"Sing ... the songs of Zion"

Sing! What courage is oftentimes required to sing spiritual songs! Yet, when gratitude and love truly abide in the heart, we sing spontaneously, even if not audibly. The first four verses of the one hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm depict the Jewish exiles dejected and persecuted. They wept by the rivers of Babylon. In their confusion and heaviness they hung their harps upon the willows. They were in "a strange land." "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" So runs their plaint, as we read, "They that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth."

"The Lord's song"! What is it, as understood in Christian Science, but joy, unceasing joy? The God-inspired consciousness is filled with joy. The children of God are never exiles in "a strange land," for they are the offspring of ever present, all-sustaining Love. It is only the counterfeit material sense which finds itself wandering in "a strange land." This may result from the mesmerism of habit or environment. Ignorance of our Father-Mother, Love, produces earth-bound, stagnant beliefs. However, thought may always be roused, awakened, uplifted, and spiritualized through response to the call of Love: Sing, rejoice, for God, good, is here! Wherever the presence of God is understood, there is unfoldment of good, progress, achievement. This understanding is a consciousness redolent with gratitude, friendly in its affluent promise, opportunity, and fulfillment.

"Sing ... the songs of Zion"! In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 599) Mrs. Eddy has given the metaphysical definition of "Zion" as "spiritual foundation and superstructure; inspiration; spiritual strength." No mental darkness is so dense that the light of Love cannot penetrate and dispel it with inspiration appropriated from omnipotent Mind. No discouragement is so heavy that gratitude cannot displace it with mental lightness and spiritual strength. Such qualities, correcting our thinking, rest upon the "foundation and superstructure" of Zion.

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Cast Not a Stone
February 24, 1934
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