great people and noble lives

Spiritual resource to share: goodness



I know great people. That is, or rather was, my big secret. These are people with profound thoughts and kind lives. Sometimes I have blogged about them. Other times, I have encouraged them to write about their ideas, healings or courageous acts and "give it to the world." Sometimes they have.

But more often, they haven't. Even with my best encouragement and finding potential publishers for them, offering to share my editing skills (such as they are) or giving them names of magazines where they could submit their brilliant ideas, it hasn't been enough to stir them to immortalize their most wise and wonderful ways. And so I know there are these profound thoughts and kind acts out there, unacknowledged and so under the radar of popular thought as probably never to be seen or heard.

This bugs me. But then, with the plethora of profound thoughts out there, who is being heard? Is it possible for everyone to be heard at once? Of course not.

So, I turn away from seeing acknowledgment as being the main way to affirm one's life and ideas/ideals. Maybe just to live a life of integrity, sharing one's wisdom and acting with courage and kindness is the reward in itself. Like a columbine flower growing on the unexplored side of a mountain, it is beautiful just because it is.

The characteristics of the great people I know are summed up in two ideas from MBEddy's book Science and Heath. In one idea, she talks about grand and noble lives including these qualities: "unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love--the kingdom of heaven." And then she goes on to say

Unselfish ambition, noble life-motives, and purity,-- these constituents of thought, mingling, constitute individually and collectively true happiness, strength, and permanence.

Being great has everything to do with being good. From her book Miscellaneous Writings (p. 354), she includes a cluster of ideas that, it seems to me, would lead one to greatness: "A little more grace, a motive made pure, a few truths tenderly told, a heart softened and a character subdued."

But the grand core of all great lives is Love.

Love cannot be a mere abstraction or goodness without activity or power.... it is the tender, unselfish deed done in secret; the silent, ceaseless prayer; the self-forgetful heart that overflows; .....the gentle hand opening the door that turns toward want and woe, sickness and sorrow, and thus lighting the dark places of the earth. - Mary Baker Eddy

To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

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