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Comfort for mourners

A Christian Science perspective: The light of God’s loving nature and presence assures us that we’re cherished and loved.

  • By Mark Swinney

At times of loss, it’s wonderful to have comfort from family and friends. And I have also found that lasting comfort can be spiritual, derived directly from the Divine. An idea that’s helped me again and again is that we are not simply physical beings that stop existing. We are actually spiritually created, the image of God, and so everyone is inseparable from God, divine Love and Life. Nothing can ever change that. We are all created to express the joyful, loving nature of God. And we can keep on enjoying the goodness of those we love even when they’re not with us.

When my father passed, I prayed for comfort. It wasn’t an easy time, but I began to see that my father hadn’t created the wonderful qualities I loved in him; he reflected those qualities from their divine source – just as the moon doesn’t create light on its own, but reflects the sun’s light. In other words, everything I had loved about my dad, I actually would get to keep. The love with which my dad loved me was truly God’s love, which is always with us, reflected in us in wonderful and unique ways. And I saw that I could honor my father’s memory by consciously expressing God’s love, just as I’d seen him do.

Divine Love never lets us go, so we can trust that we are never alone. I particularly love how this idea of God’s ever-presence is symbolized in an instructive story told by Christ Jesus, in which a father says to a son who was feeling left out of his embrace, “Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31).

When mourning for those who have passed from our sight, we can pray to feel the touch of God’s love. Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy defined angels as God’s thoughts that we can intuit. She wrote: “Oh, may you feel this touch, – it is not the clasping of hands, nor a loved person present; it is more than this: it is a spiritual idea that lights your path!” (“Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896,” p. 306).

May we all feel the light of God’s loving nature and presence, the divine message in our hearts assuring us that we and our loved ones are constantly cherished and loved.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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