The joy of Easter morn awaits you
Is the deep-down understanding of eternal life too much for us to grasp? I, like you, love the promise of eternal life that Christian Science so clearly teaches. This marvelous fact is brought out in many ways in Science and Health. The author of that amazing book, Mary Baker Eddy, understood it in such a profound way, and I often have pondered what she so boldly states in that book, “If you or I should appear to die, we should not be dead” (p. 164). I have also deeply considered what Jesus meant when he said, “If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death” (John 8:51).
Die but not be dead? Never see death? Wonderful promises. But what does it take to understand them? Sometimes it takes what feels like a crucifying experience.
Several years ago my husband was diagnosed with yet another terminal disease. (Nearly twenty years before he had been diagnosed with a completely different one that had been totally overcome, largely, I believe, as the result of his wife [me] rising to the occasion in her own prayer by refusing to believe in disease and death. But that’s another story.) He’d been married to a Christian Scientist for more than 30 years and had been a firsthand witness to remarkable healings I’d had. And he’d felt the healing touch of my understanding and fearlessness in the face of other conditions he had had medically treated over the years, but he chose medical means rather than Christian Science to prolong his life as long as possible. I promised him I would take care of him in the way he had chosen. I remained constantly by his side whether in his several hospital stays or at his bedside in our home as he vainly battled to stay alive.
I stayed crystal clear myself during those several months, constantly refusing to believe that disease had any power or reality, holding to the spiritual fact that God does not know disease or death, so I couldn’t either. And I nursed my husband in the ways and means he had chosen. I felt I was following the spirit of the Golden Rule by doing for him what I would have wanted him to do for me. I know in my heart that if the tables had been reversed, he would have stood by my side, doing all he could for me and respecting my choice to faithfully rely on Christian Science. I could do no less for him.
In the last few weeks, while I cared for him night and day at home, I wondered if what I was feeling wasn’t something like what the women at the foot of the cross must have felt. Not a sense of helplessness, but a sense of persistent, patient waiting on the Christ to change the scene. I, too, was expecting a complete reversal of the tragic human condition before my eyes.
All there is, is life.
Then one dull and drab morning, as I wiped his brow and held him, I suddenly spoke to him with an incredible force of authority and power I had not known before. I virtually shouted each word distinctly, “Nothing can convince me of anything but life!” And in less than 30 seconds, he was gone. Like the women at the foot of the cross, I wept. Yet only momentarily, because with the same suddenness of those words spoken and his last breath taken, I had new insight into what Jesus might have meant when he said that those who kept his teachings would never see death. Maybe he didn’t mean his followers would never see someone die. Maybe instead he meant his followers would cease to have any belief in death—even right in the face of evidence to the contrary. While I cannot fully explain what I felt and knew in that moment, I can tell you that I was entirely convinced that there is no death. That all there is, is life. That my husband had never really lived in physicality and had not died out of it either. I had never been more certain of the promise I so love in Mrs. Eddy’s statement, “If you or I should appear to die, we should not be dead.”
My husband’s passing occurred on a Thursday morning. Very early Sunday morning, I woke up with this phrase from Science and Health virtually singing in my heart: “. . . on the third day of his ascending thought . . .” (p. 509). This refers to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead after being in the tomb for three days. Well, it had been about three days since my husband had died, so I listened to what I could learn from that simple, comforting, tender phrase. Then almost immediately it occurred to me that though it didn’t mean that my husband had virtually ascended (as Jesus had done 40 days after his resurrection), it did mean that his thought surely was ascending. He was going forward and he wasn’t looking back. He wasn’t thinking about what had happened to him three days before, or during those difficult months. He wasn’t looking back to see if I and the rest of his family were OK. He knew we were all right. He was going forward, rising in his understanding of life. And I knew that was also true about me. I was going forward, and I didn’t need to look back either.
That was the middle of May, but it was truly an Easter morn for me. The joy I felt at knowing that his thought was ascending in new ways that I was no party to, was indescribable. That morning my sense of my husband radically shifted from thinking of him as a mortal, the husband whom I had loved and who had just died, to seeing him—really knowing him—to be an indestructible, immortal, precious, and beloved expression of God. That joy and that spiritual affection, that deep understanding, have been with me every day of my life since. Whenever I think of him, I only feel the joy of knowing he lives. Of knowing he always has been and always will be an eternally developing idea of God. And I feel certain he, too, knows the joy of discovering in some measure what Jesus wanted so much for all of us to understand—and never doubt—that no one ever really dies.
The joy of Easter morn awaits each and every one.
