumably know the concept that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared; but the majority of us don't know this fact the way Einstein knew it; therefore our knowing of his formula will (thank God) not have much, if any, effect in terms of demonstration. ** The first step in learning Christian Science is indicated by Mrs. Eddy's announcement at the beginning of Science and Health: "The time for thinkers has come." Instead of thinking about that, and desiring first of all to learn how to think as she did, so that we can heal as she did, students of Mrs. Eddy from her day to ours have simply absorbed her ideas like a sponge, along with a lot of other ideas that contradict hers. As a result, the time for thinkers has passed. “Do Christian Scientists seek Truth...through material conservatism and for personal homage?” (Science and Health 364:17-19) Yes, in the 21st century they mainly do. ** An example of this decline is an article entitled Body, which has, since the early 1960’s, made the unofficial rounds and enjoyed popularity among Christian Scientists. Attributed to Mary Baker Eddy, it has made relatively recent appearances in the July 1999 issue of Doris Grekel's The Individual Christian Scientist; on page 99 of Helen Wright's Made Whole through Our Marriage to God; on David L. Keyston's web site; and on the web site started by Helen Wright. ** Before tracing the article to its source--Lyda S. Hord, who supposedly discovered (but actually wrote) the article, was, according to U.S. Search, born in 1893, and would have been 66 years old in 1959, when Joel Goldsmith’s The Art of Spiritual Healing, which Hord mainly paraphrased, was first published (See in particular page 43 of that book)--I had written to Mrs. Grekel, to Mr. Keyston and to the late Helen Wright's representative Julie Olive Treadwell, asking for leads to documentation concerning the article. I received no reply from Mrs. Grekel. On October 8, 2005, Mrs. Treadwell sent me an e-mail attachment, which she identified as documentation. It consisted of the two copyright claims which she stated were from the Keyston web site, and which I have reproduced below. Apparently, Mrs. Treadwell is unaware that an unsubstantiated statement copied from a web page does not constitute its own documentation. ** In an autograph letter dated Oct. 2, 2005, David Keyston wrote me, in part: “I don’t know when Lyda Hord discovered it & don’t know the story behind it...Yes, you would have to travel to D.C. to research it...I suppose, at the last trump, it is our spiritual sense that will affirm the validity of the article, that is Principle, not personality.” He did not answer my question as to whether the statements between the first and second copyright claims were from the same or a different source. Regarding Mrs. Eddy’s authorship, Mr. Keyston rhetorically and flippantly concluded: “Was she the author? If you make it to Washington D.C. let me know.” I’m still trying to understand how he can represent the article as authentically by Mary Baker Eddy and not seem to care whether or not it is. I don’t think there would be much point in asking him again. This is one of many such intimations that the loss of the Christian Science movement's credibility cannot entirely be laid at the Boston hierarchy's door. ** Since his is the most elaborate, and since the article is undoubtedly by now in public domain, I give here Mr. Keyston's presentation of it, for those who have never seen it or who wish to review it. My comments will follow. ** BODY by Mary Baker Eddy ** The following article by Mary Baker Eddy is verified-Registrar of Copyright, Congressional Library. Washington, D. C., January 19, l886. (This article found by Lyda Sandifer Hord, CSB) ** "The term Mind and body I understand to mean God and man; man the manifestation and embodiment of Mind is the body of Mind; is the Infinite aggregation of spiritual ideas forever held, controlled, and governed by the law of Life, harmony, and completeness, so man was never born, never had a claim, never sinned, never left heaven, but is spiritual, perfect, harmonious and eternal. This understanding is the savior to our belief of body, the law of recovery of every and any claim of error. There is just one God and one body. I am the image and likeness of God; no mortal mind can confine this image in a mortal body, harm or touch it in any way, Mind has set me free from every error. Divine Love fills every avenue, flows through every channel and removes every obstruction. Man has no material body through which to express anything; his body is the body of God." ** STATEMENT COPYRIGHTED BY MRS. MARY BAKER G. EDDY AT THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY IN WASHINGTON, D. C. JANUARY 19th, 1886 ** The term Mind and body literally means God and man, for man is the expression of Mind and the manifestation of Mind is the embodiment of Mind. Therefore man is God's body and there is but one God. Body is therefore the aggregation of spiritual Ideas, forever controlled and governed by the law of Life, harmonious and eternal. This understanding of perfect body is the savior of the belief of body and is the law of recovery to any and every claim of error. ** It seemed a wonderful thing when advanced thinkers began to perceive certain mental laws and to apply them to the healing of the body. This mental teaching is that man is the builder or creator of his body, that he builds or forms his body through his own thought, that he can change his body by his thought, and therefore that, if he has built a sick body by wrong thinking or ignorant thinking, he can build a well body by right thinking, that by his ignorant inharmonious thought he prevents God from manifesting, and by his true and harmonious thought he brings God into manifestation. ** Of course, this is a great advance over the old drug system, but it does not go far enough to satisfy the one who wishes the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It makes the body a battle ground for opposing and contending forces, wrong thinking tearing down, right thinking building up; wrong thinking creating disease, right thinking destroying disease and bringing in healthy conditions, for this teaching deals only with the changing conditions of the personal mentality and not with the changeless state of being, the changeless Mind, the omnipresence. It is better than the old way, but it is a hard way, a way of constant battle between good and evil, of hard work and doubtful results, because it deals with two powers instead of one. ** Practically all metaphysical teachers agree that there is one presence, therefore one power, but they balk at the next step, which is that one power must mean one activity. Omnipresence means the full presence of God as all, that God is everywhere, all the time. It means that God and his activity is all there is, not only of the invisible, but of the visible, not only of the formless, but of the formed. Therefore it must follow that the formed is as perfect as the formless, the manifest is as perfect as the unmanifest; for since there is but one unchanging creator, one activity, one power, one perfect Mind bringing forth its own perfect substance, it logically follows that all form is changeless and eternally perfect. ** The body is God incarnate, God created and formed. It is God come forth within Himself and of Himself, and man's beliefs, opinions and mental concepts are not making God manifest, nor are they hindering or preventing that manifestation. Man does not create anything. He only sees that which eternally is, which is God manifest, and calls it good or evil according to his own development. ** Paul tells us, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God. Our sufficiency to think is of God; our ability to form thoughts and opinions is of our own ignorance, our belief in duality, but our power or sufficiency to think is when we think with God, as God. From this basis then, we see that man's wrong or ignorant beliefs and opinions and misinterpretations do not create or produce conditions in the body or in God's substance anywhere. Wrong thinking, which is really mental chaos and confusion itself, has no power to create. It does not create conditions of disease. The wrong thinking itself, the mental confusion and chaos itself is the