“Lord, Make Me Upright”

SH 5 — “The continual contemplation of existence as material and corporeal — as beginning and ending, and with birth, decay, and dissolution as its component stages — hides the true and spiritual Life, and causes our standard to trail in the dust.”

Whatever I fasten my contemplative gaze upon brings it more and more into my experience. This is why it is so important to have no other god before God, no other mind before Mind, as they are synonyms of one another (SH 4); the highest standard possible for me to achieve is the contemplation of God, wherever I am and whatever I am doing. This is loving God with all my mind, all of my contemplative capacities, not just part.

It is impossible to experience the “true and spiritual life” while contemplating things that hide it (this is also related to this week’s Watching Point). Continually, morbidly beholding mistakes and errors — sin, sickness, disease, human weaknesses — in frenzied resistance and protest against them, with most or all of my attention turned upon them rather than upon God, actually multiplies more of such unwanted things in my life. In Watches, Prayers, and Arguments, Mrs. Eddy says of her own contemporary Christian Science followers: “Students do not pray enough. They should go by themselves at least three times a day to pray. Their prayers should consist of much giving thanks, more realization of the perfect, as well as the denial of error. There is too much denial of error and too little realization of the perfect. Lord, make me upright.”