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Association Family responses to call for prayer

Dear People,

I am grateful to you all for rising so quickly in thought to find the perfect Love that casts out fear.  It is divine Love that meets every human need, and your continuing work and prayer bears witness to this Christianly scientific fact. 

We will be glad to hear from anyone who wants to add to their thoughts or those who want to join in this “diapason of heart-beats.” (My 189:9)

With much affection,

  Skip 

 

Association Family responses to special request from Mojisola Solanke and her home country, Nigeria. 

Last night, the Wednesday readings were about contagion. One of the testifiers pointed out that regarding the story that was read about Jesus healing the leper, he compassionately touched the man as he healed him. (Matt 8:1-3)  The testifier remarked that the Christ-touch combated, pushed back, overcame, and dismissed at once the physical belief of contagion as well as the social stigma/belief/fear regarding this supposedly contagious disease. The implication to me is that only good is “contagious” (as in the Pentecost) as God is good and everywhere present, and the beauty of it is that the Christ, Truth, is Spirit-borne, superseding and overwhelming anything that is supposedly air-borne or otherwise physically spread. 

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As a fellow student, let’s embrace Moji and her country, Nigeria, with strength and clear-sighted conviction that dis-ease beliefs, no matter how convincingly portrayed, are nothing more than mental intruders, which when properly identified, can be negated, to dissolve into their native nothingness. Turbulence can take no toll, once it is mentally turned around, calmed, healed.

“…put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.” (Col 3:10)

“In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error, — self-will, self-justification, and self-love, — which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death. (S&H 242:15 In)

In 1968 I traveled from the States, to Nigeria, to meet a college friend who was terminating the Peace Corps. We traversed the country, by small motorcycle, buses and a “Cha-Cha bus,” which took us from Lagos to Ibadan, a 7-hour journey.  My entire stay I experienced such loving kindnesses, humility, and joy that I was so interested in their country!  Well, God cares about you Nigeria, and is holding you and yours “in the palm of His hand.”

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I turned to the Bible and found the following two Old Testament selections helpful:  

II Sam 24:18-25 and I Kings 8:37-45.  Both proclaim God’s power over the “plague.”  In the amplified edition of Mary Baker Eddy Christian Healer  (p. 192), Mrs. Eddy states that the “sacred secret of the Almighty…is spiritual Love….The sole habitat of this secret place is infinite…” and we know there is no disease in infinite Love.  In a related note on p. 580, she stated that “The secret place…is unquestionably man’s spiritual state in God’s own image and likeness…” All of Psalm 91 assures continuing protection and that “…neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”

Mrs. Eddy writes: “At a time of contagious disease, Christian Scientists endeavor to rise in consciousness to the true sense of the omnipotence of Life, Truth, and Love, and this great fact in Christian Science realized will stop a contagion.” (My 116:1)  I feel the need to deepen my understanding of God’s omnipotence and ever presence.  She reminds us in her article on “Contagion” (Mis. 228:20) that “A calm, Christian state of mind is a better preventive of contagion than a drug…and the ‘perfect Love’ that ‘casteth out fear’ is a sure defense.”  Prayer will help us all to acknowledge that we do really abide in the secret place of “man’s spiritual state in God’s own image and likeness.”

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I thought of something we worked with during my experience with the Daycroft polio crisis many years ago.

During that time, I was put into quarantine.  In other words I was isolated from the community because of a perceived dangerous contagious disease.

“Quarantine” is defined as “a state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere or been exposed to infectious or contagious disease are placed.”

However, we have the right as God’s reflection to truly “quarantine” ourselves in any situation by being alone with God and “isolating” ourselves with his goodness and Truth and Life just as Jesus did in the tomb. 

This work with “at-one-ment” with God seems to attract the ugliest and most menacing loud screams that mortal mind can utter, perhaps because it hates not to be heard from.  But as our Leader points out, Truth is supreme over error and silences it.  In my case, we were faced with graffiti, anonymous threatening phone calls, long medical appointments/lectures and some family harshness caused by the frightening newspaper press. 

So it may not necessarily be easy, but “…self-denial, sincerity, Christianity, and persistence alone win the prize, as they usually do in every department of life.” (S&H 462:15)

A hymn we used:

263 v. 3

So we find the true atonement,

Know in God the perfect Friend;

For in Love is our at-one-ment,

Where all hearts in Him may blend.

