“I make strong demands on love…”
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Nothing I need to add to this one…
I was looking through old drafts in my wordpress file, and came upon this quote:”I care not what you believe; not one atom do I care; the one important thing for me to know is this – that you are entitled to my compassionate consideration; you are entitled to my respect; you are entitled to my applause for all that you do that is in the right direction. You are entitled to my kindest wishes, to my deepest encouragement; and you are entitled to nothing from me but that which means love and charity and loving kindness, and you must not get anything else from me.” – Edward A. Kimball
And I can’t think of anything else I need to add to that.
Things that make Christian Scientists look weirder than we already are (so let’s stop doing them, m’kay?)…
If we would open their prison doors for the sick, we must first learn to bind up the broken-hearted. If we would heal by the Spirit, we must not hide the talent of spiritual healing under the napkin of its form, nor bury the morale of Christian Science in the grave-clothes of its letter. The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love. – from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy
My dear Christian Science friends,
I humbly suggest that there are things we should consider NOT doing – because… well… we ALREADY look weird enough.
1) Instead of saying “I’m feeling ill” we sometimes tell people “I am working on the problem of a belief of sickness…” By the time we finish telling people we’re not feeling well, their toddlers are graduating high school. This is weird.
2) We wonder why we haven’t seen Ed in church for a year, and then finally someone tells us he is “no longer with us.” In other words – he died a year ago, but let’s not talk about it. This is weird.
3) We can no longer read up-close, but refuse to get glasses because that would be “giving into error.” This is ego and vanity, and it’s also very weird.
4) If we visit an optometrist, dentist, or other medical doctor we feel terrible pangs of guilt and remorse and feel unworthy of Christian Science, and a disappointment to God. Okay. Listen. God doesn’t give a hoot about that stuff, one way or the other. When we try to attribute human emotions and feelings and judgment to God we are anthropomorphizing God – trying to make God man-like. God is unchanging Love, Truth, and Life, and nothing we do or say or think or believe is going to change the nature of God, or Her love for us. So please, friends, stop doing that guilt thing! It is really weird.
5) When we catch someone using improper Christian Science-ese in conversation (refer back to #1), we sometimes seem to feel it is our duty to lob an earnest, lengthy, preachy lecture upon them “correcting” their thought and setting them back on the right path. We sometimes do this to non-Christian Scientists, too. Heck, I’ve seen Christian Scientists doing this to people they’ve never even met before. This is a little off-putting. It’s also totally weird.
6) When someone tells us they’re hurt, to state “there is no sensation in matter” and then ignore the person who’s come to us for human comfort does not seem to me very Christianly or Scientific . Please take whatever human steps you can take to help or comfort someone who’s come to you in need. Dismissing someone who’s hurt or sick with the words “there is no sensation in matter” is kind of lazy, not very loving, and really, really weird. Although we can, and should, see the truth – the perfection of God and Her creation – when confronted with a picture of injury or sickness – that is our job as Christian Scientists – Mary Baker Eddy tells us in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love.”
7) Long meetings about whether it’s okay for a reader to thank a soloist after her solo; whether we should be allowed to read from any bible but the King James Bible in church; whether we should call ourselves “Christian Scientists” or “students of Christian Science”; whether we should refer to Mary Baker Eddy as “Mrs. Eddy” or “Eddy”; whether we should exclude people from membership in our branch churches because of their sexual orientation, or because they use medication, or because they haven’t ascended, yet; whether we should allow any kind of accompaniment but an organ; what readers should wear on the platform; and etcetera, are all, in my opinion, a colossal waste of time and a distraction from the real mission of Christian Science, which, I believe is the transformation of our world through the power of God, Love. To expend a huge amount of time on human fussiness and opinion and narrow-minded nonsense, instead of on the healing work that Jesus demanded of his followers, is a terrible shame. It is also beyond weird.
8) We sometimes walk around with a kind of smugness about ourselves as Christian Scientists – like our religion owns the power of Love and Truth. We sometimes seem to be especially smug if generations in our family have been practicing Christian Science. Or if we’ve gone to private Christian Science schools. Or our parents or grand-parents held official positions in the Christian Science church – like CS is something we somehow inherited from our parents and grandparents. Umm…. no, the power found in Christian Science is not genetic – it’s not like the midi-chlorians that “run strong” in the family of Luke and Leia of the Star Wars movies. Christian Science is available, equally, to all of God’s children – no one has more access to the power of Love than anyone else. And to think that we do is just completely weird.
9) And if you’ve read this post, and none of the things I’ve mentioned that make us look weird seem weird to you… well… that is just…yeah, weird.
