Our Home
April 30, 1998
Fulfilling the different demands of their united spheres, their sympathies should blend in sweet confidence and cheer, each partner sustaining the other,--thus hallowing the union of interests and affections, in which the heart finds peace and home.
Home has many meanings. It is the place where we now live, where we are from and where we feel most comfortable. "A house does not make a home," so there is something in addition to a house that makes a home — perhaps it is the relationships involved. The relief we feel when told to "make yourself at home" indicates how deep the desire is for safety, comfort, and the freedom to be oneself. "Home is the dearest spot on earth," advises Mrs. Eddy (Science and Health, pg. 58:21). The work in Christian Science is to rescue home, in whatever form, from the grasp of matter or dualism with all the attendant suffering, and let it unfold out from God.
Mrs. Eddy links home to heaven, as shown in the Glossary definition of Jerusalem (see Science and Health, pg. 589). " Home, heaven" comes only after all the horrors of personal sense have been unveiled. Anyone raised in a dysfunctional home, living in one now, or indeed involved in any matter-based metaphorical representation of home can attest to the validity of these descriptions before Science is brought to bear.
In the so called Blue Book of unpublished writings, Mrs. Eddy say on page 145, "A realization of a perfect spiritual home will make our present home better." Christ Jesus strongly recommended that we build our house or consciousness on the rock of divine understanding, not mere belief (see the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7: 24-27). The book of Revelation in the Bible and the chapter on "Apocalypse" in Science and Health show the healing energies released by pondering the New Jerusalem (i.e. God consciousness). In short, let Heaven be our only home, and this will form us anew.
Healings:
One attendee located valuable lost papers after realizing that the information was lodged in Mind and that no piece of matter could control him.
Another participant was very disturbed by non-receipt of his lease renewal, but with the help of a Christian Science practitioner, used the energies of our topic Home to understand where he and all really live. The emergence of troubling paranoid fantasies was seen as chemicalization and dissipation of entrenched beliefs. Peace was re-established and the landlord appears to be moving along with the renewal.
One member recalled a healing of self-destructive drug and alcohol addictions, as well as the effects of a car crash, through the dedicated work of a practitioner while he lay unconscious.
Another reported that, after 35 years, he had thanked his local church (during the Wednesday Evening Testimony Meeting) for aiding him one Sunday, when he seemed to pass on during the service, after a particularly bad time with his lover . An usher worked with him until he decided not to go into the of comforting white light he saw before him, but to return to face his current difficulties with life.
Problem Solving
Almost all Gay men and Lesbians have painful memories of growing up in homes where their most intimate feelings were hated, and may, therefore, have had to move away from dear ancestral places just to survive and let their identities blossom. This can make us bitter but can give us the ability to empathize with peoples pushed from their homelands (e.g. Jews, Palestinians, African Americans,various people in the Indian sub continent, Hutu Tutsi and so forth).
The following readings, compiled by one of our members to address the upcoming disruption at our Lesbian and Gay Center — our church home — as refurbishment is undertaken, might also be helpful in healing the deep aches of displacement felt by many today. He asks the question "What is Divine Love manifesting in the process of exile and renewal of our church home?" And the answers show through the following quotations from Science and Health:
- 58: 21-23
- 254: 31-32
- 203: 32-1
- 262: 9-16
- 454: 18-2
- 565: 29-11
- 581: 8 (definition of Ark)
- 583: 12 (definition of Church)
- 593: 4 (definition of Prophet)
- 595: 7 (definition of Temple)
- 597: 16 (definition of Wilderness)
- 573: 13 to 577: 31
man, left to the hypotheses of material sense unexplained by Science, is as the wandering comet or the desolate star—"a weary searcher for a viewless home."
much is forgiven them.
Did the careless doctor, the nurse, the cook, and the brusque business visitor sympathetically know the thorns they plant in the pillow of the sick and the heavenly homesick looking away from earth,—Oh, did they know!—this knowledge would do much more towards healing the sick and preparing their helpers for the "midnight call," than all cries of "Lord, Lord!" The benign thought of Jesus, finding utterance in such words as "Take no thought for your life," would heal the sick, and so enable them to rise above the supposed necessity for physical thought-taking and doctoring; but if the unselfish affections be lacking, and common sense and common humanity are disregarded, what mental quality remains, with which to evoke healing from the outstretched arm of righteousness? If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one
If you launch your bark upon the ever-agitated but healthful waters of truth, you will encounter storms. Your good will be evil spoken of. This is the cross. Take it up and bear it, for through it you win and wear the crown. Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven; stranger, thou art the guest of God.
