Carving out our grand and noble lives

This is another reason why I love Christian Science: you work it. You pray, but you also demonstrate those very ideas that you are praying with. You learn to walk your talk. You heal. This is such an honest working out. One cannot harbor any sense of dishonesty, false pride or greed and still heal. The Science of it demands strict adherence to its rules.














My husband is an artist blacksmith. His work provides me with a great analogy to working in Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy says it best when she likens our thoughts to that of the work of a sculptor. She writes:

The sculptor turns from the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model? Are you reproducing it? Then you are haunted in your work by vicious sculptors and hideous forms. Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model? The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your life-work, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models.

To remedy this, we must first turn our gaze in the right direction, and then walk that way. We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love--the kingdom of heaven--reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear.

Let us accept Science, relinquish all theories based on sense-testimony, give up imperfect models and illusive ideals; and so let us have one God, one Mind, and that one perfect, producing His own models of excellence.

Photo by Helmut Preller