condition, for the condition is wholly and entirely of that personal mentality. ** There is no condition in substance, for substance is God. A condition is not a tangible something which has been created in the body by a belief of evil or an ignorant attitude. The definition given in the College Normal Class is this: A condition is that conception of Truth which is limited and temporal. It is not something which the limited conception has created, but the limited conception itself. It has no place anywhere but in the realm of chaos and confusion, the place of opinions and conclusions, based on a false premise. That there is a condition, is all the condition there is. ** The inharmonious belief does not create an inharmonious condition. The belief of lack is the lack. The belief of disease is the disease. That is why the body seems to change as man's thinking changes. It is simply as beliefs of disease and imperfections fall away, and our thinking is corrected and held true to Truth, so that mental chaos and confusion no longer cloud our vision, we see the body as God sees it, as it eternally is. Then it stands revealed to us in its beauty and its glory, the temple, not made with hands. All that our ignorance does is to affect our vision, or view of things. It does not change anything that God has made. ** We do not handle substance through our personal thought to change it. We only see according to our thought, our degree of enlightenment. Walt Whitman said, "The world is jagged and broken to him who is jagged and broken," to him whose mental realm is dark. If one's thought is ignorant and unenlightened, it changes his vision as a cloud of mist. As he looks through the cloud he sees this world, the body, all things, distorted, abnormal and wrong. ** If the mental atmosphere is dark and dense, we see but dimly and are not able to perceive the perfection that is. Man does not by mental effort bring God into manifestation, neither does he through wrong thinking prevent God's manifestation. God IS and God is manifest, and it is not in the power of unenlightened personal thought or mental effort to obstruct or hinder the activity of God, or to mar or to deface the perfection of God's creation. ** The only thing that depends upon my thinking, the only thing that is affected by it, the only thing that responds to it, is my vision, my realization. I may be ignorant of the truth of the body, but that does not alter the body itself. It is whole and perfect now, not because I think it is, but because it is God manifest. Thinking with God, as God, shows me the perfection of the body, but the body is just as perfect before I know it as after. God's substance does not cease to be perfect just because I am ignorant of its perfection, nor does it become perfect because I find out the truth. Its wholeness does not depend upon my degree of enlightenment. It is eternally perfect because it is eternally just what God is and there is no power anywhere to make it anything else. If we are looking at it through a mental fog, opinions, doubts, fears, confusion, we shall not perceive its perfection, but that does not change the body itself any more than looking at the sun through a fog changes the sun. ** All the thought that the earth was flat did not flatten the earth, did it? It just went right on being as it was, and the only thing that changed, or could change, was man's thought about it. Of course, until he reached that place, he lived as if this ignorance was the truth. ** We hear a lot about spiritualizing the body through thought. This teaching regards body as physical or material and undertakes to change matter into Spirit through mental effort. Divine Science, from the basis of omnipresence, teaches that, since, there is but one substance and that substance is Spirit, there is no material body. The body is Spirit now. ''Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." Just so long as you are trying to spiritualize the body, or to heal the body through your own mental effort, just so long as you are trying to create health, you are laboring in vain, for you are trying to do God's part, to do that which has already been done. ** We live in a universe of perfect form. Not only our body, but all that is formed is literally the body of God and is perfect now. To believe that the infinite substance has been malformed through the ignorant mental activity of the individual, and must be redeemed and perfected through the same activity, is to see not one power, but two. There is no condition in the body. There is nothing in the body to be rebuilt or straightened or healed. There is nothing to change. There is nothing needed but to see God. Stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord. Your spoken word is not needed to make wholeness manifest, for wholeness is the eternal state of the unseen and the seen, the unformed and the formed; but it is needed for your unfoldment, for the unfolding and broadening and deepening of the individual until he realizes this perfection. Stop trying to think God into manifestation. God is manifest now. God's glory and perfection are everywhere visible to him that hath eyes to see. ** All that we need to do--and it will keep us busy--is to train our thought faithfully and persistently in the acknowledgment of the truth of God's presence, train it to judge righteous judgment, to see God and God only, to think God and God only. Having accepted the omnipresence, hold to it no matter what the apparent condition may seem to be. In treating yourself, never deal with appearances or symptoms. Do not center your thought upon organs or functions. Infinite substance, power, intelligence and activity are in that place and do not need your suggestions. Do not try to formulate in thought the perfect body. Stop thinking about the body or trying to picture it as perfect from your standpoint. Our highest perception of the body today is far short of what body really is. Stop tinkering with it mentally. Loose it and let it go. Just know that it is God's body and that God is this moment and every moment forming it or bringing it forth according to His Word, His divine idea. Jesus recognized Lazarus as an undying manifestation of God. [HERE ENDS THE BODY ARTICLE] ** So now you've seen the Body article. It was first recommended to me by a Christian Science practitioner, in November of 2004. The Individual Christian Scientist, the magazine to which the practitioner directed me, prescribed working with the article daily, which I immediately set out to do. I had originally called this practitioner, from David Keyston's practitioners list, for treatment. As I thereafter worked daily with the Body article, in addition to the original claim remaining unhealed, I manifested another claim, and got very, very sick for months. ** Before tackling the Body Article's recommendations, I would point out that Mrs. Eddy, residing in Boston during the height of Walt Whitman's obscenity scandal, would NEVER have endangered her fledgling church by publicly endorsing Whitman. She may have tacitly approved of him, and apparently approved of Thoreau, whom she closely paraphrased in Science and Health. In this respect, she was considerably ahead of her time, since Thoreau was not widely recognized until the late 1920's. ** Remembering that a tree is known by its fruit, I finally began to study the Body article intelligently, comparing it with Mrs. Eddy’s actual writings. When I saw the basic error, I quickly healed. This has proved a great blessing. Not only was the immediate claim healed, but two long-standing claims were healed as well, including the one I had originally called the practitioner about. The completeness of the article’s error has by contrast helped me to understand Christian Science far more clearly, and to use it far more profitably. ** Whatever authentic statement may have been copyrighted in 1886 by Mrs. Eddy, if any, was not what appears as the Body article in the July 1999 Individual Christian Scientist, in Helen Wright’s Made Whole or on her or David Keyston’s web sites. The article's ideological premise, obviously, is man as God's body. Its technical premise is the practitioner's focus on God to the exclusion of the person being treated. ** DOES GOD HAVE A BODY? ** I heartily agree with many others that there is an esoteric