After the senseless terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California last week, it’s easy to start to feel like chaos is running our lives. We’re left to ask ourselves, why do these senseless acts of violence occur? How can we feel safe in a world where random acts of violence happen?
Thinking back to the Christmas story, Mary and Joseph had to deal with what you could characterize as a terrorist threat. King Herod had heard that in Bethlehem a baby was going to be born that would become king. Not realizing that Jesus’ kingship was nothing like his own, Herod felt threatened by this prophecy. He made a decree that all boys in and around Bethlehem that were two years old and under be killed.
Joseph knew that this was going to happen before anyone else did. How? An angel told him. Matthew 2:13 says “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.” This angel got Joseph out of bed in the middle of the night and told him to take his family to Egypt at once because Herod was trying to kill Jesus. Joseph took the angel’s advice and left immediately.
This angel inspiration saved Jesus’ life and spared Joseph and Mary immense grief. We hear about angels like this a lot in the Bible, but you don’t hear as much about them giving messages like this today. Angels are constantly with us, at our side, and we can hear them speak when we listen. In her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy defines angels as “God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect;” p 581:4. This concept of angels makes a lot of sense when we think about our experience. We may not see white, winged beings descending from heaven to tell us something. But we can all relate to the feeling that a thought or a sense about something is coming from somewhere other than our own mind. These thoughts are the angel messages of God, lifting us up, directing us, or comforting us.
Angles are one of the ways in which the Christ speaks to us. When we listen to these pure and perfect intuitions from God, they empower us. They help us overcome fear, heal any physical or mental discord we may be experiencing, and lead the way into the kingdom of heaven.
Have you had an experience with angel messages? Tell us about it in the comments section below. We would also like to let you know about our upcoming Christmas Eve event, “The Gift of Christian Healing.” This new talk by Evan Mehlenbacher, CSB, will illustrate how the healing that Jesus and his disciples accomplished was not limited to their time on earth. The power of the Christ gives us a practical means of healing today. A simultaneous Spanish translation of the talk will be available for all Spanish-speaking people. Uplifting music by inspirational artist Cherie Brennan will begin at 7:00pm and Evan’s talk will begin at 7:30pm. Please join us and invite your family and friends!
You can also join us this Wednesday at 7:30pm for our Testimony Meeting on the subject of “Rejoicing,” and this Sunday at 11:00am the service is on “God the Preserver of Man.” Our Reading Room is also a great resource to dig deeper and find helpful articles on how Christian Science heals. You can join any of our services on the phone at the following conference number:
Dial-in Number: 1-310-372-7549
Access Code: 607611
Thank you very much!
Thank you!
Yes, I have had several experiences with angel messages that directly relate to the development of a deeper understanding of Christian Science. They began several years ago. About that time I came to NY City and attended some of the churches there. I testified that this kind of “awakening’ felt like being a child once more playing with colorful alphabet blocks. At first the images on the blocks appeared meaningless even out of focus. Then gradually, i learned that the different, now familiar forms, represented different letters. Letters without a context or an “order” are still essentially meaningless although they can become enjoyable shapes all by themselves. The next stage of development involved seeing the letters in groups…small groups….maybe only two or three at a time and I learned these groups had sounds and were called “words.” Eventually, the words became language and the languages conveyed the “images” of ideas.
Here are a few simple “intuitions” of spiritual sense that have been revealed from that time until now. (1) look closely at the punctuation of the Lord’s Prayer along with its spiritual interpretation as given in the first chapter of Science and Health. What do you notice about the relationship of sentences…,one to another? How might those indicators affect the way you recite that prayer in the future or do they seem to make no difference to that daily practice of your Christian faith? (2) Regaining a sense of a child’s curiosity and child like play is also a part of this “awakening.” With God as the (our) Principle — cause and ordering force in the universe of Mind — I became prompted to question and to play with the ideas at hand by re-ordering them in different ways from the way I first found them or the way in which they were presented to me. Like the letter blocks they could be combined and reordered in ways that presented new concepts, fresh images, new thoughts,……deeper spiritual insights. A prime example is the Glossary chapter in S&H. It is presented in an alphabetic order because that order makes it the most useful as a reference, BUT surely that order is not set in stone! Mind is fluid, like water, in its metaphorical representation.
So what are some of the other groupings or ordering principles that might be applied to this group of ONLY 120 KEY WORDS that have been prudently selected to enable the understanding of both the Bible and ALL the writings of Mary Baker Eddy? How about a “temporal” order? who came first and who came next? Then one can extract various combinations and permutations: God and a prophetic line; a list of symbols as opposed to spiritual ENsamples and architypes, various Father Son relationships, additional names of God beyond the 7 synonyms….etc. What does the grand total of all those additional names add up to?
One very telling “game” is to look at various lists of spiritual qualities presented throughout S&H and several in the Bible and match them up with glossary words that seem to signify those qualities. For example, take the list of transitional qualities offered as the 2nd deg. of Mortal Mind Translation on page 115 of S&H. As you pursue this exercise it helps to be aware that some additional words and symbols are defined within the remaining accompanying text of the book and it may be necessary to pull them out from there and add them to the original glossary list which will extend it somewhat beyond the basic 120. Treat that like a “treasure hunt.” “Seek and ye shall find.”
I have also organized the lesson subjects under three headings God, Reality, and Unrealtiy. I used a 3 x 9 matrix with the Thanksgiving lesson as the 9th item in the God column. (Have fun with that!!!) In some lesson titles it is necessary to split them into two parts such as Immortals are the Reality and Mortals the unreality.
Would it interest you to know that the commandments actually come in sets of two? Both an affirmative (scientific version — what is the opposite of stealing?) and a restrictive version that add up to a total of 18 forming a useful 3 x 3 matrix of pairs instead of the linear llist of 10 which we had to memorize in Sunday School? There is proof of this in the Bible which has been ignored for years and Jesus alludes to one example as well as there being 2 positive examples within the original commandment list itself.
Most recently, I have had the idea of setting up an “Angel Listening Post” in our local Reading Room as a way to invite passer’s by to come in and find rest from the weary world and that cup of cold water that we should be offering as part of the way MBE has instructed her students to share the Christ. This is a concept “under development,” but it involves more than just setting out a table and chair with either the books or a full text quarterly. It will consist of a description of angels as they are perceived in Christian Science (similar to what you have done above) and the various means that we have been shown as the way to “invite them” into our experience. There is a delightful article in an old sentinel (good thing we have search capabilities) entitled “Catching angels.” I would try to recapture the spirit of that moment of shared affection between a grandmother and grandchild (as I recall, but it might be a mother and child) and to whatever extent possible create a suitable space within the RR “atmosphere” where that kind of spiritual listening could be effectively pursued without distractions. I would ask for feedback from those who used this feature. It would take the form of brief notes as to the specific angels thoughts that “showed up” and whether the individual found them helpful and healing (COMFORTING!!!) or not. They could initial it or not. It would be left with the other materials for future “listeners” as a way to help them get a taste of that wonderful water (of life) in the spiritual well they are about to drink from.
CORRECTION — There are 125 terms in the Glossary Chapter not 120. Please make that correction, if you share this message with others. There are also a few typos of a minor nature. Yup! we’re still “working out” our understanding of our spiritual perfection.
DR