Mary Baker Eddy's Message to The Mother Church
in Boston, Massachusetts in June 1900 is now printed in her Prose Works. It
is fifteen pages long. If we assume each page might be delivered in about two
minutes, then its reading to the meeting might have lasted about half an hour.
The second last paragraph (p. 15) mentions both
sackcloth and a wedding garment. An online dictionary explains that sackcloth
is "a very coarse, rough fabric woven from flax or
hemp." Eddy's Science and Health uses the term sackcloth
in the sense perhaps of disappointment, despair or despondency, when she
writes, in relation to Revelation 21: 9, that
"... the seven
angelic vials full of seven plagues, has full compensation in the law of Love.
... Think of this, dear reader, for it will lift the sackcloth from your
eyes, and you will behold the soft-winged dove descending upon you. The very
circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love
can make an angel entertained unawares.
(Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 574:18–19 the, 25–30, my
emphasis)
These indicate the importance of what we
"wear" mentally -- what we put on, so to speak. An excerpt from Mary
Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, by Yvonne Caché von
Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck (Amplified Edition) is helpful. It’s
on page 196:
The wedding garment is a term Jesus used in a
parable about those invited by a king to his son’s wedding to which “many are
called, but few are chosen.”
In her Message to The Mother Church
for 1900, Mrs. Eddy wrote: “To-day you have come to Love’s feast, and you
kneel at its altar. May you have on a wedding garment new and old, and the
touch of the hem of this garment heal the sick and the sinner!” Mrs. Eddy was speaking out of her own experience.
A number of years earlier she had told her students’ association:
. . . One of the
best cures I ever performed was, apparently, under the most adverse
circumstances. I had spent one year of incessant toil upon the [manuscript] of
my book, Science and Health, and put it into the hands of a printer
for publication, who, I found, had allowed it to be taken from his possession,
and I was thus obliged to return, in the sackcloth of disappointment, without
it. A student soon called desiring me to assist in a case that was dying. I put
on the wedding garments at once and healed the case in twenty minutes.
I love that thought can be lifted from sackcloth to wedding
joy. This is the consciousness which forgets self and puts on the finery of
divine Love.
In Bible times, one would not head down to the local shopping centre to purchase an outfit suitable for a wedding. Preparation might include sourcing the raw material (fine linen perhaps), choosing the style and having it made to fit. Readers who have made a garment will be aware of the care required at all steps in the process. Our garment requires attention.
We are reminded that the bride is “clothed in
light … wedded to the Lamb of Love” (see Science
and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 561:10–13).
Let’s put on our light-filled, healing
wedding garments today.
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