Someone told me not to tell anyone I was reading this book...
I was told read this book and then not to tell anyone I’d read this book for a year after.
But I’m very used to sharing.
I’m currently reading Mary Baker Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. This is the foundational book for Christian Science, which is probably the religion you’ve heard of if you’ve ever heard of someone being taken to Child Protective Services for refusing to do anything but pray for their recovery. At least that’s what the headline will read.
I’m 1.5 chapters in plus a couple of podcasts and intuitive flipping through numerous other chapters. I was gifted a complimentary book with stories of spontaneous healings through the practices and beliefs they employ, to read to Vern.
First off, it’s incredible the amount of resistance I have around Christianity, which I’ve never practiced nor tried to. My dad read a Children’s Bible to me and my brother when we were young for pragmatic cultural reasons, and it left no memorable impression on me.
On one hand, Christians often seem hypocritical, disconnected, and preachy and weird.
I do not want to be the person my friend Grant said got into his Uber and immediately asked, “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart yet?”
I told my friend Marco sincerely that if I ever seem to be a prosthelytizing (sp?) asshole that I want him to confront me so I may check in with my own sense of things about it.
On the other hand, I have felt safer in large gatherings of humans who mostly believe in God, and most of those people were Christian in some form. I suspect I feel overall safer with groups of people that practice any religion than with the chaotic mess that *some* people become without it, or with the “pure scientists” who feel zero connection to anything immaterial. There’s something empty and missing in both of them.
The Mary Baker Eddy book, and a few serendipitous encounters with walking straight by Christian Science reading rooms and then a Christian Science church, led me to actually walking through the doors. Twice so far, I have attended a church meeting.
Wednesday nights in Escondido (everywhere at Christian Science churches?), the sermon is led by a member of the congregation, who reads from the King James Bible and from Mary Baker Eddy’s works on a topic I think they decide for themselves. The last 30 minutes are reserved for passing a mic around to anyone who wants to share tales of healing or whatever is on their hearts. Very egalitarian, right?
The people I’ve met are mostly older women who have been kind, joyful, generous, and welcoming to both me and my hard questions, like, “If God made everything how can you say that some things are not of God?”
I actually was guided to a part of Science and Health this morning that held their perspective on that question —
It is sometimes said that Christian Science teaches the nothingness of sin, sickness, and death, and then teaches how this nothingness is to be saved and healed. The nothingness of nothing is plain; but we need to understand that error is nothing, and that its nothingness is not saved, but must be demonstrated in order to prove the somethingness — yea, the allness — of Truth. It is self-evident that we are harmonious only as we cease to manifest evil or the belief that we suffer from the sins of others. Disbelief in error destroys error, and leads to the discernment of Truth. [Christian Science uses the words Truth, Love, Life, and maybe a few others interchangeably with the word God - Sam] There are no vacuums. How then can this demonstration be “fraught with falsities painful to behold”?
We treat error through the understanding of Truth, because Truth is error’s antidote. If a dream ceases, it is self-destroyed, and the terror is over. When a sufferer is convinced that there is no reality in his belief of pain, — because matter has no sensation, hence pain in matter is a false belief, — how can he suffer longer? Do you feel the pain of tooth-pulling, when you believe that nitrous-oxide gas has made you unconscious? Yet, in your concept, the tooth, the operation, and the forceps are unchanged.
I have a real problem with Christian Science’s seemingly complete dismissal of the material. My interpretations of everything I’ve read so far seems to damn the body and damn the senses. And yet, I also see the point.
Perspective makes us all interpret things in insanely different ways. People pierce their skin and hang from it from hooks and experience no problems. To others, stubbing a toe is the beginning of a cascade of pain and events that leave them divorced and penniless.
What the fuck is Real?
It seems worth my time to study into what capital-T Truth is, as well as Trust, Faith, and Love.
To examine life as though the spiritual element is the most true, while simultaneously examining my fears that if I went all-in with this belief system that I would have zero fun or laugh of experience bodily pleasure any more. I don’t want that.
