Demo day to the home renovator is one thing. To the metaphysician it can mean something totally different. Demolition versus demonstration.
I’ve been learning lessons about both recently.
Half of the wall that separated our kitchen from the family room is gone now. Demo done. The fireplace is, well, so 70’s. It’ll need updating. New floors are going in. The roof needs repairing and the interior needs a fresh coat of paint. Like so many people who see the early stages of a renovation project, I’ve looked at the progress so far and said: “This isn’t our house!” It’s a messy operation, but happily we’re going forward.
Demo day for the metaphysician is every day. Forever. This isn’t another fixer-upper project. Every day you and I demonstrate however much we understand of the Science of Life.
A couple of lessons in that regard. First, as much we’d like our lives to be perfect in every conceivable way right now, it takes patience and persistence together with prayer and practice. There’s a lot of learning that goes on in order to advance, and what we’re learning is entirely spiritual. Mary Baker Eddy described the education this way: “We all must learn that Life is God.”
Christian Science helps expand our understanding of God as not only the source of life, but of intelligence, foresight, calm, creativity, confidence, inspiration, all good. This leaves us with a choice. Either we look at our lives as cast in matter, struggling against material conditions that don’t or can’t change for the better, or we learn that the source of life is completely independent from matter – wholly spiritual – and never had anything to do with materialism.
What a difference it makes to start each day with the goal of learning a little bit more about the most profound discovery anyone can make: Life – the source of our own and of everyone’s life — is spiritual. It’s all-good, all-loving, all-seeing, and all-knowing. Life knows everything we need and have ever needed, and because God is pure Love as well as Life, our needs are provided for even before we think to ask.
Another lesson: learning that Life is God requires unlearning the misconception that life somehow emerged from dust. That’s a kind of demolition. I find it helpful to remember that the truths of Christian Science we study and apply daily – teaching us that Life is spiritual – also demolish the hypnotic error that life is material, inevitably dragged down by limitation, pain, aging and so forth. This isn’t laborious education; it’s liberating.