Article August 8, 1925 Issue

Ponder These Lessons of Love

GEORGIA CLAAR

After the birth of child Jesus, recorded in the second chapter of Luke's gospel, it was said of Mary, his mother, "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." At first thought these words may seem just a touching glimpse of human mother-love, a happy and loving meditation of the most fair and wonderful child ever born. But upon further study the passage conveys a deeper meaning. In after years Christ Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," and, "Lo, I am with you alway." As his human selfhood could not be present at all times and in all places, so it must have been that the Master referred to his spiritual self, the Christ. No doubt it was his real selfhood upon which Mary's thought was fixed with such rapt attention. She was thinking of the child, to be sure, and considering his welfare, neglecting neither her duty to God nor man; but she must have been pondering, not so much the corporeal child, Jesus, as the eternal Christ, the divine idea of God, which heals the sick in every age, destroys sin, and dispels all illusions. Was it not such spiritual thinking that fitted Mary to become the mother of him who was to demonstrate the Saviour?

A Christian Science practitioner, after giving words of loving counsel and encouragement from the Bible, and the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, once said to a student: "Now ponder these words! You know Mary 'kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.' " The student thought with regret of how many times God's Word had been read or listened to, and immediately thereafter material thoughts and things had been allowed to crowd in, almost to the entire exclusion of the truth, which would have helped so greatly had it been entertained. She was grateful, though, that some of the time she had kept these things in her heart, and that difficult experiences had been averted or overcome, because of the healing effect of the spiritual things she had pondered.

But one may say, I am too busy and too practical to sit and muse or dream away the time. Webster gives as one definition of "to dream away," "To pass in reverie or inaction; spend in idle vagaries;" and of "muse," "To be absentminded." It is true that to dream away the hours in idle reverie is to be mentally inactive and is a waste of time. Dreaming is not thinking. The real Christian Scientist is not a dreamer. The habit of dreaming or musing is of the so-called carnal mind and has no objective. Animal magnetism would like to put us to sleep, and set us dreaming of the fanciful illusions and unrealities of the carnal mind's own making. But the carnal mind is unreal; it cannot succeed in doing anything; it can accomplish nothing. Man cannot be "absent-minded"; for God is man's Mind, the only Mind there is, and He is ever present.

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