Every time I go down to visit with Moz (87) and Dad (97) I come back with one stand-out moment. Here’s today’s: I haven’t slept well the last couple nights and was feeling really drowsy. I laid down on the bed in Dad’s room and closed my eyes and… I didn’t fall asleep, exactly, but I went to that half-way place. And then I felt my dad stroking my forehead and I looked up at him, and he said, “I love you.” And that – right there – that puts everything else in perspective, doesn’t it? Love is the one important thing.
These are my dad’s boots and mine – I think this was taken on our climb of Mount Hood when I was 15.
“Wouldn’t the world be happier, friends, if in our dealings with one another we could always truthfully say that whatever we thought or said or did expressed the nature of God as divine Love? …This may sound like an impossible goal. But it really isn’t. When we understand how to listen for divine Love’s guidance, there’s no need to be thrown off base by what our neighbor does or doesn’t do. Of course we’re all familiar with the temptations that would upset good relations… a dog or too loud radio keeps someone awake half the night; someone decides a neighbor isn’t good enough, has the wrong kind of name, or perhaps one envies the good thing his neighbor has…But whatever the temptation, we can refuse to be impulsive or spiteful, self-righteous or jealous. Through the understanding of divine Love each of us can learn to be a good neighbor. And a good neighbor doesn’t gossip, criticize, or even wish that he or the folks next door could move away. “
– The Christian Science Sentinel, December 4, 1954
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a good neighbor. So when I stumbled, all unexpectedly, on the article “The Remedy for Neighborhood Tensions” from an old 1954 Christian Science Sentinel, I felt the train of my thoughts come skidding to a halt as I stopped to ponder the ideas the article had to offer me.
As I’ve reflected on “neighborliness” I’ve come to understand that being a good neighbor doesn’t mean we have to “take sides” in neighborhood disputes. I don’t have to hate one neighbor to show love to another. I don’t have to criticize one neighbor, to show friendship to another. I don’t have to gossip about one neighbor, to show support for another. I don’t have to get angry or fired up or militant to take a firm stand for what is right and decent.
Being a good neighbor comes down to this one thing: I simply need to love – without exclusion or discrimination or judgment or condemnation. That’s my whole job, right there. To love. I need to see my neighbor as God sees my neighbor – as God’s dear child – beautiful and good and whole and happy. If I can see my neighbor through the eyes of God, Love, then I won’t be threatened or annoyed or irritated or frightened by him – I’ll enter into dialogue with him expecting to find solutions to conflict, and answers to problems.
Jesus told us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. I’m thinking that means that what we want for ourselves, we should want for our neighbors, too. If I want to be trusted, then I need to be willing to trust. If I want to be treated with consideration, than I need to be considerate. If I want to be shown kindness, then I need to show kindness.
When the sons were still toddlers
their eyes would light up when they saw me
at the door and there’d be big grins
on their faces and arms stretched
towards me to wrap around my neck.
And my heart would give a little jump of joy.
The sons are grown now
and I didn’t expect to ever see
again eyes light up at the sight of me.
But yesterday –
My dad’s eyes lit up when he saw me
at the door, and he said, “What a nice surprise!
It’s so good to see your smile again!”
And I ask you:
Is there anything more magical than eyes
that light up when you appear at the door?
It has been a challenging month. There has been death, a need to help loved ones make a major transition in their lives, the end of a school year (my fellow teachers will understand what that means), and car troubles. And there have been times when I wondered how in the heck I was going to get from here to there – both figuratively and literally.
But every challenge has come with a blessing:
celebrating Mike
flowers from the Humoristian hooligans
Princess
– You may remember that several weeks ago I wrote about an adventure I had with my car – the alternator gave out on me in downtown Bellingham – and that adventure led me to meeting some really nice people and finding a paper clip at the end, too. But after the alternator adventure my car continued to make squeeks and squawks and screeches, and so last Monday I took it in to have it checked. I do not have the mechanical language to tell you exactly what they diagnosed, but it involved a ball bearing in the clutch, some leaking fluid, and something to do with the thing that’s attached to the muffler. Yup. My car has been in the car hospital all week.
car repair
My husband has been shuttling me into work in the mornings, and my sons have been shuttling me back home again in the afternoons. These daily commutes have brought unforeseen blessings to me. I’ve been used to sitting in my own thoughts to and from work – and I’ve always kind of enjoyed that quiet alone time – but I’ve found a lot of joy in being able to hold conversations with my husband and sons while they are trapped… I mean… sitting… in their cars with me. I’ve had twenty minutes with my husband that I don’t usually have during the day – we’ve gotten caught up on what’s going on with family, friends, his work and mine. We’ve talked about politics, world news, and community happenings. We’ve laughed, and we’ve been serious, and we’ve ended every commute with a kiss. My sons and I have had the opportunity to talk about past, present, and future. They’ve shared their wisdom with me, and their insights on life, and they’ve shared their humor. I’ve learned a lot from them this week.
– One afternoon I found myself stalled-out on an Algebra problem I was working on with one of my students. It was actually a pretty simple problem – using long division to solve a quadratic equation – but the math compartment in my brain just seemed to shut down all of a sudden. And then I remembered that my eldest son – the mechanical engineer – was going to be picking me up at the end of the day, so I gave him a call and asked him if he could come in a little early and help Carlos and I work through this algebra problem. The son agreed to come in and help us, and he was wonderful! He was calm, he was patient – he knew exactly what to do to get through the problem, and he knew exactly what to say to help Carlos understand how to get through the problem. A blessing.
– At the end of February my beloved calico cat, Freckle Rose, died. I have felt the loss of Freckle Rose terribly. But out of this loss has come another blessing. My parents are in the process of moving out of their home of 48 years into a home more suitable to their current needs. My parents have five cats, and knew they were going to need to find homes for at least a couple of them. Mom asked me if I’d take their cat, Gabby. So I brought the cat carrier down to my folks to pick up Gabby-cat. But as soon as Gabby saw the carrier she headed for the farthest corners of the house – she wanted nothing to do with that thing. Enter Princess. Princess is a fluffy little ball of ebony fur who adopted my parents about four years ago. Princess looked at the carrier, looked up at me, looked back at the carrier, and calmly and deliberately walked right into it! She was meant to be with us. When we brought her back to our house she was a little shy – but as soon as I sat down on the sofa and opened up my laptop – BOOM! – Princess was there – walking over the keys, rubbing up against my arms – what is it with cats and laptops? 🙂 Princess has brought feline ambiance back into our home. Our home really needed some feline ambiance.
Princess
– Our neighbor and dear friend, Mike, passed away this week. Mike and his family are some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet – kind, funny, quirky, genuinely caring people – all of them were a huge support when I went through a personal crisis a few years ago. Before Mike passed on, his family and friends organized a sky lantern extravaganza in celebration of Mike’s amazing life. Apparently Mike had bought, like, a gazillion sky lanterns some time ago – never realizing, his wife said, that they’d be used to celebrate HIS life. And so we all met – friends, family, neighbors – in a green field in Bow to send our lanterns of love into the sky for Mike. Mike arrived just before the lanterns alighted and was able to watch the magic from the comfort of a car. It was good to see him there. Being able to celebrate Mike WITH Mike – instead of after him – was a huge blessing – a magical, teary, amazing time. I’m so glad I could be part of that.
celebrating Mike
– The end of a school year can be a really stressful time for teachers and students as they try to wrap up the year. Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming – there are state assessments for students to pass, courses for them to complete, and graduation busy-ness. But there have also been a lot of blessings this year. This week one of my seniors presented her Culminating Project PowerPoint to the staff – and she did a most excellent job of it, too. At the end of it, the director of our school asked my student what the best part of her time at our alternative school has been for her. My student answered, “My teacher. Karen believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.” Oh gosh. I started tearing up. That – right there – that is why I teach. Blessings.
– One of my sons let me use his car to get to the testimony meeting that I needed to conduct on Wednesday. As soon as I started the car I realized I was going to need to get some gas for my son – the tank was almost empty. Normally the getting-of-gas would not be a big deal to me. But by Wednesday I was feeling totally over-the-top mentally and emotionally stretched – I felt like those street performers who spin plates on their noses and toes whilst juggling fiery torches – adding even one more teensy thing to my juggling torches and twirling plates made me wonder if I had the mental wherewithal to keep it all from crashing around me. But I took a deep breath – asked myself how hard it could be – and decided it would be best if I stopped on the way to the meeting to get gas, rather than afterwards.