In his book, Rolling Away the Stone, Stephen Gottschalk writes: “…after the death of their founder, Christian Science became to a significant degree routinized… Eddy appears to have anticipated with great apprehension that the Christian Science church… would settle down into a kind of bland predictability when she was no longer on the scene. To her, being a Christian Scientist in any meaningful sense involved not only a strong commitment but, in a sense, a spirit of adventure.” And Gottschalk quotes William F. Hillman as writing: “The awakened Christian sees Christian Science as a means for coming into the full truth of being – the full awareness of God… It turns man away from system, dogmas, formal creeds, to God… Christian Science describes Mrs. Eddy’s experience of God. It is not a theory about God or speculation about Him… it is this experience we are after and not some understanding of a system. ” Gottschalk writes: “The readiness to plunge ahead, to leave behind what had been outgrown, to move in a new direction before it could be fully determined where it would lead – these traits were elements of Eddy’s sensibility… If there is a pattern to her life, it is the recurrence of new beginnings, and new departures.”
Little by Little
“Old age” comes little by little, I think –
little surrenders of who we are
to the experts and authorities,
to convenience and comfort –
someone tells us we need to stay out
of the sun, to eat only certain foods,
to travel only at the right times
and to the right places,
and to wash our hands after every
handshake and human touch –
and we listen and obey.
And so we spend our days in “preventative”
exams – counting the pills into our trays –
hoping to increase the number of our days.
And little by little we relinquish
the small pleasures that make life
meaningful – the joy of adventure,
noon-time lunch with our faces turned
towards the sun, whipped cream on
our cocoa, shaking hands with new friends,
and listening to our own hearts to create lives
worth living.
And we lose our lives in a fear of death.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
The Bad Guys and the Good Guys
Do we see what we expect to see
when we look at one another?
Caricatures of the “them”
and caricatures of the”us.”
Exaggerated images of
villains and saints – of the
stupid, ignorant, ugly, scary,
evil, threatening, noble, kind,
beautiful, brave, and wise. Cardboard
cutouts of humanity.
We better get them before they
get us, right?
And we build up the hate, and
ignore any efforts at friendship
and cooperation and peace.
Because where’s the fun in that?
Maybe we like being angry. Self-
righteous. Offended. Frightened.
We better get “them” before they
get “us,” right?
The bad guys are the good guys
and the good guys are the bad guys,
depending on where you’re standing.
If A=B and B=C, then A=C
and the bad guys and the good guys are the same.
But we better get “them” before they
get “us,” right?
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
“Who is thine enemy that thou shouldst love him? Is it a creature or a thing outside thine own creation? Can you see an enemy, except you first formulate this enemy and then look upon the object of your own conception?… Simply count your enemy to be that which defiles, defaces, and dethrones the Christ-image that you should reflect.”
– Mary Baker Eddy
“Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.”
My young friend, Jonathan, gave me the gift of Kurt Vonnegut’s If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? for Christmas. I enjoyed it immensely. I found Vonnegut’s musings on life comforting and reassuring. Vonnegut reminded me that the times we are now entering are not any worse that the times that have come before. And he assured me that – although I maybe can’t fix the whole world – I can, at least, make my little corner of it a more humane and beautiful place.
“I apologize because of the terrible mess the planet is in. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any ‘Good Old Days,’ there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, ‘Don’t look at me. I just got here myself.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: ‘Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut, quoting his son, Mark.
“The teacher… asked me one time, ‘What is it artists do?… They do two things,’ he said, ‘First they admit they can’t straighten out the whole universe. And then second, they make at least one little part of it exactly as it should be. A blob of clay, a square of canvas, a piece of paper, or whatever.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order. There’s a lot of cleaning up to do. There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical. And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!”
– Vonnegut speaking at Butler University.
“My politics in a nutshell: let’s stop giving corporations and newfangled contraptions what they need and get back to giving human beings what we need.”
– Kurt vonnegut
***
“How about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
‘Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth,
Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy,
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called the children of God…’
“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
“‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”
– Kurt Vonnegut
***
“Revenge provokes revenge which provokes revenge which provokes revenge – forming an unbroken chain of death and destruction linking nations of today to barbarous tribes of thousands and thousands of years ago.
