Which came first, the love or the hug?
The love. The hug is the love made manifest. So it is with God and Christ. God is Love. Christ is Love made manifest. In fact, you could say that Christ is God hugging the world.
"Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."
Let this Mind embrace you as it did Christ Jesus. Let this Spirit, Life, Truth, Love embrace you as it did Christ Jesus.
The funny thing is, you can embrace - hug - love, without really knowing what love is. But by the mere fact of embracing love whenever you can however much you're able, again and again, you begin to learn what love means. By doing so, you discover that you're embracing love in your heart.
Then you begin to feel love and to recognize it. And now you are embracing love in your heart and in your thoughts. You begin to actually look for love. And you begin to wake up to understand that all that time, all through all that struggle, you were just letting go of your sense of separation. Divine Love was actually hugging you the whole time.
And then by being open to practicing love yourself, you wake up to what has really always been going on: Love, God, embracing YOU, God's own precious spiritual creation. Then you not only know love in your heart, and in your thoughts, but inevitably, in your arms - embracing all those around you, fulfilling God's commandment: love another as yourself.
You could say that this is Christian Science "practice."
"Forgive us our debts (our seeming lack of love) as we forgive our debtors (forgive those that we think haven't have loved us)."
Love is (always) reflected in love.
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2 comments:
Mark,
Great post! Reading your post reminded me of a text I consult often. It's by MBE and it exemplifies the "practice" of forgiveness in Christian Science. It's a bit long, but SO worth it.
Mary Baker Eddy's Lessons of the Seventh Day, compiled by Richard Oakes, p. 339-340
I have learned a great secret.
I have learned how to demonstrate, I have learned how to make Science a thing of life, not of words.
I am going to tell you what the secret is, and it is wonderful.
It is this: Not to see or hear or repeat any kind of imperfection.
It is seeing and hearing and repeating good only, at all times and under all circumstances, and in spite of everything that appears to the contrary.
I make this resolve every morning, when I first open my eyes, and I renew it every hour of the day.
I see perfection in myself in my friends, in my so-called enemy, in my affairs and in world affairs.
I take my radical stand for the perfection of God and everything and for everything and everybody He has created. I look upon the world with God's eyes and see it just as He sees it, and I refuse to see it in any other way.
I stop a dozen times a day, and renew the resolve, and make sure that I am not repeating error or giving way to criticism. I watch my thoughts about people, the lame, the old, the unloved to sense that I pass in the street, stray animals, I except nothing. I have taken my radical stand for perfection and I will not, absolutely will not, relax this perfect standard.
The result has been simply marvelous. Try it and you will find that you forget your glasses; they will become unnecessary.
You will be seeing with God's eyes, His perfect sight, and you will behold a perfect universe, the outward condition of your inward thinking. To change the picture you must change the sight that produced the picture.
Aileen, what a beautiful lesson! And thank you so much for sharing it. I have been pondering this statement from Science & Health a lot lately (and it's so tied to the Lord's Prayer): "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man, the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." I think this is exactly what Mrs. Eddy is saying in this lesson that you shared.
And I have been consciously working on this same thing: whatever I see wherever I go, to see God's likeness because that is actually the only correct view there is (and it is all in consciousness). I did this in a meeting I had yesterday and felt my fear of public speaking evaporate. How can you be afraid of speaking to God? God is All-presence - so how can we be afraid? Feeling and knowing that is prayer: Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom is come; Thou art everpresent - in consciousness, as consciousness.
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