Spiritual sense and prayer

"Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality."

Intuition is the seed of desire, of prayer. Intuition speaks wordlessly to your receptive heart. It says "this is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, or when ye turn to the left." It nudges that seed-of-desire in you into an awakening feeling that something wonderful is actually possible. This gives you hope.

And Hope is not just some vague wishful thinking. The Hope that God gives you is much more solid than that. The Hope God gives you is expectancy. And expectancy is what opens that seed of prayer. Expectancy is what knows - when the night is darkest - that the dawn will come. Hope is what carries you from indulging fearful thinking into risking prayerful thinking. Hope is a glimmer of "knowing before seeing." And when Hope reaches up from the light of spiritual intuition, it is never blind. Hope right now sees the flower in your sprouting seedling prayer.

Faith, which is Hope-put-into-practice, nurtures and supports the growth of your seedling prayer. Practicing your Faith by being faithful to your expectancy over and over and over again - strengthens your Faith. Practice teaches you what works and doesn't work, what's true and what's not true, what's real and dependable and what's false and worthless. All that practice builds your Faith-muscle! And that helps your prayer grow straight and tall, blossoming into:

Understanding. And when you actually now understand your desire, your prayer, you are awake to it. You are aware of it's real meaning. Your eyes are opened, and your mind is alert, and your practice is more sure and confident than ever. You shed the driftwood dreck that might have been sticking to your prayer - tossing aside the cheap imitation answers, seeing through this misleading sidetracks, ditching the counterfeit solutions. And so your experience the beneficial results of your prayer. You demonstrate through your intuition, hope, faith and understanding, what is spiritually true. You experience something new. You feel something solid and good and wonderful. Your prayer just naturally ripens into:

Fruition. And why? Because trusting God with your desire always bears fruit. And what is the fruit of your prayer? It is always:

Reality. Yes. Reality.

You can reach this point in an instant, an hour, or a lifetime. But time doesn't matter because even right now desire is alive in your heart. And this desire, viewed rightly, is always God stirring in you, drawing you closer, awakening you to who you really are, awakening you to your likeness to Him, your at-one-ment with Him, declaring what's really true: you are God being.

Rejoice then in God as All-in-all, and you as His perfect and complete image and likeness: pure, healthy, whole, and holy. This is who you always have been and always will be. And most importantly, this is who you are now.

"For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever."
For God is infinite, all-power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all, and All.

Aspects of Reflection (Part 1)

"Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven."
Enable us to know, as in heaven, so on earth, God is omnipotent, supreme.

Isn't a mirror a good metaphor for God's will being done in earth as it is in heaven?

Think about it: a mirror creates an exact image of what is before it. Spiritually speaking then, you (as God's image and likeness) are an exact spiritual reflection of God. That means God's will - His purpose, His desire, His mandate - is mirrored in you, reflected in you, by you, as you.

Mrs. Eddy says this:

"Your mirrored reflection is your own image or likeness. If you lift a weight, your reflection does this also. If you speak, the lips of this likeness move in accord with yours. Now compare man before the mirror to his divine Principle, God. Call the mirror divine Science, and call man the reflection. Then note how true, according to Christian Science, is the reflection to its original. As the reflection of yourself appears in the mirror, so you, being spiritual, are the reflection of God."

"...so you, being spiritual, are the reflection of God." God's will done in you as it is in heaven. God's desires awakening in you as they are already truly awake in heaven. God's perfect lovely qualities active as you, as the true heavenly you, as they are in heaven.

What would this feel like? what would your life look like? How would you feel, think, act, if you understood and accepted that, by reflection, God's will is really already yours? already active as your deepest spiritual yearning? already alive as your most natural native desire to live and help others live? to love and be loved?

But what if this "mirror" is dirty? What if it's covered in sin, sickness, and death? What if there's hatred, abuse, heridity, failure, guilt, dispair scratched on its surface?

Well, that's just it: it's only on the surface of the mirror. That "dirt" never touches God or His reflection. Just as if you had toothpaste on your bathroom mirror: that toothpaste never once touches you - or your reflection. It only appears to.

So just the same, if God is intact, then you - by reflection are also intact. If the mirror (the mental state) you're seeing your reflection in is material (limited to the perceptions of the physical senses and emotions) then you're looking at yourself through a dirty mirror. You are going to think that "toothpaste" is on you. You are going to think that something is horribly wrong with you. That you have immense amounts of work to do to become whole. That there might be a long recovery from "toothpaste-itis". That maybe you are unredeemable, scarred, fatally flawed, a lost cause.

But that is never the case. That is only the view you get when you think that the toothpaste on the mirror is actually you - and not seeing that you are actually perfectly fine, and that it's just the mirror (the mental state) that needs a little spiritual Windex.

... and isn't this also exactly the case when we look at those around us? when we see them as anything less than God's own likeness?

You already know that if you change your thinking - your perspective - you begin to see things (life, love, yourself, others) differently. If you walk up the hill, you see a wider view. So likewise, if you turn away from the tooth-pastey mirror and instead start looking at yourself and the world in the mirror of Divine Science - the divine understanding of God, the divine way God sees His creation, then your "mirror" (your thinking) goes "up" - it also gets a wider perspective. It sees beyond its previous limits. You begin to see yourself more clearly, more correctly, more according to God's perspective, God's point of view of you, God's view of the whole world. If you're honest, you will begin to see that, wow, you DO look just like how God made you and all creation: whole, spiritual, holy, loved! In short, the toothpastey view gets cleaned up.

Then comes the fun part: living from that higher, that more spiritual perspective. And practicing that keeps your mirror clean and your toothpaste on your toothbrush, where it belongs.

Enable us to know, as in heaven, so on earth, God - and God's perfect will and perfect viewpoint - is omnipotent, supreme.