Here from prisoning pain and sorrow

Have we all a sure release,

Only God can bring us gladness,

Only God can give us peace.

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My first thought was that contagion travels on fear.  Love’s omnipresent light shines in every consciousness, displacing the darkness where fear, false gods, and all the deposits left by the material senses … human history, heredity, etc. … hide and do their devilishness.  Omnipotent Love is at work in Nigeria, halting aggressive mental suggestions and leaving nothing that can “sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed.” (S&H 340:23)

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The same divine Love that is the father of rain, “who hath begotten the drops of dew,” who bringeth “forth Mazzaroth in his season,” and guideth “Arcturus with his sons[,]” is the Father over Africa. (Job 38:28,32)

No one would imagine a steady rain couldn’t wash away dust. We cannot imagine that the steadiness of love — Love’s love — can’t wash away the seeming wave of fear.

Africa is just as much under the guardianship of God, Truth, as was Jesus and all his disciples.  The love of God is ever-present, is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.  It cools the fevered fears of seeming mortality.  It establishes the rule of harmony and health, of good and calm, as the natural and everlasting expression of Principle.

Man was never born into matter and therefore cannot fear living in matter, among sickness.  Health is the natural estate of the perfect idea of God, and each and every child of God is a perfect idea. 

Love reigns; and love rains across the fears, washing mortals clean of their fears. It blesses all Her children.  It blesses all mankind and frees us, and our brethren, of all that is unlike God (and therefore unlike ourselves).

God is the right Mind of all mankind. We see ourselves and our brethren as whole, fearless, free.  Africa is held by God as much as the dews or a constellation — under the control of God as much as the earth, which was set in orbit by Mind.

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Excerpts from Wednesday readings from a current First Reader

The Bible

Ps 41: 8 An evil disease, say they, cleaveth fast unto him: and now that he lieth he shall rise up no more.

Jer 32:17 Ah Lord God! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee:

Isa 59:19  When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him.

Isa 43:1  Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.

Ps 91: 2 - 6 I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. 

Matt 4: 23 - 24 And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy;   and he healed them.

John 14:12-13 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.

And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.   If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy

SH 12:32   In divine Science, where prayers are mental, all may avail themselves of God as “a very present help in trouble.”  Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.”

SH 559:8-16    The “still, small voice” of scientific thought reaches over continent and ocean to the globe’s remotest bound. The inaudible voice of Truth is, to the human mind, “as when a lion roareth.” It is heard in the desert and in dark places of fear.  It arouses the “seven thunders” of evil, and stirs their latent forces to utter the full diapason of secret tones.  Then is the power of Truth demonstrated, — made manifest in the destruction of error.   

 SH 540:11  In moral chemicalization, when the symptoms of evil, illusion, are aggravated, we may think in our ignorance that the Lord hath wrought an evil; but we ought to know that God’s law uncovers so-called sin and its effects, only that Truth may annihilate all sense of evil and all power to sin.

 SH 176: 13  When the mechanism of the human mind gives place to the divine Mind, selfishness and sin, disease and death, will lose their foothold.

 SH 521:12  The harmony and immortality of man are intact.  We should look away from the opposite supposition that man is created materially, and turn our gaze to the spiritual record of creation, to that which should be engraved on the understanding and heart “with the point of a diamond” and the pen of an angel.

Hymns 123, 271, 218

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Since receiving your request that we contribute our spiritual support to combating the belief of an Ebola outbreak in Africa, I have prayed about it in a number of different ways.  What came to me most recently is this sentence from Science and Health, by Mary Baker Eddy, “The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man.” (284:31-32)  The knowledge that God is always and only communicating good to us nullifies the possibility of any supposed communicable (i.e., “capable of being communicated”) disease! 

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law in her retirement spends half the year in Kenya working with the local population on implementing improvement projects in education, agriculture, health care, and water supply.  A few days ago she sent me a message with the subject heading, “America needs a big dose of Christian Science.”  She expressed the hope that “you are using your Christian Science beliefs around Ebola” as she prepares to return to Kenya next month.  You can imagine how grateful I was to be able to respond to her that our entire Association had been asked to pray about the situation, and to know that our prayers are effective!

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