teaching, veiled by mortal mind, within Science and Health; but if that esoteric teaching essentially contradicted the exoteric, it would render the textbook’s presentation dishonest, schizoid and unworkable. ** "As the divine Principle is comprehended...the notion of an everywhere-present body...will disappear." In this statement which appears on page 20 of Mrs. Eddy's article No and Yes, we are being admonished to repudiate the notion that man is God’s body. The statement, "Man is the body of God," in connection with Christian Science is at best metaphorical, not metaphysical. It appears nowhere in the textbook or Prose Works. On page 116 of Science and Health, lines 20-23, Mrs. Eddy states, "Christian Science strongly emphasizes the thought that God is not corporeal, but incorporeal--;" and then, just in case the reader didn't get it, she states, "that is, bodiless." How can man be the body of a bodiless God? ** Mrs. Eddy’s edition of Webster’s, which she cites on page 2 of her 1898 article, Christian Science versus Pantheism, told her: “Pan-the-ism, n. (Pan- + theism): The doctrine that the universe, taken or conceived of as a whole, is God.” To Mrs. Eddy, the universe and man are synonymous, since she variously describes the universe as including man (SH 171:12, 554:3 etc.) and man as including the universe (SH 502:24-27). Let’s incorporate one of her descriptions of man into her Webster’s, and see what we get for Pantheism: “The doctrine that man, including the universe, taken or conceived of as a whole, is the body of God.” ** The Body article states that "the body of Mind [in Hord's terminology this means man] is the infinite aggregation of spiritual ideas." The phrase "infinite aggregation" is an oxymoron, pairing unconfined infinity with a definite sum. Mrs. Eddy instead defines man as a compound idea--one whole, unified idea with infinite facets--but not an aggregation of anything. Man could not then be an aggregation--just a collection or sum total of parts. When Mrs. Eddy uses the word aggregate, as in Mis. 62:12, she associates it with a known quantity; but the compound idea man, she portrays as one inestimable whole. She has nothing against aggregations, as when in the Blue Book she states that God has environed man, given him a home amidst an aggregation of right ideas; but she does not in Science and Health or in Prose Works apply this term to man himself, who is infinitely more than a sum total of anything. ** Religious thinkers since the early years of Christianity until the discovery of Christian Science in 1866 envisioned man as embodied, encased in some kind of mindless stuff. Many have also believed that God is likewise embodied by his creation. In the nearly 140 years since the discovery of one infinite Mind and its infinite idea, beginning with its earliest proponents, Mrs. Eddy's adherents have been steadily reverting to the age old error of an embodied God, with man as the atomic, aggregated, albeit nominally “spiritual” stuff which encases God. This would be like defining the thought you are now thinking as the embodiment of your individual mentality; but this thought that you are now thinking obviously does not embody you; for even as you read these words, your thought is unfolding in another way. The thought you are thinking is the activity of your consciousness. It doesn't encase or house or enclose you; it expresses and reflects you, spontaneously and subjectively; and being entirely subjective, it is free to unfold forever. ** Your thinking is never a sum total of atomic parts; never a set of objects, either outside or inside of you. Your thinking is the real you in action, for it is your natural, unique activity. To conceive of your thinking as some kind of body which you inhabit would make it seem ponderous, cumbersome and essentially apart from your being. In fact, this misconception is all there is to your mortal body. ** You and I have, in belief, given ponderousness, substantiality and identity to mere fragmentary concepts. From this error, we have identified our bodies and a dog-eat-dog scheme we call nature. As Christian Scientists, we know that we really do not inhabit bodies or a material world. We have simply mistaken fragmentary concepts for actual objects. Man as God's body portrays God as an enlarged version of this error. ** Man as the body of God appeared as a metaphor in the very first (1875) edition of Science and Health, in such statements as: “...the body of God is the idea given of him in the harmonious universe, and the male and female formed by Him...this idea is named man, it has infinite expressions, all of which are members of the body of Christ, Truth, the Intelligence outside of matter. Principle is expressed in one entirety or full idea...Soul and body, or God and man, we shall understand...That man epitomizes the universe, and is the body of God, is apparent to me not only from the logic of Truth, but in the phenomenon..." I don’t believe it was mere chance that Dorothy Sawyer, my 11th grade English teacher, who introduced me to Christian Science, also took it upon herself to teach her students how to diagram a sentence, after sentence-diagramming had been dropped from the curriculum of Montebello High School. A close look at these phrases mark them as metaphorical, not metaphysical. Mrs. Eddy doesn’t say that God’s idea is a body; rather, she says that God’s embodiment is an idea. If man epitomizes the universe, he exemplifies it. Only an idea could exemplify the entire universe. Man embodies God as image, not object. This concept is redemptive, for it includes our human experience in a spiritual context. This is bound to heal better than conceptually annihilating all that’s human. However, as a slogan or catch-phrase, man as God’s body tended to keep Mrs. Eddy’s students from entering the subjective realm, and she dropped it early on. ** The concept of man as God's body made its first official appearance as an element of Christian Science theology in the teachings of Edward A. Kimball. On page 442 of Kimball's Lectures and Articles on Christian Science, posthumously published by his daughter in 1921, and prefaced by the personal recollections of his student Bicknell Young, we read: "It is a scientific statement to declare that man exists at the standpoint of body, nay is body." Kimball goes on to give his reason for introducing that unfortunate departure from Mrs. Eddy's theology: "Many Scientists seem to be afraid to declare properly concerning body. Some will do nothing but to declare the facts about God [as the Body article prescribes exclusively doing] and religiously refuse to declare the truth about man and body." ** Mr. Kimball's intent, the very opposite of Lyda Hord's, is practical. He wanted his students not to ignore the body, but to declare its health. Unfortunately, his mistaken ideology introduced a permanent schism, regardless of the temporary ego boost it might give to mortals. Its hidden impetus is mortal mind’s attempt to shove God aside. ** Man is not an enclosure for God; nor is he an object lurking around somewhere in God. Man is the infinite, spontaneous expression of God's unencumbered being. Mrs. Eddy never defined man as God's body; only as his idea. ** Kimball's defenders cite his claim to Judge Septimus Hanna, to the effect that Mrs. Eddy had “unreservedly approved” his (Kimball's) teaching. Kimball had, along with his claim of carte blanche, presented a formal outline of his own class teaching to Judge Hanna, which stated that man is God's body. Hanna may have maintained a diplomatic silence on this, but his greater familiarity with Mrs. Eddy’s methods would likely have aroused his skepticism. Mrs. Eddy’s critical approach had not allowed her to unreservedly approve of anyone’s teaching since the hard lessons she'd learned by overestimating Phineas Quimby. ** The 1968 edition of Arthur Corey’s Behind the Scenes with the Metaphysicians, page 112, displays a photocopy of a manuscript page authored by Edward Kimball. Four out of the seven Kimball assertions are together with substantial corrections by Mary Baker Eddy in her own handwriting. Two of those Kimball assertions have been identified as “a lie” by Mrs. Eddy. Our not merely nominal Leader had learned, early on, that her Cause could not sustain sacred cows. While wanting us to preserve our heritage of periodicals and luminaries, she would not want us to swallow that legacy whole. Her example of correcting, censoring and dismissing her officers, including editors of her periodicals, exemplifies her critical approach to what is now our heritage. ** One statement in Science and Health would seem to challenge the premise of incorporeal man. Page 280:25-26 states, “Rightly understood, instead of possessing a sentient, material form, man has a sensationless body...” This puzzling assertion made its debut in the first, 1875, edition of Science and Health, and remained essentially intact through all editions, despite the ridicule it incurred in such contemporary works as Cather and Milmine's McClure's Magazine series of 1907-1908, and its 1909 book format, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy. ** In Mrs. Eddy’s precise terminology, in both her first and last editions, man does not inhabit this body, but simply has it or finds it; next, it is sensationless. If Mrs. Eddy really meant that man's body is sensationless, then the eyes of man's body do not see, nor do the ears hear; neither does man use the body’s legs to move, nor its voice to speak, for that would require the complex feedback mechanism termed sensation. Whatever this body might be, it obviously is not a reflection of an omniscient God. ** Mrs. Eddy did not leave her students on their own to decipher this. She states (SH 187:27-2): “If you take away this erring mind, the mortal material body loses all appearance of life or action, and this so-called mind then calls itself dead; but the human mind still holds in belief a body, through which it acts and which appears to the human mind to live--a body like the one it had before death. This body is put off only as the mortal, erring mind yields to God, immortal Mind, and man is found in His image.” ** This is telling us of a transitional or probationary state in which we will use our bodies to relate to one another and to our environment, but will not experience ourselves as being in them. This is the resurrection. This is what Jesus experienced when he conquered death and showed himself at the last breakfast. We would then be able to see everything from any desired angle, even see our own faces. These resurrection bodies will be able to do everything our present sense of body does--eat, walk around, etc. as Jesus’ body did during his after-death appearances--but they will do so at a distance from our incorporeal (bodiless) sense of being. We will literally operate them by remote control. They will appear closer to their actual character as symbols of our identity; and much less like the solid objects they seem at present. They will walk through walls, as did the body of Jesus. ** Because we will not have light filtered by eyes, we will see brilliancy and colors we cannot now imagine. Without ears to filter out certain sounds, we will hear the music of the infinite spheres. It will feel as if “all power in heaven and in earth” had been given us. We will reach this freer, less material sense of body here or hereafter, not through death, but through probation and growth; yet even this will not be the ultimate. When we have attained to the resurrection--the complete spiritual correction of our beliefs about body--we will then progress to the ascension. At no point, however, will we transcend individuality or initiative (Mis 22:10-14). We never become anything resembling a passive body. Ascension means power, not passivity; and we are not allowed to complacently admire that power in Jesus and Mrs. Eddy. We are expected to, and eventually must, demonstrate that power ourselves. ** When John fell down to worship before the feet of the ascended Jesus (Rev. 22: 8-9), he was told: "See thou do it not." This agrees with Jesus' prior admonishing of the rich young ruler (Mt 19:17; Mk 10:18; Lk 18:19), "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God." In red letter editions, Revelation 22:9 is always in black print, a hangover from old theology. If you look closely, you'll see there's no change of speaker from Rev. 22:6 through the “Amen” in 22:20; so the entire passage is spoken by Jesus and should be in red. ** The angel of Jesus, scientifically defined, was John's spiritual perception of the ascended Jesus, rather than a middleman. Jesus had not become the body of the Father, nor was he away in some heavenly office building delegating tasks to angels. He was still present and recognizable to John’s spiritual sense. If Science and Health is really the Key to the Scriptures, we will read Revelation 22:16, “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things...” not as a portrayal of a winged postal carrier with letters from Jesus, but as: "I Jesus have revealed my exalted thoughts to give you an inspired sense of these things." (See SH 299:7 and 581:4-7) ** Jesus had formerly predicted that they who "obtain that world" of ascension which follows the resurrection (Lk 20:35-36) will all appear just as angelic as he seemed to John. How like John to outclass the Synoptic Evangelists by actually demonstrating it! This last word on the correct approach to divine service (Rev. 22:9) forbids us to put Jesus and Mrs. Eddy on a pretty little pedestal. Jesus' and Mrs. Eddy's students are commissioned, not to complacently venerate them, nor to merely do what they did, but to do even better. (SH vii:25-26; John 14:12) Could we feel inclined to live up to this awesome responsibility if we believed our ministries were not just as divinely and uniquely ordained as theirs? ** Toward the end of the textbook, in Mrs. Eddy’s analysis of Revelation, we read: “The word temple also means body. The Revelator was familiar with Jesus' use of this word, as when Jesus spoke of his MATERIAL body as the temple to be temporarily REBUILT (John ii. 21). What further indication need we of the real man’s incorporeality than this, that John saw heaven and earth with ‘no temple [body] therein’?" (SH 576:14-20) Here, toward the end of the last edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy deals a double death-blow to Lyda Hord's Body, by indicating that Jesus was required to rebuild and perfect his material belief of body before he could demonstrate that neither God nor man has a body. ** * CAN WE TREAT THE PERSON? ** * The following statements attributed to Mrs. Eddy by the Carpenters and other authentic sources indicate that it's perfectly OK to include the patient's personal corporeal body in a treatment: ** From: Mrs. Eddy's Statements to Various Students in the Pioneer Days of Christian Science: ** I always preserve in my thoughts (as I know Jesus did) the fact of actual and harmonious function of the body. ** From Five Hundred Watching Points, by Gilbert C. Carpenter Jr.: ** 388-WATCH that you do not lose sight of the need for continuous progress. Mrs. Eddy once said, "A belief of personal sense that is...governed by Truth is spiritual sense-understanding." This statement gives us the authority for a demonstration to bring out harmony in belief, providing we do not stop there... Mrs. Eddy once described Jesus' progress as follows: "Jesus [after his death on the cross] spiritualized his personal corporeal body to the extent of presenting it sound; then [and only then] he ascended, laid off his corporeality. All his mechanism was preserved and restored until the ascension. He ate with his disciples, showing that he could digest his food with his natural functions. I always preserve the above harmonious being in my thought, just as Jesus did." ** From the Blue Book p. 270-71 (as quoted from the Sentinel): ** “...a belief of health is an improvement upon a belief of sickness...Jesus...does not require the last step to be taken first...He restored the diseased body to its normal action, functions and organization...and...said, “Suffer these things to be so now,”...Job said, “In my flesh shall I see God [Good],”...as the scientific proof of God with us...The spiritual body came [some time after Jesus spiritualized his personal, corporeal body] with the [subsequent] ascension. Jesus demonstrated the divine Principle of Christian Science when he presented his material body absolved from death and the grave. THE INTRODUCTION OF PURE ABSTRACTIONS IN CHRISTIAN SCIENCE WITHOUT THEIR CORRELATIVE [I.E. WITHOUT