Will you join the dance?

As the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon dance the Lobster-Quadrille in Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,m the Mock Turtle sings a song about a fish and a snail. The fish urges the snail to join other sea creatures for a dance on the beach. Although the song alludes to pleasure and vitality, it is also deeply mournful, for it includes undertones of violence and death. The snail refuses the fish's mesmerizing invitation: "Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?"

We have a similar invitation every day. Will we or won't we join the dance of mortal life, the dance of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, and death? We have a choice.

And yet the choice is not solely between joining and not joining. Christ Jesus knew the options. He was certainly not a mere observer of the mortal scene, but neither did he join in or reinforce its sad dance. He didn't participate in sickness; he healed it. He didn't take part in death; he raised people from it, and finally effected his own resurrection. He didn't act out a scenario of lack; he fed multitudes when there was little food available from the usual sources.

Matter's so-called laws were overcome by Jesus because he worked from the standpoint of a different cause and different universe: a spiritual cosmos. He knew that God, divine Mind or Spirit, was his Father, and that he didn't have to acquiesce in mournful mortality's view of existence.

Christian Science reveals -- and we must prove -- the purely spiritual existence Jesus demonstrated. Science helps one look beyond what the material senses present; it empowers us to see the spiritual facts and to live as much as possible from the standpoint of these facts. It enlightens thought, enabling one to look out on a universe of spiritual ideas mirroring forth the harmony of Deity.

Where do we see this creation? We see it in friends and acquaintances when we acknowledge and hold to their tru, immortal nature. This nature expresses only divinely based qualities, such as vivacity, integrity, affection, and intelligence. We can also perceive something of God's creation in animals and birds when we understand that they in fact hint at the spiritual qualities of life and beauty.

When we view everything that makes up our present lives as forms of consciousness, we begin to comprehend things in a different light. And when we go one step further and acknowledge that God is the only real consciousness, a completely new life opens up. St. John said he say "a new heaven and a new earth." n1 Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes: ". . . The human mind will sometime rise above all material and physical sense, exchanging it for spiritual perceptions, and exchanging human concepts for the divine consciousness. Then man will recognize his God-given dominion and being." n2

n1 Revelation 21:1

n2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 531

We need not accept the mournful invitation when a material sense of existence would call the tune. Rather, we can align ourselves with God, divine Mind, and look out on a universe of spiritual ideas. We can actively participate in the divine adventure of Life, God, and sing with the Psalmist, "Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness." n3

n3 Psalms 30:11.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE Be pleased, O lord, to deliver me: O lord, make haste to help me. Let them be ashamed and confounded together that seek after my soul to destroy it. Psalms 40:13, 14

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