Article February 27, 1909 Issue

"FOLLOW ME."

LOUISE DELISLE RADZINSKI

IN St. Luke's Gospel we read that to one who had been listening to him Jesus said, "Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God." This seems a hard saying to a grieving son, and unless he were very open to the sense of life as Jesus taught it, he must have felt that his duty as a son was neither recognized nor respected. To Jesus, who knew only his heavenly Father, God, who recognized none but the divine fatherhood, the senseless husk of mortality was nothing; it could not check in the way of life any one who had entered therein; hence his command, "Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God."

To bury means to judge as having no life, therefore to put out of sight, to dismiss from consciousness, and this helps us to understand our Lord's saying. The formalists who with their lifeless rituals and ceremonies had starved and stifled the man called dead, could bury him, their victim; life, action in the service of God, in the declaration of His supremacy, in the announcement of His kingdom as present, was not to be obstructed in its progress. The dead, those who dwelt in the unspiritual forms of creed and ceremony, were to bury their dead; and the living, those who accepted the new teaching of life, were to go on in the way of Life unhampered by false beliefs.

No one who has been lifted out of the pit of erroneous belief and custom into the free atmosphere of Christian Science can fail to appreciate the fact that every step onward and upward in the way of Life eternal is marked by the lifeless husk of some habit or affection or sin dropped in the way of obedience to the call, "Follow me." Forms of thought that had seemed very dear, very beautiful to human sense, lose their attractiveness and appeal under the search-light of Truth, and drop away from us, dead.

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