This week’s subject — reflection Editor’s note: Every Friday a question is printed at the end of this column inviting a response. If you are a religious leader on Kaua‘i please send in your thoughts or suggestions for future topics.
This week’s subject — reflection
Editor’s note: Every Friday a question is printed at the end of this column inviting a response. If you are a religious leader on Kaua‘i please send in your thoughts or suggestions for future topics. Next week’s subject is on prayer/meditation. The suggested topic at the end of the column is for the following week.
by Pam Woolway – The Garden Island
Wendy Winegar
North Shore Christian Science
My dad always got a kick out of having clients visit him in his home office. After a few minutes of business talk their eyes would wander to a photo on the wall behind him. It was a girl on a dirt bike flying over a whoop-dee-doo eye level with the top of a Joshua tree, booted legs stretched out in a straight split. The inscription read, “Rejoicing in God’s ever present protection 35 miles from nowhere, Mojave Desert. I love you, Wendy.”
It was an incongruous picture to put next to his certificates of achievement and business accolades, but he treasured it as a commemoration of all the years he spent as an absent father doing what was best for me. Through his daily prayers he saw me as God’s reflection, a child of God made in His image and likeness: Spiritual, free, complete, joyous, reflecting the spiritual qualities of a perfect Father-Mother God.
My dad was a Christian Scientist who actively lived his religion. This “seeing me clearly” as he called it, from birth through adulthood, exemplified a basic truth that Mary Baker Eddy discerned in the teachings of the Bible and Christ.
In “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” she states, “Jesus beheld in science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the savior saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.”
Based on the Genesis 1 account of man created in the image and likeness of God, Eddy states, “Man is and forever has been God’s reflection.” With support like this and such a center of parental love, itself a reflection of God, my inner core felt a divine guidance system guarding and governing me.
Shortly after that picture was taken my bike broke down and I had to be towed out of the desert. The tow bike was too fast and erratic for me to hang on and I flew over the handlebars landing in a sprawl. One leg was twisted all the way around from below the knee. As I started to scream into my full coverage helmet I made a choice to turn to God for help. Instead of screaming in pain, I screamed in prayer. A great sense of Christly calm enveloped me. From that point on I knew that it is the Christ that heals, certainly not a human positive thinking process. I was able to get back on the bike but asked the tow guy to please go slower. The details of the complete and verified healing that resulted were published in the May 1999 Christian Science Journal, a monthly magazine. To read the article go to spirituality.com/journal
The Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Koloa
Baha’is believe that all the divine Prophets, including all the founders of the great religions, are reflections of the same God. “Know Thou assuredly that the essence of all the prophets of God is one and the same.” Baha’u’llah wrote, “Their unity is absolute. God, the Creator, saith: There is no distinction whatsoever among the bearers of my message …”
God is a limitless, infinite and unknowable essence. However, God has progressively revealed, at various times and in various places throughout the world, that portion of His guiding light which humankind has both needed and been able to understand. God has done this by sending divine messengers, who reflect that part of God’s light required in that place and time. This gradual guidance of God is known as progressive revelation.
Each manifestation of God reflects the light of God. Think of the way in which a mirror or the moon reflects the light of the sun. Neither mirror nor moon generates its own light, but each is capable of reflecting the source of the light, which is the sun. God is like the sun. God can be thought of as the light that radiates infinitely in all directions. The manifestations of God are perfect mirrors of God’s perfect light. God’s will for humanity is revealed through that light reflected by each manifestation. It is through this reflection only that we are able to know God.
In like manner, each one of us has the capacity to reflect the virtues of God revealed time and time again by the manifestations.
Each one of us is called upon to develop our characters, our spirituality, by developing our ability to reflect His virtues.
Next week’s question:
• Will you speak to us on hospitality?
• Spiritual leaders are invited to e-mail responses of three to five paragraphs to pwoolway@kauaipubco.com
• Deadline each week is Tuesday, by 5 p.m.