THE PERFECTING OF THE PERSONAL, CORPOREAL BODY] LEAVES ITS DIVINE PRINCIPLE UNEXPLAINED [I.E., UNDEMONSTRATED], TENDS TO CONFUSE THE MIND OF THE READER, AND ULTIMATES IN WHAT JESUS DENOUNCED, STRAINING OUT GNATS AND SWALLOWING CAMELS. JESUS [after his death on the cross] SPIRITUALIZED HIS PERSONAL, CORPOREAL BODY to the extent of presenting it sound; then [and only then] he ascended, laid off corporeality. All his [personal, physical] mechanism [including stomach, eyes, etc.] was restored and preserved [in his personal thought] until the ascension [which could only come after his belief of body was perfected]. He ate with the disciples, showing he could digest the food with the natural functions. I always preserve the actual, harmonious being in my thought, just as Jesus did. ** Let's take a brief look again at some of the statements in Lyda Hord's Body: ** We hear a lot about spiritualizing the body through thought. Just so long as you are trying to spiritualize the body, or to heal the body through your own mental effort, just so long as you are trying to create health, you are laboring in vain, for you are trying to do God's part, to do that which has already been done. Stop trying to think God into manifestation. All that we need to do--and it will keep us busy--is to train our thought faithfully and persistently in the acknowledgment of the truth of God's presence, train it to judge righteous judgment, to see God and God only, to think God and God only. Having accepted the omnipresence, hold to it no matter what the apparent condition may seem to be. In treating yourself, never deal with appearances or symptoms. Do not center your thought upon organs or functions. Infinite substance, power, intelligence and activity are in that place and do not need your suggestions. Do not try to formulate in thought the perfect body. Stop thinking about the body or trying to picture it as perfect from your standpoint. Our highest perception of the body today is far short of what body really is. Stop tinkering with it mentally. Loose it and let it go. Just know that it is God's body... ** In contrast to the above excerpt from Body, supposedly discovered in the Library of Congress, but apparently written to make a name for herself by Lyda Hord, Mrs. Eddy clearly stated that we must, as did Jesus, first spiritualize our belief of body before we can lay it off in ascended spiritual thought. She advises us to hold in mind an actual image of a perfectly functioning human body both before and after we start understanding our nature as Spirit. Thinking God [Good] into manifestation is therefore the first step in Christian Science healing. ** If all we do is think God, God, God, our heads are, as Mrs. Eddy once admonished a student, in the clouds while the enemy fills our body with bullets. Mrs. Eddy is telling us to stop our metaphysical daydreaming, and start picturing accurately, graphically and vividly what we want. She mentions precise functions and organs--eating and digesting food. She flatly states, "Jesus spiritualized his corporeal body." She says we must center our thoughts on a perceptible image of harmonious body parts; she wants us to formulate in thought the perfect body; to actually picture it perfect from our point of view, before we try to ascend--not to simply see God and God only. Mrs. Eddy tells us that she always centered her thought upon organs and functions, picturing them harmonious, and that Jesus did too. ** Jesus' ascension above bodily experience marked the end of his personal healing ministry. The premature attempt to ascend the body will effectively end the healing career of any Christian Science practitioner. It has, in fact, effectively destroyed our movement. ** All such admonitions in this article regard Christian Science healing practice, and should not be construed as condemning out-of-body experiences such as the one described in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4. I am only reproving the misapplication of Paul’s willingness to be absent from the body (2 Cor 5:8), which he himself renounced in order to continue his ministry: "Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you. And having this confidence, I know that I shall abide and continue with you all for your furtherance [of healings] and joy of faith [understanding]." (Philippians 1:23-25) Mrs. Eddy never interpreted Paul's absence from the body as ignoring a patient in prayer; nor did Paul intend it so. The phrase "absent from the body," on page 383 of the textbook, along with: "...the Christian Scientist takes the best care of his body when he leaves it most out of his thought..." has reference to hygiene and medicine, not to spiritual healing. ** Mrs. Eddy informs us that Jesus most certainly did not think God and God only, but rather that "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals." (SH 476:32) The 19th century versions of Webster's Dictionary, as do our current versions, stressed the faculty and clearness of sight in defining "behold." Considering Mrs. Eddy's fastidious care in choosing her words, she was informing us that in his healing practice Jesus employed what is known today as eidetic imagery: Rather than clinging to an abstract, gelatinous deity, he visualized with lifelike fidelity the healing of the individual he was treating. ** Rev. G. A. Kratzer's 1908 Sentinel article, Dominion Within, opened with the ideas that, "...the endeavor to become conscious of God in His infinity is usually not the best means...Often, what we need to realize are those specific manifestations of good which, in our limited state of belief, we are more readily able to comprehend." Two days after its publication, Rev. Kratzer received from Mary Baker Eddy an autograph letter, which began, "Your article, Dominion Within, is superb." Several of Rev. Kratzer’s articles begin in this superbly workable way, and then regress into misty abstractions. Either his articles reflect the early stages of a breakthrough, or he was pulling his punches to avoid trouble with Boston. In any event, Mrs. Eddy applauded his recognition of the "need to realize...specific manifestations of good..." in our treatments. In 1913 Rev. Kratzer's practitioner card was removed from the Journal, and his name dropped from Mother Church membership by the Boston Directors. ** Bicknell Young, the last teacher of teachers appointed by Mrs. Eddy, after inculcating that his students should never picture their desired results, had no right to balk when his student John Doorly went on to fabricate a science based entirely on the manipulation of labels. A typical Doorly passage, from Volume II of his 1949 Talks given at the Oxford Summer School, reads: ** Someone has asked me, “How can I use Science?” Well, the fact is that you don’t use Science – you let it use you. What you have to do is to culture it, understand it, live it, love it, and then it uses you. Suppose somebody comes to you for help, or suppose you have a problem to work out, how should you go about it? Begin to think about God; say to yourself, for instance, “God is Mind; that means that God is all power, all wisdom, all intelligence, all action,” and ponder those ideas. Then think, “God is Spirit, – all substance, infinite divine order, the only reality,” and so on, and ponder those ideas. Then go on to the other synonymous terms. As you gain the ideas of God in that way, your thought begins to be in harmony with God, the divine Principle of all real being, and if you are in earnest you will find, just as surely as the day follows the night, that your thought develops along a certain line which uncovers the error of the situation you are treating. In proportion to your knowledge of arithmetic you are able to uncover arithmetical mistakes, but it is the truth about arithmetic which really uncovers them for you, not your thinking about it; just so, when you begin to fill your thought with the truth about God and God’s man, then the ideas of God which come to you uncover error, but the power, the being, the substance, the salvation, is in the idea, not in your thinking about it. [END OF DOORLY EXCERPT] ** The Doorly error receives a strong rebuke at the beginning of Science and Health, on page 3: "Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of mathematics to solve the problem? The rule