Your secret place

Alice Swain Bailey

Do you have a secret place in your house or out in your garden or down the road? A place no one knows about except you? You feel special and safe there. You might go there when you don't want to play with your friends and you just want to be quiet.

Everyone can have another kind of secret place. This place doesn't need to be in the garden or in the house. It is a "place" of thinking called prayer.

Christ Jesus talked a lot about prayer in his Sermon on the Mount—both about how to pray and how not to pray. He pointed out how wrong it was to make a big show out of prayer, to use words or attend church to impress people. Then he said, "When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."^{Matt. 6:6.}

In Jesus' time a house often had a room for storing things, and this room is what the Bible calls a closet. But we learn from the Bible that Jesus prayed in many places—on a mountain, in the Garden of Gethsemane, or in a friend's house with his disciples around him. It's plain that Jesus didn't think it necessary to go to an actual storeroom to pray, and he didn't have to be alone to pray. He was talking about a quiet place of thought.

Christian Science teaches that God is Mind and is everywhere. So when we go to this "closet" of thought, God is there already, seeing His own perfect creation. We reflect God, the only Mind, and as we pray we, too, see ourselves and others as His children, happy and free. This prayer is quiet, full of lovely ideas from God. It leaves out thoughts of fear, hurt, or unimportant things.

Carolyn Bentley

Do you remember this verse from a poem by Mary Baker Eddy? It's in the Christian Science Hymnal:

Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing;
In that sweet secret of the narrow way,
Seeking and finding, with the angels sing:
"Lo, I am with you alway,"—watch and pray. Hymnal, No. 207 . See also Poems, p. 4

This place of prayer, where we seek and find God, is always where we are. God's angels, spiritual thoughts, are with us always. We can be in this secret place any time we want.

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