RITA POLATIN: Emily, with the new year right around the corner, I think many people are thinking about starting over. I know you had an experience that was very pivotal in being able to do something new, being able to do something better than you did before. Can you take us back to that moment?

EMILY BYQUIST: I would love to. I was a fairly new student in Christian Science, and I was studying the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson, which consists of passages from the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. The subject that week was "Love," and I remember just sitting by myself, reading the Lesson, and thinking, "Oh, God is Love—how great is that!" I was just feeling how much I loved everyone, pondering that, and almost feeling proud that I had love for everyone.

On the heels of that, someone came to thought whom I realized I did not love at all, and I was so taken aback. That individual was my dad. We had not been in touch for many years because of a difficult family situation. I hadn't really thought about him, but at that moment, I realized I didn't love him.

Now my books were open from doing the Lesson, and my eyes fell down at my open Bible. The story was on Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. After he does this, Jesus turns to those around him, and in a command says to them, "Loose him, and let him go" (John 11:44).

When I read that, they were words to me that I needed to loose my dad and let him go. I had to release him from all the human history that God never attached to him, that had no truth to his being, and I had to relinquish it. It wasn't an intellectual wrestling. I didn't ponder it. I turned to that Love divine that I had just been reading about.

RITA: So you were loosing your dad from any kind of material history. No matter what seemed to have happened, it wasn't divine or something God knows about.

EMILY: Right. And the most beautiful thing is that all are included in this Love, and that all are redeemed. This is an all-inclusive, universal, divine Love that embraces all and knows all, and at some point each of us will exchange the false, restrictive, limited sense of ourselves, or of a circumstance, or of another one for that Love divine—that actual spiritual fact of the boundless love that God has for us, and therefore that we have for each other. And this is genuine and heartfelt; it is concrete. It isn't an abstraction of Love or an ignoring of the human situation. But rather, what it does is it directs us; it gives birth to the new and the true view of our spiritual nature and enables us to experience that.

RITA: How do you do that, thought?

EMILY: In this case it was a willingness to do it, such a childlike willingness. It was a love that is not a human love, because we hadn't spoken or redeemed anything on a human level, but it truly was a Love divine that redeemed all human history. Divine Love had replaced the misconception that there could be a lack of love. I loved him so much at that moment, seeing him as God knew him, and I felt I had to tell him. I had to tell him how much I loved him and how much he was loved.

RITA: Now, did you know where to find him or how to get in touch with him?

EMILY: I recalled the state that he had lived in many years before. This was before computers, so I went to the phone and called a long-distance operator and asked for his name in that state, and they found his phone number. I took it down, and I called him and told him how much I loved him. It wasn't so much what was said, but what was felt.

RITA: What did he think, or what was the response?

EMILY: It was a mutual response. He felt that Love had also wiped away any sense of burden or discomfort or distance. We were just in that moment of genuine affection and tenderness. You see, in that moment our relationship was completely redeemed—made entirely new—by Love divine. And in the years since, I've thought there is no such thing as an unredeemed human relationship, that we all will come to understand how the Love divine is the Love that we express. And from that place, from our Father, we understand and love ourselves and our brother, because there's really nothing else to do but love.

I would say that relationship was gift-wrapped. We met, we saw each other, and we had years of a great relationship together before he passed on. He was not of a Christian denomination, but when we met, we had many talks about God, and he was very receptive to prayer. He even let me pray for him, and he had wonderful healings.

RITA: And it was really all from that one moment?

EMILY: It was just in that moment.

RITA: Emily, let's say there's someone who perhaps is having a really hard time feeling love for someone else, and maybe yearns to have that kind of fresh start, that realization of being washed clean of the past, but they're not able to do that. What would you say to them? How can they get to that feeling of love that you felt?

EMILY: Well, by beginning with God, and asking our Father-Mother, "How do you know Your children?" Because that's the only truth, and we must always go back to God, and work it out from there. The beauty of this is that it does not depend on the other individual at all. Our experience completely depends upon our relationship to God, and this is why there is nothing—absolutely nothing—unlike divine Love that will not, at some point, be healed. We're dealing with God's script. I think that when we're dealing with human relationships and human situations, we often ruminate on the perfect conclusion to what would remedy a situation and what has to happen to make it right again. We have a particular script, but really that's God's job.

RITA: To write that script?

EMILY: Yes, that's really what God is, what God does, but we need to yield up our script, our human outlining, and doing that allows us to see the divine already in place, and experience it. It's just glimpsing the truth of our true nature, being willing to let the false go for the true. And this Love embraces all. It is completely impartial and universal, as Mrs. Eddy speaks about divine Love. And it's about forgiveness.

I had to go to God for healing because it was really my healing. It might have seemed like the other guy needed to change, or had done something to me, or left me out of something, but really it was my going to God and truly yielding to God's presence, to that divine Love.

I didn't need to wait for my dad to come to me or apologize, nor did we need to humanly reconcile anything. When I yielded to God, that was the reconciliation, and that provided the way for us to be reunited in the most perfect way. That was the healing, and that paved the way for all good to be experienced, and that included all.

RITA: And so, really, it's possible for anyone to be able to do that?

EMILY: Anyone, absolutely. It is impartial love for all. Love divine is not removed from our experience. Our experience reflects what we know of divine Love. So the more we yield to this Love, the more we see it and feel it—know it and understand it—we witness it, we uplift mankind, and we're truly able to bless and heal.

You know, in Science and Health, in the chapter on prayer, Mrs. Eddy wrote, "Prayer cannot change the Science of Being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it" (p. 2). And then later on in Science and Health: "The harmony and immortality of man are intact. We should look away from the opposite supposition that man is created materially, and turn our gaze to the spiritual record of creation, to that which should be engraved on the understanding and heart 'with the point of a diamond' and the pen of an angel" (p. 521). She said that angels are "God's thoughts passing to man"—God's thoughts passing to us. They will tell us everything we need to know.

RITA: So then we're not alone in doing this; we have the help of God.

EMILY: Oh, absolutely. It is the opposite of "doing" ourselves; it is yielding to God's allness, to God's script, to God's control. And if God is Love—which He is—then we need to stay there and work out from there. This Love is the truth. css