Thursday, June 6, 2013
Healing of Grief
(I'm happy to post this contribution from my long-time
friend, John Wellsman. He lives in Tucson,
Arizona, and is a photographer.)
Some time ago an e-mail arrived notifying me that a dear friend of many years had passed on suddenly and very unexpectedly. Although this individual had been a close high school and college friend with whom I had shared many happy occasions, our lives had taken separate courses over the years until re-connecting via the Internet several years ago. Although it was unlikely that I would see this individual again in person due to our being on opposite sides of the country, we enjoyed reminiscing and sharing details of our lives.
To say the news of this individual's passing came as a shock would be a major understatement. Over a period of weeks I found myself recalling fondly many of the good times we shared and becoming more and more grief-stricken with depressing thoughts of death beginning to overwhelm me. I realized it was well past time to deal prayerfully with the situation in Christian Science.
Humbly I reached out for guidance in my thought. Almost immediately it came very clearly that the first thing I had to deal with was to defend my own thought from accepting the world's obssession with thoughts of death. I began by vigorously declaring that my thought could not be mesmerized by the world's beliefs and thoughts of death. I saw that my sense of grief was just that--an acceptance of the world's belief of death. My prayer continued along these lines for several minutes, by the end of which I was completely free of the oppressive weight of grief. I cearly understood that the world's belief of death was not my thought at all and it could not affect my thought in any way since my thought was in fact a perfect reflection of what God, Life was/is knowing.