is already established, and it is our task to work out the solution. Shall we ask the divine Principle of all goodness to do His own work? His work is done, and we have only to avail ourselves of God's rule in order to receive His blessing, which enables us to work out our own salvation." Mr. Doorly's approach makes as much sense as if after having learned basic math, one were to gaze upon a math problem on a blackboard and believe that just by his mentally reviewing the multiplication table, the problem would solve itself. ** To say that "it is the truth about arithmetic" rather than "your thinking about it" which uncovers arithmetical mistakes is just crazy! Even a casual perusal of the Britannica Great Books will reveal Euclid, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Fourier, and Faraday as doing their own thinking, rather than passively waiting for the truth of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, electricity etc. to enlighten them. It should hardly be necessary to add that a casual perusal of Science and Health likewise reveals Mrs. Eddy as doing her own thinking--unless by her statement "God wrote the book," she meant that she was a complete automaton! Six substantial revisions of the textbook would indicate either that God revised his own thinking through a robot; that Mrs. Eddy corrected God’s thinking; or that Mrs. Eddy critically examined and clarified her own thinking. Even humanly, we refer to a man whose ideas control him, rather than the other way around, as neurotic or insane. The phrase, “I will listen for Thy voice,” in Mrs. Eddy’s beloved hymn, is followed by “lest my footsteps stray,” implying intention, not vacuity. ** Man is Mind’s great idea. He is used by Mind alone. There is no other idea to equal or control him, nor can he be used by any lesser idea. As Blake, the master of contrasts, noted: "To be in a Passion you Good may Do / But no Good if a Passion is in you" [As Mind's idea, you good may do; but not to believe ideas use you!] Whatever healing Mr. Young or Mr. Doorly actually did, resulted from their clearly conceived objectives, whether they admitted it or not. ** There are gems to be found in the Doorly opusculum: His explanation of the true and false creations in Genesis is lucid; he generously shares his prodigious knowledge of how, when, where and by whom the Bible was assembled and how its parts affect one another; and he's got some great quotes and one-liners. A structural analysis of Christian Science is desperately needed, if we expect to heal as Mrs. Eddy did; but Doorly's analysis based on a handful of words snatched from Science and Health is ludicrous. Even so, I disagree with the Boston bunch excommunicating him for expressing his opinions, which were only the logical extension of Bicknell Young's limitations. ** I have read my hard copy of The Bookmark's voluminous Collection of Writings on Christian Science by Bicknell Young three times in its entirety. I have gone through several of its sections dozens of times. It's a delicious read, full of wonderful tools, but it contains serious mistakes. Here's one from the 1936 Primary Class, page 83: "You must not erect in your imagination a sick person or a well one, and then try to heal him mentally. We cannot hold a person in thought at all. You are handling cases, not people, and the belief will always yield to the fact." ** First of all, only an idiot or a madman would erect a well person in his imagination and then try to heal him, so we can discard that reference as meaningless. Next, we can agree that erecting a sick person in our imagination would be counterproductive. However, why can't we hold a person in thought at all? Where did Young get this idea? He couldn't have gotten it from Mrs. Eddy, who always preserved in her imagination the harmonious functioning of the personal belief of body, as she knew Jesus did. He couldn't have gotten it from Jesus, who beheld in Science--in his Mind--and in the language of human experience--the perfect man where sinning, sick men appear to mortals. Bicknell Young's departure from Mrs. Eddy's technique grew out of his confusing her ideology with her practice. The idea that there is no person, or only one infinite Person ('01 4:17-20) is ideological, not technical. It is meant to sound the tone and set the stage for a treatment or a lifetime; but it gives no clue as to how to give a treatment or how to live. The ban on picturing the desired result of a treatment has so permeated the field that any randomly selected Scientist, if asked, will likely tell you it originated with Mrs. Eddy. ** If Mrs. Eddy had believed it unscientific to focus on the person, our textbook would not include statements like: "An ill-tempered, complaining or deceitful person should not be a nurse...No person is benefited by yielding his mentality to any mental despotism or malpractice...No person can misuse this mental power, if he is taught of God to discern it...Then white-robed purity will unite in one person masculine wisdom and feminine love...one person cannot exist in two different states of consciousness at one time...etc." Mrs. Eddy was comfortable with focusing upon the person from a technical standpoint. She did not feel obliged to speak or think only of unchanging ideas of God vs. false concepts. She knew that the person before her was really the idea of God, pure Spirit. She wrote the textbook not to help that idea, which needs no help, but to help suffering people. Mrs. Eddy did not shoot people with the cold bullet that nothing ailed them. (SH 460:14-23) She saw their plight, and she pictured their healing. ** Have you ever considered just how our Way-shower showed us this picturing? What do you suppose he saw, when he healed blindness, deafness, etc.? What could he have seen in his Mind besides a person seeing, hearing, walking etc.? Do you believe he beheld in Science a bowl of spiritual Jell-O, or a list of metaphysical terms? When Jesus said (Mark 5:41), "Talitha cumi--Damsel, I say unto thee [to the person], arise," what do you think he beheld in Science; an abstract idea floating in the clouds? He pictured exactly what he said he pictured--the little girl rising! ** Since Mrs. Eddy calls Jesus our Way-shower, wouldn't she want us to follow him, as she did? When confronted with a case of feebleness, Jesus did not go into the Goldsmith quantum vacuum state, nor did he recite a Doorly ditty: "God is Principle--Principle is Life--Life divided by the square root of minus Christ equals Mind multiplied to the fourth power of Divine Science." You know what Jesus said: "Rise, take up thy bed and walk!" (John 5:8) To have any meaning, this command must have resulted from Jesus picturing the man before him getting on his feet, picking up his mat and walking unassisted. ** When confronted with Paul's claim of blindness, Ananias didn't flip out on Cloud Nine with God and God only. You know what he did! He first formed a perfect image in his human awareness of his patient, even before meeting him in the flesh. He addressed Paul not only by the name Paul was then known by, but by Paul’s spiritual relationship to himself. "Brother Saul" not only identified the person being treated, but placed him within the larger context of the Christian community. That word "brother," in the context of the story, shows that Ananias was including every specific detail that God had revealed to him about this particular patient. He then formed an eidetic image in his imagination of Paul being able to see, confirmed the truth of that image with his highest knowledge, not only of God, but of God's perfect man, and translated these pictures into words: "Receive thy sight!" (Acts 9:17) Significantly, Paul had a hand in his own healing, since he too clearly pictured his own healing before the treatment was formally given (Acts 9:12). We need not "sit in the silence" a la Goldsmith, and wait for a vision to descend. If we scientifically know the One Mind, we are entitled to the confidence that our mental pictures are divinely inspired. ** When Jesus said to the wind and the sea (Mark 4:39), "Peace, be still," did he believe the wind and the sea actually heard him; or did Jesus go around talking to himself? Didn't he rather say this for our benefit, so that we would know that an essential part of his treatment was a clear picture of a windless, placid sea? ** Joel Goldsmith, in The Spiritual Journey, mentions reading "unauthorized" CS literature. We need not assume that he specifically encountered Bicknell Young, even though both his and Young's writings are filled with admonitions like: "We cannot hold a person in thought at all." This straightjacketing of the imaginative faculty so quickly pervaded the field after 1910, that in the August, 1919 edition of The Herald of Christian Science, Louise Knight Wheatley, as she was then known, wrote, "When human will...and specific outlining are eliminated, we may rely upon it that we shall soon see the solution of our problem..."