Warm New Bunny Slippers Every Day

(I hope readers of my wife's website will find something helpful in this little offering.  I've written it primarily for those who are serious students of Christian Science- John Robert Howell)
     
   
One clever way of catching some monkeys is to put a favorite food in a tethered hollow gourd with an opening just large enough to admit an empty paw.  The monkey reaches in and grasps the food, which enlarges its paw and prevents it from passing back through the opening.  Some monkeys will keep their grip on the food even though it results in their remaining a prisoner of the gourd and being captured.  We may think how stupid such monkeys must be to fall for such a trick, but does this not have a sardonic parallel in mankind's seemingly irresistible and often fatal attraction to the material and physical and to medicine and doctoring?

Moreover, Christian Scientists may not be acting any wiser than the monkey when they intone texts from the Bible or the writings of Mary Baker Eddy as if they were incantations with some glorious power.  When the Word does enter our heart and help and heal it is because some spiritual sense of those words has, however, briefly, spoken to us and touched us, not from latent force present in syllable and grammar.  "Felt ye the power of the Word?" (Mary Baker Eddy, "Communion Hymn").  Words and sentences, if not consciously imbued with Spirit, are but human mutterings which can't affect the floating of a mote in the sunlit air.

Many of us may need to release some hidebound concepts of God we have lovingly and diligently accumulated over the years, else like the monkey we may become prisoners of them.  It may be necessary for us to see God in glorious newness each day.  Not as a comfy down-at-the-heels pair of slippers we need to get rid of but can't bear to part with.  Oh, the comfort and sense of being enclosed in His love we gain from new views of Him.

Every Sunday these words from I John 3 are read in Christian Science churches:  "...we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.  J. B. Phillips has this inspired rendering of the passage:  "We only know that, if reality were to break through, we should reflect his likeness, for we should see him as he really is!"

As we do this we are fulfilling our duty to God to express our eternal oneness with Him as children of Light.