A friend reminded me about this post from 2007 tonight...just when I needed a reminder that I always have the right to refuse to be distracted, and reclaim my focus...transfixing it on God, good. It's always there.
"Talkin' about magic..." “Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart This question surfaces constantly: “If God is good, and is all, how is it that we experience illness, depression, sorrow, evil?” “Any seeming benefit derived from it [animal magnetism] Hmm….what could be the connection between this topic of animal magnetism and magic? I spent the next year investigating that question. “No evidence before the material senses There is never a moment when we cannot be the love “the magician” is trying to convince us is absent, or to ask the question that affirms the presence of Mind, Love, Truth, Life that this same trickster would try to assert has left the room. “Love is especially near in times of hate, I left the café that day with a new friend…a magician…and a fresh, vital way of thinking about my work, my world, and my right to stay focused on the presence of God--the presence of good--throughout every day. “I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul Kate
Here's the backstory:
Thanks, S.
How the music can free her, whenever it starts
And it's magic, if the music is groovy
It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie
I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll”
- John Sebastian
I too have asked this question of myself, and of others…teachers, pastors, sages, professors…but especially of God.
At one point in my study of Christian Science, this question seemed to be all I could think about. I took Mary Baker Eddy’s route towards discovery. I “searched the Scriptures and read little else”…well, except her best-selling book on spirituality, Science and Health.
One day during a particularly intense search for answers, it was in this book that I found a clue that seemed to stand out in relief as if highlighted in yellow neon. My research had led me to focus my inquiry on a chapter titled “Animal Magnetism Unmasked” in which she explores with her reader this topic that she defines in these six brief pages, in part, as “mesmerism,” that which “leads to moral and physical death,” “a mere negation,” “a specific term for error,” “mortal mind,” a “suppositional lie,”…etc. Not a light topic. But one that seemed to have me stopped in my tracks like a deer in the headlights.
Through the course of my daily spiritual practice, I would study, ponder and pray out from other spiritual facts, but this question seemed to loom just at the back of every question I brought to the closet in prayer. One day I was sitting in my office, once again reading through those six pages, and I came across this sentence:
is proportional to one’s faith in esoteric magic.”
And I got nowhere…slowly. Granted, I was busy. I had a full-time public practice in spiritual healing, as well as the parenting three children, and a consulting project with an international speakers’ bureau, to navigate each day. My plate was full, but there always seemed to be space for that question about Eddy's use of the term "magic," in connection with "animal magnetism," to surface.
After a year of scouring library, bookstore, and “strange little out of the way magic shop” shelves for some clue as to the connection between spiritual healing and esoteric magic, I was frustrated and ready to give up. I had read lots, but felt no closer to something I could make my own, feel the strength of, and find practical as a healer.
I decided to give it another try one Saturday in early April. It was one of those perfect crocus-popping spring days. Temperatures in the 60s, a deep blue cloudless sky, and robins singing from the trees like that deranged bird in Mary Poppins during the “Spoonful of Sugar” sequence… all assertive and cheery. But I digress…
The girls were playing happily with their dad, so I slipped away for an hour after the breakfast dishes were done for a cup of tea and some study at my favorite coffeehouse in our village center, just outside of Boston, while our older daughter was in a ballet workshop. I arrived early enough to garner one of the few tables outside on the wide sidewalk, and settled in. Before long, I was more frustrated than ever. I just didn’t get it.
I was ready to resign to the possibility that I would never get the connection between magic and the practice of spiritual healing, when a man approached my table balancing his coffee mug on a book, and carrying his brioche on the plate in his other hand, while a copy of the Boston Globe seemed to be ready to spill out from under his arm. He asked if he could share my table...glancing about, as if to encourage me to notice that there were no vacant seats, except the chair on which I had placed my small traveling library. As I reached to move the books and papers, I looked right into his face and allowed all of the frustration I was feeling about my search, to pour out in seven words that surprised us both.
“Yes, but it’s going to cost you!”
Normally I would never have said such a thing. I’d have met his request with a cheerful nod, and then within a few moments excused myself and left for home, or the car, to wait for our daughter to finish her ballet workshop. But this time I was so absorbed in my question that I had blurted out the conditions of my demand, before thinking.
I don‘t believe he could have ever imagined it coming from the benignly studious person he had approached. There I was in jeans, a white men’s dress shirt ten sizes too large and rolled up at the sleeves, a pair of old scuffed pick ballet slippers, the arms of a nubby grey sweater tied around my shoulders, my reading glasses clinging precariously to the tip of my nose, and my white hair bursting wildly from the pencils that anchored it up into a bun. I was anything but the image of a coquette-ish schoolgirl flirting with a stranger. Thank goodness for his ability to process that visual information quickly enough to respond with patient good humor.
“What’s it going to cost me?” he asked with a curious, and hesitant, smile.
I was relieved that he hadn’t given me a “what a weirdo” look, and just turned his back. I smiled and said, “You have to tell me everything you know about magic!”
I could see relief seep through the wariness in his face. As he placed his coffee and brioche, book and morning paper on the table, he replied, “Piece of cake, I’m a professional magician.”
I was stunned, but didn’t waste precious time.
“Good," I said, "tell me about magic in layman's terms, in three or four sentences, so that I understand the fundamental principles behind how it works.”
“I can tell you in one word: distraction.”
He then explained it to me.
When a magician is performing a trick he diverts your focus from watching what his hands are doing so that you aren’t aware of the "trick" that is going on right in front of your eyes. He then lets go of your focus, allowing it to return to where you think it has been all along. And voila…a rabbit pops out of a hat. While he had distracted you, or pulled your focus off of what he is doing...by suggesting that you look at his sequined, flashy assistant...he has retrieved the rabbit from a box under the table, and placed it in the hat in full view right in front of you. When he released your focus and then pulled the rabbit out of the hat, you thought it was magic.
For me it was just the key I needed for unlocking an important door in my practice of spiritual healing...one that I've alluded to, in a previous post titled, "And immediately the fever left her..."
Sickness, sin, disease, war, violence are just, at their roots, the suggestion that God is absent. They, like the magician, would like to be able to pull my focus from the allness of God, good, that is always right in front of me. To pull my eyes off center to where it is jumping up and down, screaming “God is absent…God is absent.” But at any given moment I can say “No…I have the right to see what is right in front of me." I have the right to reclaim my focus and see that God is present. And that any instance of good, however faint, points to the allness of good. . That when Love is at all present, in some expression of kindness or affection…even if it is just the very moment of loving that you are bringing to bear on the situation by doing something kind for another...it is all-present -- since there is only one measure, or portion of Love, God, and that is infinite, all.. To realize that it is enough to realize that Mind is present in the very questioning you are doing, as you search for answers.
By reclaiming your focus, holding it on the presence of God, appreciating any indication of God’s presence, you are refusing to consent to the absence of God in any measure, degree or form. This focus, the appreciation...awareness of, and gratitude for...good, results in the appreciat-ing...ensuent growth in value, of goodness in all its manifestations. And acting out from this presence of God, good, is to begin living with spiritual (God-based) authority without condition or measure.
Mary Baker Eddy further supports this way of living and seeing when she asserts:
can close my eyes to the scientific proof
that God, good, is supreme.”
Eddy goes on to say,
and never so near as when one can be just
amid lawlessness, and render good for evil.”
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll”
- John Sebastian
Here's a link to John Sebastian, and the Lovin' Spoonful singing ""Do you believe in magic..."
with Love,
Thank you so much!
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