--as if it were sacrilege to see the solution now; as if clarity in a treatment were synonymous with human will! ** The sacred cows of Christian Science, in attempting to return the Ark of its Covenant to spiritual Israel, have, instead, stranded it in a ditch. If Mr. Young were with us today and snapped at me, as he reportedly snapped at a student, "How long are you going to linger in the relative statements?" I would like to think I could answer him: "I don't know! Maybe as long as it took Mrs. Eddy to write them--an entire human lifetime!" ** To ignore the person you're treating for is like going to the supermarket blindfolded and throwing items in your cart at random. Certainly they would all be groceries, but not necessarily the right ones. Reeling off lists of spiritual terms while leaving out the person you're supposed to be helping is like that. What would you think of a dentist who, instead of repairing your teeth, just rattled off his general knowledge of dentistry? You'd be lucky indeed to get a healing that way--although you might get a bill! ** If you have not read Robert Peel's Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age, you really must--and if you're that rare bird actually, having acquired the skills to do so, hunting for answers, you'll find them there. Its most impressive and best documented account of healing, given in the opening pages, concerns a group of evangelical faith healers, not Christian Scientists. ** This was one of Peel's books which horrified and intimidated the Boston Directors and eventually got him, like practically every other capable, intelligent thinker, ousted from the Church; and he had to go outside the auspices of his religion to get it published. Its most detailed Christian Science testimony is by my late practitioner, Doris E. Wiederkehr. I had called Mrs. Wiederkehr circa January 2000, after being dumped by a Mr. Allen, who wasn’t helping me anyway. Mr. Allen had explained that he couldn’t effectively help me because he was burdened by his too great number of patients, resulting from his alphabetical Journal listing as the first in the Los Angeles area. Logic bade me then to go to the bottom of the list, where I found Mrs. Wiederkehr. The results of her treatment were too dramatic and detailed to list here; but she remains in my estimation the only sane and efficacious Christian Science practitioner out of the several I have called upon. I turned out to be one of her last patients, for although there was nothing in her demeanor to suggest it, she passed on shortly after treating for me. It was some months after that, and getting my practically unbelievable healing, that I discovered her testimony in Peel’s book. ** Mrs. Wiederkehr’s testimony concerns an infant with multiple handicaps (including unformed vocal chords, bleeding after the slightest scratch, a damaged heart, a serious bone condition, a malformed spine and cerebral palsy), whom she and her husband adopted. Over the years, this child, Lester, whom the physicians had predicted would not survive beyond eight months, was completely healed, and grew to productive adulthood. This healing, which compares favorably with anything Jesus ever did, was accomplished by precise expectation, or what Christian Scientists today disparage as “outlining.” Included in the examples of her “outlining” which Mrs. Wiederkehr gives, are such statements as, “I didn’t want to make too much of this [demonstrated] healing we had expected. I wanted to treat it naturally...And I said [to my husband], ‘Dad, what we’ve been expecting and knowing would happen has taken place’...And he said, ‘Les is going to walk, he’s going to skip, he’s going to run [all of which would mean nothing without accompanying visual images of the person under consideration, and all of which were eventually demonstrated]’...When Jesus tells us love thy neighbor as thyself, you have to love yourself too, and that includes every [human, specific] part of you....to love yourself is to see yourself the way God [in the terms you understand] sees you.” I am certain that Mrs. Wiederkehr’s outlining for Lester and for me was part of the power behind our healings. Truly shall the first be last, and the last first. ** If David Keyston had considered the significance of the compilation of Mrs. Eddy's healings which bears his name as editor, he would not have represented the Body article on his web site as authentically by Mrs. Eddy. The Healer is filled with accounts of Mrs. Eddy's healings which portray her as clearly focusing on the person she was treating for. ** On page 39, Mrs. Linscott recounts how as a student at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College she had difficulty climbing the stairs. On one occasion, Mrs. Eddy witnessed this. She gave a sweep of her hand and commanded, "RUN UP THOSE STAIRS! Run up those stairs!" Mrs. Linscott did, and was permanently cured of the difficulty. What would have happened if instead of addressing the person, Mrs. Eddy had simply closed her eyes and recited the synonyms or listlessly listened for the voice of God? ** On page 40, there's an account of a young girl in Lynn with decayed lungs, whom the doctors had given up. No doubt Mrs. Eddy saw the girl as an undying manifestation of God, but she also ordered her out of bed, yanked the pillow out from under her and made her get dressed. The girl was healed. What if Mrs. Eddy had been so absorbed in God and God only she had ignored the person? ** On page 42, Mrs. Eddy explains how she healed a cripple: "When I looked at that man [that person], my heart gushed with unspeakable pity and prayer." Imagine! When Mrs. Eddy looked at that man, she did not immediately begin to think: "God is Mind. That means all thought, creativity, intelligence. God is Spirit. That means all substance, essence, power, etc." She undoubtedly knew something of that sort, but her precise focus was pity for that person. How many practitioners would consider that unscientific? Bicknell Young, John Doorly, Joel Goldsmith and Lyda Hord would have been scandalized had one of their students engaged in such common stuff. ** Page 53 recounts how Mrs. Eddy cured a case of blindness, while telling the young patient: "My darling, I love you, I love you! Why I could sit up all night to love you!" How many Christian Scientists, if they did not know the story was about Mrs. Eddy, would have criticized the practitioner for loving a personality rather than simply loving God and God's idea? ** UNTANGLING THE KNOT ** Shortly after Mrs. Eddy’s passing, her student Annie M. Knott, with the backing of Archibald McLellan, Editor of the Christian Science periodicals and Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Mother Church, bifurcated our Cause by opposing Edward Kimball’s erroneous pantheistic theology with her (Knott’s) own erroneous nihilistic practice. Mrs. Knott was right to take Kimball to task for his teaching that our body parts symbolize aspects of the divine absolute--an idea he got, not from Science and Health, but from Plato’s Republic; but Knott’s dismissal of the body is based on her equating it with matter--a mistake Mrs. Eddy did not make. Mrs. Knott was apparently unfamiliar with Adam Dickey’s account of Mrs. Eddy touching his body and informing him that it was not matter, but pure Spirit; not that man is God’s body, nor that body parts symbolize deific verities, but simply that where our bodies seem to be, there is God. Dickey himself never evidenced an understanding of that encounter, but instead repeated, in his famous article Possession, Kimball’s Platonic idealism. ** Mrs. Knott’s second "corrective" editorial appeared