Christian Science Perspective audio edition

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It’s that time of year when the glossy catalogs showcasing my community’s continuing education offerings have begun landing in mailboxes. With them usually comes a message about the lifelong opportunity to expand our horizons by learning new things.

How true that is – not just in subjects like music and languages, but also in our spiritual progress. In fact, my practice of Christian Science has shown me that the truly horizon-expanding education isn’t just in studying religion like an academic subject. It’s in more deeply knowing and understanding God.

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this publication, was an ardent student of the Bible and found it indispensable to her spiritual search and eventual discovery of the Science of being, which she called Christian Science. But it was more than just the words of a spiritual text that impelled this paradigm-shifting sense of God to dawn for her. As she explained it, “The Scriptures had to me a new meaning, a new tongue. Their spiritual signification appeared; and I apprehended for the first time, in their spiritual meaning, Jesus’ teaching and demonstration, and the Principle and rule of spiritual Science and metaphysical healing” (“Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 25).

It was something beyond mere human insight or understanding that opened these vistas for Mrs. Eddy. It was a palpable, practical, alive sense of what God is and all that means for us as His children, not created materially, but spiritually. She experienced something of the living presence of God and that changed her – healed her. She then spent the rest of her life working to demonstrate, articulate, and teach this profound discovery so that the rest of us could likewise experience more of God, good, and the spiritual laws that undergird and govern our lives.

To those who asked how they could progress most rapidly in their own understanding, she left, in part, these instructions: “Study thoroughly the letter and imbibe the spirit” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 495). In my life, I’ve come to see that as getting beyond the head to the heart. Not just learning and thinking about God, but reaching for more of an experience of God: to feel the love of God as Love, the life-sustaining power of God as Life, the harmonizing of God as Soul. To listen to, trust, and follow God because God is infinite intelligence, Mind.

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Oftentimes, concepts that start out as interesting ideas that I’ve gleaned from my study of the Bible and Science and Health take root and blossom as I ask God for help in getting a less academic, and more spiritual, sense of what they mean. For example, I spent a full year praying about what it means that God is Life. As I did, that idea went from feeling like notes on a page in a musical score to becoming like the music behind those notes – shimmering and singing to me in the most wonderful ways. At the end of that year, I even discovered that I didn’t need to wear glasses anymore, just because I’d been perceiving more clearly that God is Life itself.

The continuing education that opens up new views of God to us has no season or registration deadline. It’s there to be experienced daily, as we open our hearts and let God show us who we and He truly are.

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