Sunday, June 28, 2009

Hearing Truth's Susurrus Loud and Clear

My apologies for the (perhaps welcome) hiatus--assuming anyone noticed and cares enough to return and read this belated entry. Lives have become far too complex and frantic. We probably have at least 50 electric motors, large and small, in this house and its contents, the majority of which hum along efficiently and reliably day after day, but with that many motors and their attendant compressors, appliances, and devices, lawns and plantings and their innumerable biological afflictions, water, electricity, and gas with their respective meters spinning ever, it seems, a toute vitesse, one's home can readily become, without good metaphysical work, the devil's rec room.

Akira Kurosawa's superb film Ran (chaos), a masterpiece, is his retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, as his magnificent Throne of Blood is a retelling of Macbeth. Both of these films are set in Japan's chaotic medieval period and testify, in part, to mortal mind's hidden conspiracy to assert itself and drown out goodness, love, and peace. If permitted to do so, tumult will indeed drown out, in our consciousness, Truth and its still small voice.

Why doesn't Truth drown out error with an even louder voice? Why does Truth seem to speak sotto voce? Well, first of all, Truth's omnipotence and omnipresence do not compete with anything, being All. The comptition for attention is in our thinking. Mrs. Eddy tells us we must "silence the material senses". (S&H 15:16) When prayerfully listened for and heard "The inaudible voice of Truth is, to the human mind, 'as when a lion roareth.'" (S&H 559:10-11) So it is perfectly audible to the receptive thought, but often the din of material existence seems to drown it out. We cannot afford to suppose that Truth is ever drowned out by anything, even for a moment. It can only be our disobedience to God which deafens us to Him and turns up the volume on cacophanous human activity.

False belief, personal sense, always plays with a cold deck, and we must quit taking that tempting seat at its card table and again and again tossing our ante hopefully into the pot. It is a game no one ever wins but the house of error. If we haven't already done so we would be wise to "Be still and know that I am God", or "Let be then: learn that I am God". (The New English Bible)

Monday, June 15, 2009

Divine Direction Disrobes Depraved Delights

Surely one of the most original and fantastic masterpieces ever painted is Hieronymus Bosch's preternatural and phantasmagoric triptych "The Garden of Delights" or "The Garden of Earthly Delights". Yet the title is undeniably sardonic, ironic, saturnine, since if these are earthly delights one would shrink from his depiction of earthly horrors. One of the panels is even thought to be a depiction of hell. One writer says the painting's purpose is " . . . to depict man's life on earth as an unending repitition of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, whereby we are all doomed to be the prisoners of our appetites." (H.W. Janson, History of Art, 1969, p. 299) Another writer says: "Bosch seems to show erotic temptation and sensual gratification as a universal disaster . . . ." (Helen Gardner, Art Through the Ages, 5th edition, p. 525) Does not Bosch's surreal vision reveal the truth about the material delights mankind seems to indulge and revel in?

Many years ago a friend, Lewis Meyer, an erstwhile bibulous bibliophile, wrote a book titled Off the Sauce about his struggles with that all-too-prevalent demonic attraction. To employ an admittedly dodecaphonic segue, the title of his book seems to have relevance even to those many of us who are not in our cups. Would not we all benefit greatly from getting off the insidious sauce called sensual and sensuous attractions and delights? Does not the tippling of these potent distillations of mortal mind engender those fearful pink elephants of sin, disease, and death?

Obviously none of us wants to experience the crushing tread of pink pachyderms, but how fervently do we really want to get off the sauce? Fear and doubt usually have major supporting roles in this drama--fear of the supposed reality of the terrifying hallucinations of false belief and perhaps the shame of doubting that our heavenly Father-Mother God will, scout's honor, make good on His promises. Have you ever had the thought flitter across your mind that if you could just get another little earnest of His healing omnipotence and omnipresence up-front you'd really knuckle down and do better work? Do we not want to snatch a reassuring glimpse of the lagniappe on its way to us right now to allay our nagging doubts and fears, when what's necessary is to turn from the belief of fleshly existence and accept the divine gift of Truth that has been available all along?

The material, human experience is not all Brussels sprouts, tripe, bills, and taxes. Ah yes, how many of us retain a perhaps guilty fondness, a sweet tooth, for many of the enticing offerings on materiality's resplendent desert tray? The devil would like us to sin in haste and repent at lethargic and sated leisure. In the cynical Weill/Brecht opera Die Dreigroschenoper, The Threepenny Opera, Macheath sings "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." Or "First comes the grub, then come the morals." That's a cynic's song with its cynic's exploitation of human proclivities. Mortal mind has us believe the grub is haute cuisine, and many of us can't seem to resist or get enough. The promised morals unfortunately go unheard and unheeded during the usual post-prandial snooze. The time has come, came long ago in fact, for us to uncover and awaken from the illusions of mortal mind, and Christ Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy have lovingly shown us the Way to getting off the sauce and permanently on the path to complete salvation. "Without this process of weaning, 'Canst thou by searching find out God?'" (S&H 322: 30-31)

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Wise Dropouts

If as a result of some computation hijinks you found your check register balance was a few hundred dollars short, would you lapse into despair and abandon hope of ever getting the missing money back? Obviously not, since a few calm minutes with a pencil (or pen or calculator) would undoubtedly restore the phantom loss. So why are we so often cowed, disheartened, and discouraged by an equally phantom loss of health, security, or peace of mind?

