Learning from each other

The opportunity of reading this book, “Unity of Good,” together, as a book club, has been extraordinary.  Just as a class will be enriched by having students at different levels of understanding, and a team is made more robust by having members from different backgrounds, it sharpens our reading to have input from others; and it keeps us on our toes to have a set time in which to complete a task.

 

From the first page, we are launched into the main topic: Does God know such a thing as sin?  And yet we are told to be careful not to discuss the subject until “practically able to testify, by [our] lives, that as [we] come closer to the true understanding of God [we] lose all sense of error” p. 1. 

 

In page after page, Eddy startles us, makes us laugh, makes us think – hard; she turns her subject over and over and looks at it from an extraordinary number of angles.

 

Here are some particular passages that I have loved for many years, or have caught my new attention during November:

 

Chapter: Caution in the Truth

“Now this self-same God is our helper.  He pities us.  He has mercy upon us, and guides every event of our careers” p. 3.

 

“Let us respect the rights of conscience and the liberty of the sons of God, so letting our ‘moderation be known to all men.’  Let no enmity, no untempered controversy, spring up between Christian Science students and Christians who wholly or partially differ from them as to the nature of sin and the marvellous unity of man with God shadowed forth in scientific thought.  Rather let the stately goings of this wonderful part of Truth be left to the supernal guidance” p. 5.

 

Chapter: Seedtime and Harvest

“Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities” p. 11.

 

Chapter: The Deep Things of God

“Science reverses the evidence of the sense in theology, on the same principle that it does in astronomy” p. 13

 

Several times (I’ve skipped to and fro all over this book this past month) I tripped over Eddy’s reference to “Burgess, the boatbuilder” on p. 14.  Wikipedia gives a good run-down on William Starling Burgess, a boat-builder from Boston (1878 – 1947), (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Starling_Burgess), but I’m unsure what “the Volunteer” is; I imagine it is a boat which was much better than the boats used by the Puritan’s.  Any clues anyone?

 

Chapter: Ways Higher Than Our Ways

“A lie has only one chance of successful deception, - to be accounted true.  Evil seeks to fasten all error upon God, and so make the lie seem part of eternal Truth” p. 17.

 

“…evil ties its wagon-load of offal to the divine chariots, - or seeks so to do…” p. 17.

 

Chapter: Rectifications

“How is a mistake to be rectified?  By reversal or revision, - by seeing it in its proper light, and then turning it or turning from it” p. 20.

 

Chapter: A Colloquy

“If we observe our mental processes, we shall find that we are perpetually arguing with ourselves; yet each mortal is not two personalities, but one” p. 21.

 

I would really love to read this chapter with a friend: one to speak for EVIL, the other for GOOD.  Perhaps someone will come to the Reading Room one Monday and we can read it together!

 

Chapter: There is no matter

“Brain … is only matter within the skull, and is believed to be mind only through error and delusion.  Examine that form of matter called brains, and you find no mind therein” p. 33.

 

Chapter: Is there no death?

“The sweet and scared sense of the permanence of man’s unity with his Maker can illumine our present being with a continual presence and power of good opening wide the portal from death into Life…” p. 41.

 

Chapter: Suffering from others’ thoughts

“Sorrow is the harbinger of joy” p. 57.

 

Julie Swannell