“We may never dissuade leaders of our nation or any other nation from responding vengefully, violently, to every insult or injury. In this Age, the Age of Television, they will continue to find irresistible the temptation to become entertainers, to compete with movies by blowing up bridges and police stations and factories and so on…
“But in our personal lives, our inner lives, at least, we can learn to live without the sick excitement… And we can teach our children and our grandchildren to do the same – so that they, too, can never be a threat to anyone.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
***
“When my father was dying, he said, ‘I want to thank you, because you’ve never put a villain in any of your stories.’ The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“…I would like to infect people with humane ideas before they’re able to defend themselves.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Culture is a gadget; it’s something we inherit. And you can fix it the way you fix a broken oil burner. You can fix it continuously.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long for all of human experience so far that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on… Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on; they want something even more basic than that. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard again.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Our founding fathers never promised us that this would be a painless form of Government, that adhering to the Bill of Rights would invariably be delightful. Nor are Americans proud of avoiding pain at all costs… So it is not too much to ask of Americans that they not be censors, that they run the risk of being deeply wounded by ideas so that we may all be free. If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like American heroes in the days gone by, bravely carry on.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“So the advice I give myself at the age of 71 is the best advice I could have given myself in 1940, when detraining for the first time in Ithaca, having come all the way from Indianapolis: ‘Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“And here’s what I think the truth is: we are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, we are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Much has been written about the effects on institutions of higher learning of the sudden influx of veterans after my war. One thing it did was bamboozle many teachers whose authority and glamour was based on their having seen more life and the world than their students had. In seminars I would occasionally try to talk about something I had observed about human beings while a soldier, as a prisoner of war, as a family man. I had a wife and kid then. This turned out to be very bad manners, like coming to a crap game with loaded dice. No fair.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
***
Kurt Vonnegut speaking to Joe Heller, author of *Catch-22*:
“‘Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch-22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the last forty years?’
“Joe said to me, ‘I have something he can never have.’
“I said, ‘What’s that, Joe?’
“And he said, ‘The knowledge that I’ve got enough.'”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Creature of Joy
Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
– Mary Baker Eddy
…joy cannot be turned into sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy…
– Mary Baker Eddy
This Scary Stuff Isn’t New
“Progress is the law of God…”
– Mary Baker Eddy
Come on, Karen. You majored in History. You know the struggles our world has endured, survived, overcome. You know the scary stuff we’re seeing now isn’t new. I mean… it’s not like all the political corruption and corporate greed and dishonesty you’re seeing in America is something that’s springing up for the first time here. Look back at just the last 100 years in the United States – :
- in 1918, when your 98 year-old father was born, women still didn’t have the right to vote in this country
- when your father and mother were living through the Great Depression, members of the nation’s Supreme Court continually over-turned laws and programs designed to provide relief to the poor, to help the nation recover, and to bring reform to the economy
- in 1942 Japanese-Americans had their homes and property taken from them and were sent to live in “internment camps”
- in the early part of the 1950s – just before you were born – government workers, and people involved in the Hollywood movie business, lost their jobs without recourse for being Communists – or just being accused of being Communists – by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and company
- up until 1954 – just two years before you were born – racially segregated schools were still legal in this country
- in 1961, when you were a pre-schooler, there were still African-Americans who were living as slaves – who’d never been told slavery had ended in this country
- when you were seven years-old the President of the United States was assassinated
- when you were 11 years-old, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and, two months later, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated
- when you were an eighth grader, four students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University were shot and killed by members of the National Guard
- when you were in high school the President of the United States resigned before he could be impeached for trying to cover-up a break-in of his political opponent’s campaign headquarters
But recognize that for every step backwards – for every reaction against progress – we’ve seen humongo strides forwards. Look at the progress in the last 100 years:
- in 1920 women were given the right to vote
- in the 1930’s – in spite of the Supreme Court’s resistance to social reform – social security and other programs were established to ensure a safety net for our nation’s citizens
- in 1954 the Supreme Court ended racial segregation in public schools
- in 1963 the Equal Pay Act was passed – making it illegal to pay a woman less for doing the same work as a man
- in 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed, prohibiting discrimination in employment, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, making discriminatory voting practices illegal
- in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that laws forbidding inter-racial marriage were illegal
- in 2015 same-sex marriage was recognized as a right protected by the Constitution
Karen, you now live in a country full of people who’ve never known legal segregation between the races. You live in a country full of young people who take it for granted that women can participate in politics – can vote, run for office, and serve on the Supreme Court. Americans are not going to allow this country to slide backwards. The gains we’ve made won’t be lost. Have trust in your fellow man and woman.
Buck up. There may be battles ahead – every generation has them – but progress always wins in the end.
“In Christian Science there is never a retrograde step, never a return to positions outgrown.”
– Mary Baker Eddy
An Ode to Boxing Day
Ode to Boxing Day
It’s a humble holiday, tucked in between
Christmas and New Year’s, but it’s really keen.
Things look a little bedraggled, it’s true
The tree’s a little droopy and no longer new
The movies and music of the Christmas season
Are getting on our nerves now, and we’re seeing no reason
To eat even one more sugary oversweet sweet
It’s time for broccoli and carrots (maybe hold on the beets)
The pressure for perfection comes off on this day,
the toys have been opened, and it’s come time to play.
And if before we were wearing faux holiday cheer
to blend in with the others and not Scroogey appear
It’s time now to be genuine, and honest and real.
The food banks are empty, people still need a warm meal.
The homeless and hungry and jobless and alone
still need love and care, still need a home.
So maybe we can celebrate the day after Christmas
by keeping the spirit of hope alive,
we might make that our business.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell, from *A Poem Lives on My Windowsill*
Christmas Moon
Christmas morning walk…
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 