A story worth retelling!
By Alex Cook via Time4Thinkers.com
For the past six years, I’ve served as a volunteer chaplain at a jail in Boston. During that time I’ve seen, beyond a doubt, that the qualities of God are alive and well, living and being lived in these places which would otherwise be very dark. Lots of people, when they go to jail, find themselves face to face with their mistakes and their problems, and want very badly to get past them.
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Family gatherings can be difficult times for many. How do you feel a sense of God’s presence and love during the holidays? God is the Source of each one’s individuality, so we can all know — spiritually discern — that we are each loved equally despite what may have gone on before.
Pure humanity, friendship, home, the interchange of love, bring to earth a foretaste of heaven.1
Our identity, feeling worthy and loved doesn’t actually come from other people, although sometimes friends and family can beautifully reflect how worthy, lovely and lovable we all are. These expressions of joy and appreciation are natural and normal and are signs of God, divine Love’s, kingdom on earth.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.2
Relationships are a good opportunity to dissolve what Mary Baker Eddy calls the “adamant of error”: self-will, self-justification and self-love3 ; the old adage “my way or the highway” mentality; self-righteousness, which wreaks havoc on all of us; then of course there’s just plain old judgement.
Christ Jesus was the perfect example of living and expressing spiritual love.
After washing their feet, he put on his robe again and sat down and asked, “Do you understand what I was doing? You call me ‘Teacher’
and ‘Lord,’ and you are right, because that’s what I am. And since I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you…Now that you know these things, God will bless you for doing them.4
God will bless you for doing them! God will bless you for putting off old resentments. God will bless you for being humble enough to be made new — in the likeness of God!
You deserve to express divine Love — not hold on to the past or limited views of others (that God is not knowing about them). Self-hatred is what makes us feel we are not worthy or loved enough to let go of hatred towards others! We are worth it! Let it go.
Spiritual living and blessedness are the only evidences, by which we can recognize true existence and feel the unspeakable peace which comes from an all-absorbing spiritual love. 5
Feel that unspeakable peace. It is God’s spiritual love wrapping you up and enabling you to move past hurt, condemnation, resentment. You are holy! You are free. You can feel that way by seeing others that way.
________
1 Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 100
2 Matthew 6:10 The Holy Bible New Revised Standard Version
3 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 242
4 John 13 The Holy Bible New Living Translation
5 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 264
The United States has seen several mass shootings in the last few years in schools, universities, a movie theater and places full of innocent people.
The most recent shooting in Santa Barbara caused me to consider: what can we do better? What can our country do better?
The answer to me is: to see each other as the spiritual reflections of God.
We have all seen a reflection — it mirrors the original. So man (including all of us) is the mirror image of God, though not the original.
“All that God imparts moves in accord with Him, reflecting goodness and power…As the reflection of yourself appears in the mirror, so you, being spiritual, are the reflection of God…God fashions all things, after His own likeness. Life is reflected in existence, Truth in truthfulness, God in goodness, which impart their own peace and permanence.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 516)
To me, this means that man reflects the beauty, grace and goodness of God. When we see our neighbor, our parents, and our children, we can see them in this light. Seeing their spiritual identity, we know that hatred, fear, sin, etc. are a counterfeit impression of who they really are.
So what can we do better? Love more. Love the way God loves by seeing His creation as we really are — made in His/Her “image and likeness”.
No one is excluded. No division. No separation.
St. Paul writes,
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35-39).
Nothing — no place, no person, no experience — can separate us from the Love of God or the love that we can express towards each other.
Spirituality & Healing 