Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Lens of Thought


When I was a young boy living in a relatively small town many years ago, our school provided a movie during lunch period for students who took their lunch to school. We could go to the auditorium, pay a whopping 2 cents and watch the "featured" movie. The films were old and undoubtedly dirty and played on a noisy projector. Often during the middle of the film, almost always at the most exciting part, if an old Tom Brown's School Days or an Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy movie ever got really exciting, some dirt smudges or hair and dust balls would show up on the screen and flit around making it difficult to see the action!!!.

Invariably the projector would be shut off and the projector operator would clean off the lens, and the movie would start again.

It fascinated me that even though the debris appeared on the screen, the solution wasn't to cut parts of the screen out and replace them... the solution was to merely clean the lens and a perfect picture reappeared.

I often think of that today when some problem seems to be affecting my life. How easy it would seem to be if only I could cut out the offending part, like cutting the blotchy part out of the movie screen, and continue on with my life. Whether the problem is a physical ailment, a problem in business, or a relationship, or financial or any a long string of problems which can present themselves to our thought, it would be an easy way out.

But I am learning, however slowly, that to properly and completely correct the problems and to see myself and others as perfect reflections of and made in the image and likeness of, God, Spirit, the creator of all Life,  it is necessary, as demonstrated by the old projector operator, to clean the lens of thought so that a more pure and focused life can be experienced.

That means cleansing the lens by washing away material based thinking. When I give power or credence to anything opposed to spirituality, to a sense of life outside of God's infinite qualities of Love, Spirit, Mind and Truth, the lens starts fogging up again. Jesus saw clearly that man is wholly spiritual and was able to heal the sick and sinning. He was not burdened with worries about finances, food, clothing, social status, a BMW, war, terror or any of the situations that we seem to be obsessed with.  Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy contains this statement, "Jesus beheld, in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick."  S&H 476

Jesus said "be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect...." Matthew 5:48.  As we fill our hearts and mind with Love, there is no place for in-harmony, illness, discord of any kind.  

It's okay to be PERFECT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


1 comment:

JayArty said...

My grandmother, Alice Coyle Torbert (for whom we named our 2nd daughter) was a huge presence in my & my brother's childhoods. She died in the mid 60's, when we were both in college and she was in her mid 90's, having survived our grandfather by almost 30 years. She was a Christian mystic and a poet. Here's a poem she wrote when she was 80 called "That moment":

"Small change, my Lord," I say,
"This that you ask in pay,
When I would give the lifelong, incandescent day
And thus my debt defray;
Nay, I'd include the range
Of weeks and months, the change
Of seasons, not one moment only. Strange,
T lifetime's bounty You prefer small change.
Why, not to disavow
My debt, I'd servile bow
Beneath Thy yoke for eons, take a vow
To serve eternally."

He smiled, "I'll not allow
Such tribute: give one moment only,
But that moment now."