Day 287: Place & Time

556:3-557:27

As I read this section, I thought about the classes I took yesterday (unrelated to C.S.). They were about being keenly aware of place and time -- how to put a reader into story place and time. One of the speaker’s advised the audience to be “ruthless in self-examination.” I thought how funny – that’s what I’m studying in Christian Science.

These pages are about getting beyond or without place and time. Holy habitation.

The discussion yesterday was about how the reader must perceive an opinion about place and time from the writer. This grounds the reader in the material story world. In order to drop the materiality in my own life, to reach higher, I need to drop the concept of place and time (and my opinion of it). Of course, the first place and time is home.

I need to work on home:

1. the Word of Life, Truth, and Love
2. Christ, the spiritual idea of God
3. Christianity
4. Christian Science

Day 286: Sackcloth

574:3-576:7

 

Think of this, dear reader, for it will lift the sackcloth from your eyes, and you will behold the soft-winged dove descending upon you. The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares.

Day 285: States and Stages

572:3-574:2

In this reading Mary Baker Eddy discusses the idea that your consciousness opens, loving and looking toward the spiritual. That this change in direction and movement away from material, reveals the new heaven and new earth.

These are not new ideas but are brought up over again and again in the book.

I thought how a state or stage has a duration. I may be here for a while. It’s funny how much I ask my children to listen to me repeatedly but I don’t ask myself to listen to God nearly enough.

Day 284 Sin chasing Mortal Man

569:29-572:2

The image of the dragon sending water to wash the woman away is an interesting image. Mary Baker Eddy spends this reading discussing reporting evil as well as good:

Many are willing to open the eyes of the people to the power of good resident in divine Mind, but they are not so willing to point out the evil in human thought, and expose evil’s hidden mental ways of accomplishing iniquity.

Then she advises:

Escape from evil, and designate those as unfaithful stewards who have seen the danger and yet have given no warning.

Day 283: Questions for the Audience

567:14-569:28

The book of Revelation is almost completely unfamiliar to me. In reading this chapter, The Apocalypse, I don’t know what is going to happen next in the biblical text. This is the first chapter where I have had to read and re-read to figure out what is going on biblically and from Mary Baker Eddy’s explanation.

The point she makes that I was most unaware of, so far, is that Genesis and Revelation both start with true stories and then proceed with false stories. So just for clarification, where does the true Revelation story start and end? If you know, please comment below.

She comes back to two points that are interesting but have been a while since she mentioned:

• Self-abnegation is a rule in Christian Science
• He that [1] touches the hem of Christ’s robe and [2] masters his mortal beliefs, animality, and hate, rejoices in the proof of healing

What does she mean by touches the hem of Christ’s robe? Is the figurative interpretation that someone reaches out for Christ?

Day 282: At War with an Idea

565:6-567:13

Mary Baker Eddy makes an interesting point at the end of this reading:

Against Love, the dragon warreth not long, for he is killed by the divine Principle. Truth and Love prevail against the dragon because the dragon cannot war with them.

The dragon is at war with Love but he is killed by divine Principle. Materiality cannot destroy an idea. There have certainly been, and still are plenty of dictators, tyrants, and politicians willing to disprove this.

The idea remains.

Day 281: The Subtle Serpent

562:22-565:5

The great red dragon in the Apocalypse and the talking snake in Genesis are compared in this reading. The great red dragon is scary and standing there waiting to be noticed in his massiveness while the talking snake is just a lowly, snake – almost avoidable.

Mary Bakery Eddy uses the word harmony twice in this reading. I can see how both the snake and the dragon are totally about disrupting harmony. If you get by the snake, there’s always the dragon. You won’t ever make it by him – so he wants you to think.

I marked the questions MBE poses at the top of 563 because when she writes out the issues like that, they seem silly, and I remember they’re silly. Which helps – when I see the dragon.

Day 280: Points to Remember

560:6-562:21

In this reading, Mary Baker Eddy noted a few points that I wanted to remember:

• the grand necessity of existence is to gain the true idea of what constitutes the kingdom of heaven in man
• without the correct sense of its highest visible idea, we can never understand the divine Principle
• Ignorance of the divine idea betrays at once a greater ignorance of the divine Principle of the idea – ignorance of Truth and Love.
• The understanding of Truth and Love…leads to the discernment of the divine idea.

Day 279: Sweet & Bitter

558-560:5

Today is the first day of the chapter, The Apocalypse. Not my favorite chapter. Mary Baker Eddy makes a point in this reading that when reading this book, at first it will taste sweet when it heals but the Truth, afterward, may be bitter.

I’m either not there yet or past that point. It seems like as I read the book now, I understand it differently every time and I’m having different challenges in my life to apply it to. The whole experience has mellowed into wanting to understand, then understanding.

Although, the farther into the book I get, I’m getting excited  -- only because new ideas are jumping out of the text.

Are you in a sweet or bitter moment?