A New Year's Resolution (2010)

For many well-intentioned and perhaps guilt-nagged souls the musty tradition of new year's resolutions is, I suspect, little more than the opportunity to have a self-satisfying workout with the Styrofoam weights of good intentions and the relief of knowing that sweat and strain will not need to mar, like fire ants at a Fourth of July picnic, the experience. What should be done should be done today, if possible, not delayed to some distant and convenient future day when it can easily be trifled with, forgotten, or left to molder in the bottom of a "honey-do" basket. We may think we live in more benign times than the unconcealed depravity and cruelty of the early Christian era, but seething beneath the whitewashed surface of our seemingly more civilized centuries are insidious and malignant evils which will, if not corrected or destroyed, engulf mankind.

The great red dragon has, we are told, seven heads and ten horns, so we are not looking at some readily defined Goliath, but something more akin to a mental army of hugger-mugger plug-uglies intent on more than busting a few kneecaps. One manifestation of these evils is an age of narcolepsy, insomnia, or a seemingly inoffensive refuge in the teddy bear of sleep. Mrs. Eddy once wrote in one of her "watches": "Watch that M.A.M. does not dull your thought to the clear Word of God. I gave so much to your class--my last class--and so little has been done with it! Why? Because sleep overcomes the thought. Students must be watchers against the 'thief that cometh in the night'.

To which it seems wise to add the admonition Jesus repeated: "Physician, heal thyself." If one is not already committed to being his own physician, it is one new year's resolution he can wisely make--if kept. An understanding and demonstration of Christian Science cannot be postponed forever, so why do so for another year or lustrum or decade? Someone once pointed out in an old Sentinel, I think, that turning reflexively to a C.S. practitioner for help and then returning after healing or alleviation of the problem to business as usual is using Christian Science as a material medicine. Christ Jesus required his followers to "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils", not habitually to seek out the aid of those faithful workers who do it.

Note: A reader gave the definition of mithridatism in a comment to that entry. Since I wasn't intending its meaning exactly, I modified it with malignant. We certainly do not wish to become immune to mortal mind's pernicious effects. My intent was to caution against the very real danger of becoming immune to the deleterious effects of an increasing, imperceptible acceptance of the so-called laws and claims of mortal mind, which then assume aggressive legitimacy in the arrogated plumage of one's false beliefs.