Maybe they’re not saying that - maybe they’re saying that pleasure is experienced on a spiritual level and this body is a hologram and I’m not actually experiencing pleasure there anyway, it’s all in the Mind (I think that’s another term for God w/them).
I’m not down with abandoning lust, but then again, I am against disembodied “sinning.” God, do I have a trigger around calling anything “sinning.”
An interesting note based on the 4-6 people I’ve met so far who are practicing Christian Scientists — compared to a short weekend at Kripalu, a highly-regarded and popular yoga school with a beautiful campus in Massachusetts — Christian Scienctists are very embodied. I think the yoga students were used to disregarding their bodies and following directions whether they understood things or not. Which makes me think, is embodiment really better described as ‘en-spiritment’ or ‘ensoulment’?
When a person is in a Part, in Internal Family Systems-speak, they aren’t in their true selves. When someone is operating under the influence of a spirit that hasn’t crossed over, they aren’t in touch with truth either. The shift occurs into their —body? Spirit? once the falsehoods being experienced by the parts that believe themselves harmed are felt, understood, and righted. Suddenly you and I can feel them landing in their bodies in greater presence. Maybe I’m already a Christian Scientist, jumping through more hoops than are necessary to get to the same places.
I have no issue discussing ghosts, or parts, or spontaneous healings, so long as they aren’t labeled with a Christian lens. Isn’t that interesting? I’m like a wolf circling with mistrustful eyes to see what will happen next and if this object before me is setting some trap meant to harm me.
I will say this — there’s a damn good point to be made in wondering why spirituality is such a nonstarter in secular medicine. “Spontaneous healings” are kept under the label of “unexplained”, as if submitting prayer as evidence is simply impossible.
Doesn’t seem very scientific, which is their point.
And if someone goes through all manner of Western medicine torture and dies, it is said that they “did all they could” as long as it was sanctified by the annointed doctors and hospitals, and no Child Protective Services will be called. The child may become hairless and sickly and die after chemo treatments that leave the family broken and destitute, and it is deemed acceptable. But praying without also doing that is unacceptable. It gives food for thought.
One thing I am sure of is that I am coming to grips with the degree of selfishness I have lived my life with thus far. I have been obsessively focused on myself and not other.
I tried out Christian Science on myself as I’ve read people doing it in the spiritual healing stories. I asked silently to be shown humility, and then ended up cutting Vern’s finger and toenails and discovering a gross, gross thing under his inflatable mattress that I’ll spare you from. I have often looked at his finger and toenails scornfully and with disgust, and yet not 60 seconds after that open prayer, I felt no internal distress about it, though I did tease a bit for sure. I was able to objectively observe that it was kinda gross without feeling like it was gross. I have often felt that jobs were below me, or that I was underappreciated, with the utmost pride and confusion. It seemed like nothing would humble me. And now I feel aware of it more than I was yesterday, or a week ago. And that feels a little more in tune with the Truth.
Can someone simply become so open to Truth as God that their pain disappears, vanquished because it was only belief in something “not real” (an “error”) that made it so? I’ve heard stories of people’s broken arms clicking back into place because they Understood. Sorry for all the capitalization, it seems the best way to convey the import and weight of actual understanding, which kind of honestly escapes MATERIAL DESCRIPTION. Dammit, Mary Baker Eddy.
I know ghosts are real, and she says they aren’t. Ha. I still have my own mind here amongst the all.
I’m not abandoning my body. Obviously we have a lot to learn together about how this shit is practically applied to a life on planet Earth. But they did say at church last week, “The sun is God, the cumulative rays are Jesus, and we are individual rays, there is no separation,” which sounds an awful lot like the interconnectivity people experience on ayahuasca or mushrooms or Alan Watts saying I’m the wave and the ocean and we are not separate, and I was ok with those things already.
I’m ok with Alan Watts but not ok talking about God through the lens of right and wrong via a specific religion as a part of that religion governing my life. Isn’t that interesting. I think it is more a fear that I will succumb to others definitions for me without having a real understanding of my own.
An assignment this week: decide something you wish to improve on, and take enough space to change and choose your reaction so that it is more in line with the way you wish to be.