Day 4

1-3:3


My Initial Thoughts
Prayer is the first main chapter in the Science and Health. When I started reading S&H as a child, I didn't realize how vastly different pray in Christian Science was from other religions. Now I think of Christian Science as a quiet religion because there is no chanting of prayers or other dramatic happenings. No beads. No candles to light. No incense.

How I read the passages

The passages in these two pages cover the motive of prayer (1st paragraph of page 2), the means of accomplishing the prayer (page 1, line 6-9), and most importantly what prayer is not (page 2, line 8 to page 3 line 3).

New Vocabulary for me

I looked up self-immolation. I had a sense of the word but I wanted to look at the actual meaning. I used dictionary.com which was the wrong thing to do - self-sacrifice. Then I switched over to thesaurus.com and it got worse - hari kari or self suicide. I've always assumed it meant selflessness or unselfishness.

What Caught My Eye

"Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-immolation, are God's gracious means for accomplishing whatever has been successfully done for the Christianization and health of mankind." 

I took class instruction a few years back. Sitting in a room of people reading Science and Health is great because I got all those different perspectives. Before class instruction, I would have quickly read over the following sentence. But my teacher pointed out a different idea on how to read it.


In this Internet age, we are used to bullet points and lists to feed us the important points so I read a list like this and see:

Effective prayer is:

1. Pray
2. Watch/Listen
3. Work
4. Be unselfish - put others first

Items 1, 1 and 3 seem straightforward to me. The third item in the list, work, is tricky. What does that mean to me?  It doesn't mean have a job, but it could mean have a purpose. Or it could mean do something, move forward, get on with it. Or it could mean put my thoughts into action. When the new ideas come to me, don't ignore them. Don't let them slide off into oblivion with the rest of the noise in my head.

My Journey So Far
So here is my 9th post on this blog. What do you think?

I'm still feeling my way through it. I've talked to a couple of people about this blog and the idea of reading the book in a year but I'm feeling very alone with it right now. I read the 2 pages at night and mull it over then blog the next day. 2 pages is nothing, less than five minutes. If I wasn't trying to figure out what to write in the blog, I probably wouldn't remember what I read. But now I have to slow down and think about it. I like that part - thinking about it.