METAPHYSICAL MEETING, February 21, 2011
Contents
| - Topic | |
| - Call to the meeting | |
| - Readings | |
| - Member contribution A | |
| - Member contribution B | |
| - Member contribution C | |
| - Member contribution D | |
| - Member contribution E |
Topic
Cherishing our members
Call to the meeting
Our branch church has been having metaphysical meetings each month for the last two years. We have gained spiritual growth from researching and discussing various topics of church. This month we are concentrating on cherishing you, our members and our church family.
We see one another at our weekly meetings on Wednesday and Sundays but do we honestly cherish each other as God’s beloved children? Everyone is busy doing their perspective jobs at church and making it run smoothly, but have we reached out to each other in spiritual support, providing a loving hand or acknowledgment of a job well done?
Let’s apply some of our thoughts and prayers to help bridge the gap and cherish all our members, ones we can visually see at meetings and those working at home and are home bound.
Mrs. Eddy said to “love one another”. How can we demonstrate this love through our fellowship with one another? She also says in Miscellaneous Writings, “Cherish humility, ‘watch’, and ‘pray without ceasing,’ or you will miss the way of Truth and Love. Humility is no busybody: it has no moments for trafficking in other people’s business, no place or envy, no time for idle words, vain amusements, and all the et cetera of the ways and means of personal sense.” (Mis. 356: 30-3)
1. What can we do metaphysically to support each other?
2. How can we show we care for our brother, man?
3. How does this enrich our church by cherishing our members?
Study guide suggestions:
Matt.22:36-40
Matt. 18: 1-5
Matt. 5:1-3,8
I John 4:16
S&H 475:5
S&H 469:30-5
S&H 481:2-3
S&H 467: 3-16
S&H 582:28 Children
S&H 518:15-23
Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures on page 55:16, “My weary hope tries to realize that happy day, when man shall recognize the Science of Christ and love his neighbor as himself, — when he shall realize God’s omnipotence and healing power of the divine Love in what it has done and is doing for mankind. The promises will be fulfilled. The time for the reappearing of the divine healing is throughout all time; and whosoever layeth his earthly all on the altar of divine Science, drinketh of Christ’s cup now, and is endued with the spirit and power of Christian healing.”
Learning to work together with our fellow members and to cherish each and every one of them is the evidence of the love of the Christ in action. When that love and fellowship are working together in our church, great things will happen.
Readings
Un. 48: 5-21
Member contribution A
How hard is it to say, “I am loved, loving, and lovable as the child of God right now?” This is a metaphysically sound statement of who I really am, my genuine identity as the beloved of God. This is cherishing who I am, my true nature as God’s child, the Christ-image.
Truly seeing one’s spiritual selfhood and seeing our reflection as God’s child is to clear our consciousness of any wrong-doing or material ego. To cherish our spiritual identity is to respond to the divine Ego, Love. This is where we start, for if we can love ourselves first we can certainly love one another, a command for all mankind from Christ Jesus.
Mark Baker Eddy, our Leader, gave us the definition of man in Science and Health, then proceeded to tell us to get to work and demonstrate our understanding of the spiritual man. These truths are the tools, the ammunition she gave us to work with to heal all mankind. Seeing our true nature we start with God, and we stay with God’s omnipresence and with the omnipotence of His being and the endurance and strength of Her Love. It’s easy to cherish our fellow man when we start with the right thought.
I looked up the word CHERISH in the dictionary and found the definition: 1. To hold dear, 2. To feel or show affection for, 3. To keep or cultivate with care and affection.
I also found NURTURE: 1. To supply with nourishment, 2. Educate, 3. To further the development of. Synonym: prize, treasure, value, appreciate, respect, protect, safeguard-guard, foster, nurture, cultivate.
As I pondered what this all meant to me in the frame of supporting each of our members, I found I needed to love and appreciate each member spiritually first as a child of God, perfect and complete just as God saw them. I must also understand their humanhood and meet them on this plane of existence. My husband always helps me to remember that we all have not walked on water yet! We must be compassionate and caring. For without this element of caring we give the impression we don’t care … then where is the “love reflected in love” we share for one another?
Mrs. Eddy healed. She didn’t turn aside or ignore a problem, she met it full faced. I have a concern that others perceive us as stiff and cold when this isn’t the case at all. We as church members are warm and loving, but what does it take to activate this atmosphere of love divine and cherish the genuine spiritual nature of man where healing takes place? Mrs. Eddy writes in Unity of Good, page, 49: “The more I understand true humanhood, the more I see it to be sinless, — as ignorant of sin as is the perfect Maker.”
I cherish the good, the wisdom, the tenderness, strength, and joy I see in each one of you as long as I recognize God as the originator of these qualities. Thank goodness we can choose to recognize this God-given, God-inspired, and God-sustained nature of man.
The desire to understand and practice Christian Science is always our goal, but to be able to share the truths and spiritual insight with one another is true appreciation and cherishing one another. Together we will move mountains and enrich our church in action.
Member contribution B
It is natural and normal to know our spiritual sense, and we don't need the extra effort to deprive ourselves of this.
Member contribution C
I started my preparation for tonight’s meeting by being sure that I understood what the word cherish actually means. According to Webster’s Unabridged, it means “to hold dear: feel or show fond affection for”. However, I was surprised by one of the two major synonyms the definition listed: nurse. Webster further informed that “nurse implies careful sustaining of an infant, person, thing, or notion,” and “cherish implies fondness or love for something with incidental nurturing of it.” I think we want to go beyond simple cherishing and begin nurturing our members. Isn’t that what people come to church for - to be nurtured in Science? Let me give an example.
We have two recent new members who are newer to Christian Science than most of us and we may be about to admit a third. None of these people have had a branch church experience. What are we doing to nurture them so that they feel not only warm and welcome, but also that they know how to and will participate? Our church has a loose structure, without a lot of committees and other activities for people to get to know each other and to learn how church “works”. And, just because a member has a spouse who is a life-long Christian Scientist doesn’t mean that s/he will receive sufficient church-related nurturing from the spouse.
To me, this is more than going to lunch on Sunday. It’s getting together and talking about church, providing a forum for questions to be answered, nurturing them along to know how to study. I recently heard of a woman in another branch church who was relatively new to C.S., had had class instruction, and then her teacher passed and the association was disbanded. This woman was still so “new” that she didn’t know that she could visit other teachers’ associations, and she didn’t learn until several years after her association was disbanded.
It doesn’t seem to me that we should be on the “business as usual” track that we longer term Christian Scientists are used to. Each of us needs to be proactive in helping to nurture our new members. The questions for each of us to ask are, “What am I going to do to help these members? How am I going to express in the midst of my busy life the brotherly love that I would want if I were a new member? How are we going to assimilate these new members into our branch church culture?” I guess I’d better come up with answers and put them into action. Perhaps, this is, in part, answering the second question for tonight: “How can we show we care for our brother man?”
For the first question, “What can we do metaphysically to support each other?, I like to go back to “A Rule for Motives and Acts.” It pretty much sums up how we should act toward each other. So often, when we talk about loving each other and expressing unconditional love for each other, it sounds like we mean accepting and putting up with all the other person’s foibles. I don’t think that’s what Jesus did. In fact, we have examples of him rebuking people and acting rather violent. However, he was actually rebuking the error. To quote Mrs. Eddy, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.” (S&H 475:32-4) He didn’t see people as sick, sinful, arrogant, hard to get along with, unreasonable, belligerent, egotistical, etc. He saw the truth about them and they were healed. I think this is what Mrs. Eddy means when she says that we are to “...reflect the sweet amenities of Love, in rebuking sin...” If each of us (me included) truly accepted only the truth about each of our fellow church members, which would also include no complaining, we would be overflowing.
To be more specific, to metaphysically support each other means to see only the truth about our fellow member, whatever the claim may be. It’s our duty to do this. It’s our duty to leave our own cares at the door and enter the church with the motive to heal each inharmonious thought that occurs to us or is presented to us about the others.
Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, “An ill-tempered, complaining, or deceitful person should not be a nurse. The nurse should be cheerful, orderly, punctual, patient, full of faith, — receptive to Truth and Love.” (395:17) To truly nurture others, we need to fully express these nursing qualities - never be ill-tempered, complaining, or deceitful; always be cheerful, orderly, punctual, patient, full of faith, receptive. It’s kind of a tall order!
Question 3: How does this enrich our church by cherishing our members? The obvious answer is that we would like each other even more, be more alert to their needs and help supply them, and have more members and attendance as a result of it. Each of us would be nicer than we already are, too. I think there’s a more significant answer, though. If we are truly cherishing and nurturing our members metaphysically, we are enriching our own practice and will experience quicker, permanent healing ourselves. We are building up our “house,” the “structure of Truth and Love,” and sharing it with the world.
Member contribution D
1. What can we do metaphysically to support each other?
In short, the answer to this question is: Everything! Whatever is necessary to be done, we can do through reflecting the Christ, Spirit. Actually doing that requires a longer answer, and we can but touch the surface of it here.
In the Church Manual, the bylaw Alertness To Duty says “It shall be the duty of every member of this Church to … not be made to forget nor to neglect his duty to God, to his Leader, and to mankind. By his works he shall be judged, — and justified or condemned.” I’ve always been intrigued by the reference here to God, Leader, and mankind. But I’ve come to regard this as God referring to the wholly spiritual nature of mankind, Leader as the church and all those in it, and Mankind as the spiritual nature of worldwide mankind and the universe.
Thus the term Leader embraces our members. In the first instance, it brings out the importance of understanding Mrs. Eddy and recognizing her role in founding the church. In the second instance it embraces all those of our members who are nurturing the Christ-view of themselves, their church, and the world. We are all leaders in terms of having joint responsibility for out church.
We support each other as we truly comprehend and understand the spiritual speciality of each of us, and ensure that it’s what we know. The degree to which we do this determines the strength of our church leadership. This has nothing to do with personality, nor of recruiting humanly brilliant members; but it has a lot to do with seeing that our members are spiritual ideas and that we work together as “an active portion of one stupendous whole … Thus may each member of this church rise above the oft-repeated inquiry, What am I? To the scientific response: I am able to impart truth, health, and happiness, and this is my rock of salvation and my reason for existing.” (My 165:14-22)
This approach embraces every one of us, and it excludes any suggestion of ignorance, unworthiness, loneliness, exclusiveness, oddness, ineffectiveness, inferiority or superiority. We see each individual as a richly endowed expression of divine Love, all of whom combine to form that solid wall of Spirit that constitutes the structure of our church.
2. How can we show we care for our brother, man?
On the surface, the topic may look like it relates to helping those in need, but there is much more to it. Good deeds done for their own sake are rarely as beneficial to giver or receiver as they might be. We can all benefit from seeing that the Christ, Spirit, governs every true thought, and that divine Love provides for all of its ideas. Then we will find ourselves acting as we need to. Basing our thinking clearly in the richness of Soul is where we start and where we need to stay. That never makes man an acetic or a hypocrite. Divine Science is completely practical. Common humanity demands it, and divine Principle knows nothing less.
Even those members who are most self-sufficient receive needed comfort, strength, and resilience from being part of the membership team, in being embraced spiritually by us all. Indeed the dictionary definition of the word “comfort” includes the words strength and support, as well as the somewhat traditional meanings of consolation and aid. We are all in this as one whole membership.
“The best man or woman is the most unselfed.” (My 165:28)
3. How does this enrich our church by cherishing our members?
I feel that I’ve already answered this question. It gets down to the business of seeing our fellow members as supporters of Principle in our community, as promoters of Truth, divine facts, in every situation encountered. “Love will finally mark the hour of harmony, and spiritualization will follow, for Love is Spirit.” (S&H 96:4-5)
At the same time, we much be careful to ensure we go beyond the merely human and embrace the cognizance of Spirit governing its own compound idea. Spiritual sincerity is keenly needed. It’s more than religion, it’s the knowledge that the aliveness of church, that spiritual animation of good, is present and operative as the Life of our church. Then we can expect to go forward richly endowed with all that we need, fulfilling the needs of our members and our community, and being welcomed and cherished by others as we do so.
Member contribution E
We support church and are supported by the church.