I tried to remember which side of the car the gas tank was on – and I guessed my side – and I remembered that you couldn’t just open the flap to the gas tank – there was some super-secret something I had to do – I figured when the time came I would figure it all out. My son drives an automatic and I am used to driving a stickshift – so there was that – my left foot kept searching for the clutch. It was raining – where were the windshield wipers? And whoah! How did you slow them down?! And it was getting dark – where were the lights? I got all that sorted out before I reached the gas station – I started to pull into a gas lane just as the attendant put a cone down to block it off – I tried to pull around and ended up in reverse somehow – but there was no one behind me – blessings. I finally got myself pulled next to a gas pump – and found I’d been right about which side of the car it was on. And when I opened the door to get out of the car I looked down and discovered a little lever that would open the car’s gas tank – blessings. I know this all seems like simple stuff – but it’s amazing how each little thing can seem like an almost-insurmountable mountain at times – and it’s amazing how grateful a person can be when it all works out.
– Yesterday I came home from school to find a bouquet of yellow lilies and little pink roses waiting for me on the counter. There was a card attached. I had no idea who could have sent me this beautiful bouquet – Mother’s Day was LAST weekend, right? I opened the card. These words greeted me: “From your wily Amazonian Humoristian hooligans. We love you.”
flowers from the Humoristian hooligans
You’ll need a little background to understand what that bouquet meant to me: Eight years ago, on an Amazon religion discussion forum, I started a new religion – Humoristianity. The people who were attracted to the Humoristian “temple” represented a wide range of religious and non-religious backgrounds – there were atheists, Methodists, Jews, Catholics, a couple Mormons, and at least one Christian Scientist (moi). But what they all had in common was the ability to laugh at themselves, and to laugh with me at the nonsense of life. This little community of friends has been with me through the good times and the challenging times. I’ve been blest to meet half a dozen of them in the person – and continue to be friends with many of them on Facebook. They are like a second family to me. And apparently one of them had discerned that I needed flowers. It was totally unexpected – a complete surprise – I never could have seen it coming – but I am so grateful for the love these dear people showed to me with that lovely bouquet.
I am blest – I really am. I’m blest with the physical stuff – the roof over my head, the food on the table, the water coming out of our pipes. But more – so much more than that – I am blest with love – the love of a new cat in our lives, the love of my family, the love expressed in my community for a dear neighbor, the love from my students, and the love from my Humoristian fellowship. There is power in Love – the power to lift up a burdened heart, and to help our fellow humans see that they matter.
Dear reader, may your moments and days and years be filled to over-flowing with Love.
If you wanted to convince me that I should see the world in the same way you do, how would you go about doing that? Would you threaten me with hell? Try to out-shout me? Pummel me with your (carefully-chosen) *facts*? Do you think that showing hatred and bigotry towards people who don’t belong to your “team” might persuade me to view the world in the same way you do? Do you think you might so impress and humble me with your keen intelligence that I will want to be just like you?
Intelligence is an awesome tool and I respect people who use their intelligence to find ways to help make the world a safer, kinder, healthier place. Eloquence and wit and humor are all qualities I value highly – and I have great respect for people who use eloquence, wit, and humor to disarm and diffuse haters – on the other hand, I have little respect for those who use their wit to bully others and feed their own egos.
No, if your way of looking at the world doesn’t include love and kindness and generosity, it has – in my opinion – nothing of value to offer me. Facts are cool – I love learning new stuff – but if all you have to offer me are a bunch of facts – well, the internet is full of “facts” and accessible to all of us – I don’t need to convert to your way of viewing the world to get facts. You do not have a monopoly on facts.
Honestly, what attracts me to different perspectives is the kindness I feel from the people with those perspectives – the love I feel coming from them. That is something I recognize as useful to me. If you wanted me to convert to your view of the world – whatever that is – the best way to do that would be to show me the love and good will that come from your way of seeing things.
Of course, the people I MOST enjoy conversing with are those people who don’t have any interest in converting me, or showing off to their buddies, or feeding their egos – the people I most enjoy are the ones I can share with – the people who know how to shut up and listen every now and then, and have the courage to share their own views and insights without thinking their way of looking at the world is the ONLY way of looking at the world.
“Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.”
– Mary Baker Eddy
I just watched a great video on YouTube (“This Video Will Make You Angry”) about the epidemic spread of anger thought-germs on the internet. This video got my “brain” sparking in all kinds of directions: I thought about some of the internet “conversations” I’ve gotten myself involved in the last several years; took a look at how internet dialogues have changed since I first began participating in them seven or eight years ago; compared some of the thoughts shared in the video with thoughts shared by Mary Baker Eddy back in the late 1800’s – long before the invention of the internet, but, I think, still pertinent today; and began looking around me for some good news – signs of hope and salvation from the anger pandemic that seems to be infecting the globe.
In the video, the narrator tells us: “Anger by-passes your mental immune system…The internet is the best thing to happen to thought-germs…The more they (anger-germs) are shared they under-go the same process (as biological germs), changing and distorting to become more aggravating. These have a better chance of spreading than their possibly more accurate rivals.”
– Ohmygosh! I’m guessing we can all recognize the truth of those words! According to this video there are two emotions that are highly contagious to humans – anger and awe. Anger and awe are almost irresistible. When anger or awe go hopping by us we are like the dog in Up! and…squirrel! – we have to look, right?
The narrator in the video continues: “Once everyone agrees (on something), it’s hard to keep talking (about it)… but if there’s an opposing thought-germ then the thinking doesn’t have to stop. The more visible an argument gets, the more by-standers it draws in – which makes it more visible. These thought germs aren’t competing, they’re cooperating… working together they reach more brains… Thought-germs on opposite sides of an argument can be symbiotic… its divisiveness also grows its symbiotic partner… gaining more allies also gains more enemies… Though the participants think they’re involved in a fiery battle to the death, from the anger germ’s perspective one field is a field of flowers and the other a flock of butterflies… ”
– I suppose most of us would now agree that the earth is roundish. Can you remember the last time you got in an in-depth conversation about the roundishness of the planet? No, right? We don’t generally talk about stuff we all acknowledge as true. But I can guarantee that if there suddenly appeared a large group of people – not outliers, but a mainstream group – that rose up and declared the earth was flat, there’d be a hot fiery debate about it all over Facebook. Flat-earthers would be calling round-earthers arrogant and smug, round-earthers would be calling flat-earthers ignorant and stoopid, and the oblate-spheroid-earthers would be denouncing everyone but themselves as unrealistic fuzzy thinkers.
The narrator continues: “When opposing groups get big they don’t really argue with each other, they mostly argue with themselves about how angry the other group makes them… We can actually graph fights on the internet to see this in action – each becomes its own quasi-isolated internet – sharing thoughts about the other…each group breeds thought-germs about the other…the group almost can’t help but construct a totem of the other so enraging they’ll talk about it all the time…”
– And don’t we see this in politics ALL THE TIME?!! Republicans are this. Democrats are that. Socialists are the other. And don’t even get me started on the Libertarians. 🙂 We take a certain pride in our alliances and our loyalty to our team. And we insulate ourselves from other perspectives and hang out with our own group. We lump everyone who belongs to another group into one monolithic unit – no longer seeing individuals – and rant about the short-comings of everyone who isn’t “us.” In short, we become bigots.
The narrator ends the video with these thoughts: “It’s useful to be aware of how thoughts can use our emotions to spread… If you want to maintain a healthy brain it pays to be cautious of thoughts that have passed through a lot of brains… it’s your brain – be hygienic with it.”
– And this brings me to the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. In her Miscellaneous Writings, Eddy writes: “Beloved Christian Scientists, keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them. It is plain that nothing can be added to the mind already full. There is no door through which evil can enter, and no space for evil to fill in a mind filled with goodness. Good thoughts are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort. And not only yourselves are safe, but all whom your thoughts rest upon are thereby benefited.”
And in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Eddy writes: “The weapons of bigotry, ignorance, envy, fall before an honest heart.”
I have found this to be true. 🙂
“We should remember that the world is wide; that there are a thousand million different human wills, opinions, ambitions, tastes, and loves; that each person has a different history, constitution, culture, character, from all the rest; that human life is the work, the play, the ceaseless action and reaction upon each other of these different atoms. Then, we should go forth into life with the smallest expectations, but with the largest patience; with a keen relish for and appreciation of everything beautiful, great, and good, but with a temper so genial that the friction of the world shall not wear upon our sensibilities; with an equanimity so settled that no passing breath nor accidental disturbance shall agitate or ruffle it; with a charity broad enough to cover the whole world’s evil, and sweet enough to neutralize what is bitter in it, – determined not to be offended when no wrong is meant, nor even when it is…” – Mary Baker Eddy
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 