JERUSALEM. Mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporeal senses; the pride of power and the power of pride; sensuality; envy; oppression; tyranny.
In divine Science, the material man is shut out from the presence of God. The five corporeal senses cannot take cognizance of Spirit. They cannot come into His presence, and must dwell in dreamland, until mortals arrive at the understanding that material life, with all its sin, sickness, and death, is an illusion, against which divine Science is engaged in a warfare of extermination. The great verities of existence are never excluded by falsity.
The Revelator was on our plane of existence, while yet beholding what the eye cannot see,—that which is invisible to the uninspired thought. This testimony of Holy Writ sustains the fact in Science, that the heavens and earth to one human consciousness, that consciousness which God bestows, are spiritual, while to another, the unillumined human mind, the vision is material. This shows unmistakably that what the human mind terms matter and spirit indicates states and stages of consciousness.
Oneness in spirit is Science, compatible with home and heaven.
Who lives in good, lives also in God,—lives in all Life, through all space. His is an individual kingdom, his diadem a crown of crowns. His existence is deathless, forever unfolding its eternal Principle. Wait patiently on illimitable Love, the lord and giver of Life. Reflect this Life, and with it cometh the full power of being. "They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of Thy house."
Built by the word of His command,
With His unclouded presence blest,
Firm as His throne the bulwarks stand;
There is our home, our hope, our rest.
Dwelling in Love that cannot change,
From anxious fear man finds release;
No more his homeless longings range,
God keepeth him in perfect peace.
Here, O God, Thy healing presence
Lifts our thoughts from self and sin,
Fills with light their hidden places,
When Thy love is welcomed in.
Here Thy tender sweet persuasions
Turn us home to heavenly ways,
While our hearts, unsealed, adoring,
Pour the fragrance of Thy praise.
MOTHER'S EVENING PRAYER
O gentle presence, peace and joy and power;
O Life divine, that owns each waiting hour,
Thou Love that guards the nestling's faltering flight!
Keep Thou my child on upward wing tonight.
Love is our refuge; only with mine eye
Can I behold the snare, the pit, the fall:
His habitation high is here, and nigh,
His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.
O make me glad for every scalding tear,
For hope deferred, ingratitude, disdain!
Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear
No ill,—since God is good, and loss is gain.
Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing;
In that sweet secret of the narrow way,
Seeking and finding, with the angels sing:
"Lo, I am with you alway,"—watch and pray.
No snare, no fowler, pestilence or pain;
No night drops down upon the troubled breast,
When heaven's aftersmile earth's tear-drops gain,
And mother finds her home and heav'nly rest.
Home is the dearest spot on earth, and it should be the centre, though not the boundary, of the affections.
Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven; stranger, thou art the guest of God.
God is at once the centre and circumference of being.
We cannot fathom the nature and quality of God's creation by diving into the shallows of mortal belief. We must reverse our feeble flutterings—our efforts to find life and truth in matter—and rise above the testimony of the material senses, above the mortal to the immortal idea of God. These clearer, higher views inspire the Godlike man to reach the absolute centre and circumference of his being.
Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way. Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action. Love is priestess at the altar of Truth. Wait patiently for divine Love to move upon the waters of mortal mind, and form the perfect concept. Patience must "have her perfect work."
Do not dismiss students at the close of a class term, feeling that you have no more to do for them. Let your loving care and counsel support all their feeble footsteps, until your students tread firmly in the straight and narrow way. The superiority of spiritual power over sensuous is the central point of Christian Science. Remember that the letter and mental argument are only human auxiliaries to aid in bringing thought into accord with the spirit of Truth and Love, which heals the sick and the sinner.
Revelation xii. 6. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God.
As the children of Israel were guided triumphantly through the Red Sea, the dark ebbing and flowing tides of human fear,—as they were led through the wilderness, walking wearily through the great desert of human hopes, and anticipating the promised joy,—so shall the spiritual idea guide all right desires in their passage from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual, up to the glory prepared for them who love God. Stately Science pauses not, but moves before them, a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading to divine heights.
ARK. Safety; the idea, or reflection, of Truth, proved to be as immortal as its Principle; the understanding of Spirit, destroying belief in matter.
CHURCH. The structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle.
PROPHET. A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth.
TEMPLE. Body; the idea of Life, substance, and intelligence; the superstructure of Truth; the shrine of Love; a material superstructure, where mortals congregate for worship.
WILDERNESS. Loneliness; doubt; darkness. Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence.