“…Love is reflected in love.” – Mary Baker Eddy
Note: The artwork below was published by the USGS. The artwork was created to illustrate the water cycle, but I have modified it and added my own text to show… well… something else. 🙂
When the heart speaks, however simple the words, its language is always acceptable to those who have hearts.
– Mary Baker Eddy
Nine years ago, as I was entering a challenging period in my life, I clicked on a button at the bottom of my book’s page on Amazon and found myself in a zany world of Christians, atheists, Buddhists, pagans, and other assorted folks engaged in dialogue about religion. I was fascinated by what I saw there. I laughed out loud. At times my mouth literally fell open in disbelief. I was moved. I was inspired. I was disturbed. I was informed.
I tentatively put my toe in the forum waters and soon found myself sucked into the current and pulled into a rollicking, outrageous, epic verbal adventure. Ohmygosh! It was an amazing trip! As I was thrown here and there by the currents, bouncing around ad hominem boulders, I reached up to a raft going by, and the folks in the raft reached down and pulled me into their daring, laughing midst. Without further ado, they handed me an oar and made me one of their crew. They became my friends.
I was the only Christian Scientist in the crew. My crew mates were atheists, Christians, Buddhists, wiccans – some believed in a god, some did not. But they all had a couple things in common that, for me, were more important than whether they believed in a god or not – they all had the ability to laugh at themselves; and they were all enlisted in battling self-righteous busybody bullying and meanness.
Soon after I got on the forum I got it into my head to start my own religion. I named it Humoristianity. Here are the tenets of my faith:
1) You must be able to laugh at yourself.
2) You must be able to recognize how ludicrous your beliefs might appear to others.
3) You must want nothing but good for everyone, everywhere in the universe.
4) You must have a natural aversion to meetings, committees, and scheduled events (as we will be having none of those).
5) You must enjoy the humor of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Tom Lehrer, and Jerry Seinfeld (if you’re a Jerry Lewis kind of guy, you might want to think about starting your own religion – although we wish you nothing but good).
My friends soon joined me in the Humoristian temple. We gave each other grandiose titles and set forth to conquer the world with humor. The conquering-the-world thing never really came to pass. But we did get a book out of it: The Humoristian Chronicles: A Most Unusual Fellowship.
For me, the most amazing things to come out of that time on the forum were the incredible and lasting friendships that were made there. In some ways these friends knew me better than my off-line friends because we had talked with each other about things that people rarely talk about in normal, polite conversation – we’d talked about our most deeply-held beliefs about God and life and the universe. We’d shared our doubts and our fears and our triumphs with each other. We got to know each other through our thoughts and words before we got to know each other in the person. It was a rare and beautiful opportunity.
During my time on the forum I was also working my way through a terrible depression – something I’d never experienced before. When I clicked into the forum I was allowed to escape, for a time, from the world of depression, and into a world of laughter – into a world where people actually wanted to hear what I had to say, and listened, and responded with kindness. Later, when I was telling a psychologist about my experience on the forum – suggesting to her that I might have actually been addicted to it – she told me, no, it looked like I had instinctively done something really healthy for myself; I had found something that was helpful to me and helped me cope.
Through the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of my forum friends in the person. I have never been disappointed by the people they are in “real” life. They have been a blessing to me.
Yesterday my husband (who has met several of my forum friends with me) and I met my forum friend, Craig, and his wife, for lunch. Craig and his wife are from Jamaica, but they are currently living in Dubai. The last month they’ve been vacationing in the USA – traveling up the west coast – and, happily, I live on their route. Craig and his wife are WONDERFUL people. His wife is smart and beautiful and accomplished – a high school chemistry teacher. And Craig is as kind and funny in the person as he was on the forum.
Afterwards I asked my husband: “Weren’t they great?!” And he said, yes, they were. “Didn’t I meet cool people on the forum?”
Without hesitation, he answered “Yes, you did! Very cool people!”
Know thyself, and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil. Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you.
– Mary Baker Eddy
Have you ever been accused of something you didn’t do? Have you ever been accused of THINKING something you weren’t thinking, or of being motivated by something that wasn’t motivating you?
Yeah. Most of us have probably found ourselves in that position at one time or another. I know I have. In fact, I know this kind of thing happened 2000 years ago, too, because there are references made to it in The Bible. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour…” is one of the ten commandments, after all. And the story of Job is pretty instructive in this regard: There was Job, afflicted with all kinds of crap – disease and pain and horrific loss. And there were his three “friends” – Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar – all having a great deal of fun plastering Job with labels, and telling him that God had brought these troubles to him because he deserved them somehow. Zophar says: “But oh that God would speak, and open his lips against thee; And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are double to that which is! Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.”
Ooh baby!
But in the story, Job knew his innocence. He recognized his real identity.
And this all brings me to Chris, a young man I met in Bellingham a few weeks ago. I saw Chris standing outside the restrooms at the top of the ramp leading to the boardwalk, and smiled and wished him a good morning. He wished me a good morning back and then told me he was homeless and asked me if I had any money I could give him to buy breakfast. I invited him to join me on my walk and told him I’d buy him breakfast down at the coffee shop in the park. The park is about a mile away, so Chris and I had a lot of time to chat. He told me he hadn’t finished high school – and I told him about a program I knew of that could help him get his diploma at the local community college. He told me about his favorite high school teachers – an art teacher, a special education teacher, and a math teacher – and said that he enjoys making art and writing. And then he shared a piece of life-wisdom that I thought was worth preserving for posterity – and that he graciously allowed me to record on my camera. (Click on the words highlighted in blue to hear Chris’s life-quote.)
Chris explained his quote this way: “Be known in life for what you do do, and not for what people say you do.”
And that – right there! – is a man who recognizes his identity isn’t based on what other people think of him. He isn’t going to let other people define who he is. And neither should we.
“And Love is reflected in love…”
– Mary Baker Eddy
I’ve been wanting to share this experience, but I haven’t been sure how to go about it without looking like I am full of myself or something. So maybe I should start this post in this way: I am nothing special to look at – I am a stubby middle-aged woman, generally seen in schleppy clothes and walking shoes when I’m out running errands. I might have been called “pretty” when I was younger – but these days I look more like Cinderella’s fairy godmother than Cinderella. And I’m cool with that.
So a few months ago, on my lunch break at work, I put on my old walking shoes and ambled down into town in quest of something to eat. I don’t remember now what I was thinking about as I was walking, but it must have been something happy because I, apparently, had a smile on my face. A young man, approaching from the other direction, said he’d seen the smile on my face from a block away. He said he’d felt himself pulled to me so he could wish me a good day and let me know that my smile had put him in a good mood.
Isn’t that neat? 🙂
I thought of that experience again last week when I was grocery-shopping at the local supermarket. I was in a funk when I began my shopping. I no longer recall what had put me in this funk, but I remember feeling really tired and cranky. Coincidentally, everyone else I encountered seemed to be feeling less than jolly, too. As I rounded an aisle I saw a woman whose face looked particularly drawn and tired. My heart went out to her and I found myself summoning a smile for her. As soon as she saw my smile, she returned a dazzling one back to me. I could see the lines on her face literally lifting in front of my eyes. I felt the lines on my own face lifting, too.
I still had the smile on my face when a man turned his cart into my aisle and glanced my direction. And now HIS face turned up into a friendly grin. I decided to keep the smile on my face as I continued with my shopping – sort of conducting an informal experiment. And, sure enough, just as I had predicted would happen, every single person I encountered whilst wearing my smile, smiled back at me in a friendly, cheerful way. It was like magic.
I think people WANT to be nice to each other, you know. I think they’re looking for an opportunity to smile at other people and be kind to them – even stubby, middle-aged ladies.
But I should probably do a lot more smile experimentation to make sure my hypothesis is correct, right? 🙂
“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
Groucho Karen
The flag is at half-staff again
or still.
I can’t remember the last time
I saw it waving from the top
of the pole.
Days? Weeks? Months? Years?
Someday it will rise again,
someday when we put our fears
to rest, and begin
to trust each other once more,
put down our weapons of words
and steel, and pour healing
love into our nation’s wounds.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
About once a week I walk into town to buy a hummus roasted veggie sandwich and to see my friend, Frank, who works at the sandwich place. Frank is gay. We’ve never talked about his gayness or my not-gayness or anyone’s whatever-ness in conversation – I mean – it’s not like people usually approach a new friend, shake hands, and introduce themselves by their labels – “Hi, I’m Karen and I’m a progressive bleeding heart liberal heterosexual female Christian Scientist of mostly European ancestry (although there might be some Basque Reptile alien in there, too) – and how about you? What are your labels?” – but, yeah, Frank is gay.
This week when Frank asked me how I was, I gave the usual, “I’m good. And how about you?” And he gave the usual, “I’m good.” But this time something made me stop and really look at Frank. And I asked, “Frank, how are you really?” Frank said it had been a rough week.
He said he’d been in a bar earlier in the week, and he’d heard people at the next table over saying – in deliberately loud voices so Frank could hear – “Yeah. Those people in Florida deserved it.” Frank had tried to remain civil to them – he and the bar-tender had had their own conversation – loud enough to be heard – about the terribleness of the tragedy. And the people at the next table spewed out some more hatred. And Frank wondered about them: Hadn’t they ever been targeted for being different in some way? Didn’t they know what that felt like?
I started tearing up. “Frank, where does that hate come from? I don’t understand it.” Frank shook his head sadly, and said he thought it came from ignorance – from people being afraid of what they don’t know. He said he leaves those people in the hands of the Lord – and he didn’t mean that in a vengeful way – but in a “God will help them” way.
I told Frank that I was with him. I told him that he wasn’t alone. And he thanked me and gave me a hug.
Later on I was thinking about what Frank had said – his wondering if those people had ever been targeted for being different – and it made me remember a time, years ago, when I’d been watching a local “town meeting” on television and I’d heard someone say that “All Christian Scientists should be lined up against a wall and shot.” It had been strange and disturbing to hear someone who didn’t know me wish me dead. It stuck with me. I learned something from that.
Anyone could become a target – hatred is a form of insanity, really, and it doesn’t have to make sense – maybe tomorrow it will be stubby people, or extra tall people, or people with green eyes, or left-handed people, who will become the targets.
I think when we take the time to get to know each other – to try to understand each other without judgment or condemnation – to listen to each other – when we take the time to get rid of our own ignorance – we are doing a lot to make the world a better place. It’s been said so many times, but I think it’s true: Love really IS the answer.
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 