Mrs. Eddy asks essentially the same question, though with greater Scientific precision: " . . . why should we stand aghast at nothingness?" (S&H 563: 7) We stand aghast at the nothingness of matter because we have been thoroughly indoctrinated over many years in mortal mind's ubiquitous classrooms to fear, obey, and respect all the falsities that accompany a belief in material existence. These false beliefs cling to each of us with varying degrees of tenacity, but 10,000 x 4=39,000 is no more real an error than 10 x 4=39 or 0 x 0=1. Why count the teeth in the beast facing you if not one of them can ever bite God's man? It is only false beliefs derived from a misbegotten education that make us fear matter's putative savagery. Let us once again thank our Leader for and perhaps mosey around to acting on her wise statement: "The entire education of children should be such as to form habits of obedience to the moral and spiritual law, with which the child can meet and master the belief in so-called physical laws, a belief which breeds disease." (S&H 62:4-7) A childlike thought should also qualify for re-education.

Even those of us who avoided a summa cum laude degree in false education can undoubtedly do a better job of ridding ourselves of what we did acquire, course by course, and replacing depraved thoughts with an abiding consciousness of Truth, Life, and Love. We must now and forever sit enraptured at the feet of Christ and drop out of the sordid classrooms of mortal mind, however compelling they may seem.

Friday, June 5, 2009

The Unlimited Unfoldment of Holy Thoughts

Prudential Insurance, smartly co-opting a powerful Christian symbol, reassuringly offers us "a piece of the rock" (for a price of course). As Christian Scientists we all would like our own comforting piece of the Rock--Christ, Truth. But do the specifics of how to individualize what can seem like solidly monolithic Truth get lost in a muzzy fog of timorousness and uncertainty? How can one uniquely express infinite God?

We can start by realizing we do not express God's infinity or omnipresence, but His qualities. A small piece of the rock has all the qualities of the whole rock, except, of course, size, but we are not trying to be God, but to reflect Him. Nevertheless, when we get down to the nitty-gritty of our own individual expression, the vastness of the Original can be daunting and overwhelming. We must then claim our oneness with infinite Mind, all-intelligence. Doing that, even imperfectly, should enable us to realize that nothing can limit our ability to understand and express God. That does not mean we think about God, but develop and increase our understanding of Him.

Anton Diabelli, a music publisher and minor composer, sent to a number of contemporary composers a little waltz tune of his own composition, asking each to submit a variation on it, which he would collect from all and publish. One of the composers he included was Beethoven. At first the irascible genius disdained the publicity ploy and the trite waltz as well, calling it a "Schusterfleck", a mere cobbler's patch. But even though he tossed it aside, the tune apparently gestated in that great musical mind, and the result was perhaps the finest set of variations ever written: the 33 "Diabelli Variations", a 50-60 minute masterpiece. My point, long in coming, is that if Beethoven can do this with a humble cobbler's patch to start with, shouldn't we be able to realize unlimited unfoldment in our own contemplation of God and the truths of Christian Science? It can be done and must be done if we are to put off the old man and demonstrate the complete spiritual selfhood of the new man.

If need be, we should see and think of ourselves as artists as well as Scientists. Did not Mrs. Eddy call all of us sculptors (S&H 248: 13) and if sculptors, then artists? And note that as sculptors we mould as well as chisel thought, i.e., work with the pliable in our consciousness as well as the resistant. We cannot be content to merely think about the truths that come to us, but we must wrestle with them like Jacob until our thought is blessed by an uplifting angel message.

One can hear many rich examples of the unfolding, development, or expansion of musical ideas by listening to Haydn. His music is, to me at least, clearer and simpler (but no less great for it)than, say, Mozart or Beethoven, who can be quite complex. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, 50+ string quartets, 125 trios for baryton, viola, and cello, 43 trios for piano, violin, and cello, and about 60 piano sonatas. A conservative guess would be that there are over 1200 movements in these works alone, with each movement treating a theme in some way. He is a constant joy and inspiration to listen to, and if he can do all this, with original themes to boot, and far more, without Christian Science (genius though he was), how can we entertain the slightest inertia or feeling of limitation with all we have in Christian Science? There should scarcely seem enough hours in each day to ponder all the angel thoughts which God sends to our side to "comfort, guard and guide". (Hymn #9)