in the Christian Science Sentinel (January 10, 1914, volume XVI, page 371) and relates: ** In one of Mrs. Eddy's classes, a student remarked that she always endeavored to have the perfect body in her thought when giving treatment. Mrs. Eddy at once asked where she found her authority for such a method. The student unhesitatingly responded that it was from Science and Health, and after a little search she triumphantly read the statement on page 407, "Let the perfect model be present in your thoughts," etc. Smiling, as one would at the mistake of a child, Mrs. Eddy then asked if she regarded the body as the "model" here referred to, and the student said she had so believed up to that moment. With the utmost patience Mrs. Eddy then explained to her students that we can only perceive the divine and perfect model as we are, to quote Paul, "absent from the body" and "present with the Lord." ** On other notable occasions, as in her reminiscences included in the We Knew Mary Baker Eddy series, Mrs. Knott is careful to include not only the year and month she attended a class, but even the address where the class was given. This would have added to her credibility by inviting the agreement of her contemporaries who had attended those classes. No such markers are included in this Journal editorial, suggesting that Mrs. Knott hadn’t attended that particular class, but was at best repeating her version of hearsay. While quoting the words of the apostle Paul, she only offers an interpretive paraphrase of what Mrs. Eddy supposedly said. She contradicts Science and Health 576:14-20, which teaches that Jesus rebuilt his material body before he ascended it. ** Bicknell Young modeled his class teaching on Kimball’s version of the Platonic doctrine that every material object symbolizes some divine idea; Young then rejected Knott’s scientific theology, which correctly portrays both God and man as incorporeal; but instead of also choosing Kimball’s workable patient-centered practice, Young combined Kimball’s pantheistic theology with Knott’s mystical practice of ignoring the patient in a treatment. Since Kimball and Knott had both been favorites of Mrs. Eddy, and since Young’s teaching incorporated the major error of each of these two opponents, neither of their factions was able to entirely dismiss Young’s version, which quickly became, and still is, the Boston hierarchy’s approved presentation of Christian Science. This presentation, so easily assimilated by mortal mind, has finally terminated in the Boston Directors’ stance that “God doesn’t know anything about us;” which stance has encouraged a mass exodus of young and old from that cold and desolated tabernacle. ** Three centuries elapsed before Constantine could kill Christianity with kindness. The eminent Christian Science teachers, lecturers and writers have likewise diluted Christian Science in less than a century. Both tragedies were unavoidable, given mortal mind’s passive preference for champions instead of for individual thinking. ** We cannot magically put off the old man, any more than we can build a nuclear reactor with wishful thinking. There are steps to learn and follow in any science. If matter's dream is ENTIRELY separate from real Life (SH 14:25-26), mortals must eventually give up their naive reliance on symmetrical relations, because Life is not limited to human notions of perfection. Angelic perception hasn't yet been given us as our usual modus operandi. At our present stage of development, accurate evaluation depends mainly on asymmetrical relations; otherwise, we end up daydreaming in an imaginary straight line. Such ingrown, sterile mental masturbation has eclipsed Mrs. Eddy's intent and meaning. The parts of any--including Christian--science could no more be expected to look alike than could your eyes be mistaken for your feet (1 Cor 12:19). Humanly, we know nothing of perfection and harmony but that which appears to us in the language of imperfect human evidence. (2 Cor 4:7) ** Mortal mind wants everything symmetrically cut-and-dried, and preferably predigested. It prefers either/or choices over grappling with the facts. The Way of Christian Science is indeed narrow, and its port of entry constricting (Mt 7:14); but an unswerving Spiritward course may appear zigzag when represented in a dream. ** Mrs. Eddy would have agreed with the celebrated mathematician E. T. Bell, who wrote: “Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.” Mrs. Eddy knew that the main parts of a genuine science will exhibit asymmetrical aspects to each other. It is precisely because they do not superficially resemble each other that her theology and her practice are so complimentary. Since she understood that neither God nor man has a body, she was free to refashion what she knew to be illusory, as precisely as Michelangelo fashioned his David. “We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives.” (SH 248:26-29) Did she, or did she not, mean what she wrote? Her teaching on absolute incorporeality seems at first to contradict her patient-centered practice, and only seems consistent when critically analyzed and faithfully followed. ** The Bookmark’s collection of articles, My Grace is Sufficient for Thee, contains an excerpt from a letter by Mrs. Eddy to a student, which illustrates how her seemingly disparate theology and practice actually work together: “When you gain an understanding of the [incorporeal] Principle of sight and think of [picture] your eyes (without doubt, fear or anxiety) as improving or being perfect, that [compound] thought sinks into your inner consciousness and becomes a part of your real self, and you do not think it, you know it, for ‘as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.’” ** I do not mean to isolate or overemphasize either Mrs. Eddy’s theology or her practice. I only maintain that without its correct theology, which includes both incorporeal God and incorporeal man, Christian Science becomes hypnotic instead of regenerating; and also that without its correct practice, which includes the rebuilding and perfecting of the material belief of body, Christian Science becomes at best just another useless theory. I most certainly am not implying that picturing what you want constitutes the whole of Christian Science--only that you have the right to do so, and that it can help. ** Science and Health, page 485 states, “If thought yields its dominion to other powers, it cannot outline on the body its own beautiful images, but it effaces them and delineates foreign agents, called disease and sin.” If Mrs. Eddy meant what she wrote, it necessarily follows that if thought DOES NOT yield its dominion to other powers, it CAN AND SHOULD outline on the body its own beautiful images! We have confused Mrs. Eddy’s ideology with her practice by insisting that they look alike. Her definition of Mind as “Deity, which outlines but is not outlined,” prohibits us from picturing an embodied God, but not from picturing what we want. The unreality of any sort of body is, paradoxically, the reason we can heal our bodies while they seem to persist in their illusory half-life--not by ignoring them, but by picturing them as harmonious and knowing why they must reflect harmony. ** Today, New Agers, New Thought adherents, Christian fundamentalist faith healers, et al are apparently frequently getting their healings despite their superstitions, inaccurate metaphysics and material reliance, having adopted the eidetic imagery which Mrs. Eddy used and taught; while holier-than-thou Christian Scientists find themselves left behind with their illnesses and pretentious purity. ** When a bunny sees an apple fall from a tree, he approaches it and starts nibbling. When Sir Isaac Newton saw an apple fall, he discovered gravity. When we encounter Science and Health or any spiritually inspired proclamation, are we just “getting fed,” or are we making discoveries? Let’s listen to Science and Health and 21st century physics when they insist there are no bodies anywhere on any level--only Consciousness unfolding; and let's not pretend to a greater spirituality than we've demonstrated, but rather get our actual experience more in line with our most vivid image of human perfection, as Jesus and Mrs. Eddy did. Let's get our healings!
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