Dear Broadview Family:
August. Grilling sun. Ripening grain. So ripe that wheat fields literally smell like baking bread. It’s delicious for the senses — but let’s find a deeper take on the season.
Lammas was the traditional Christian festival celebrating the grain harvest. Priests led processions through medieval towns, blessing bread and the bakers of bread. The roots of the festival go all the way back to Demeter, the Greek grain-mother goddess, whose daughter Persephone represents the seed of next year’s new growth: the continuation of abundance.
Still, as Christian Scientists we have so much more to rejoice over than a material harvest. We have Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritualized concept of the biblical “seed within itself.” The perpetuation of eternal good. Sentinel writer Harold Molter describes this seed as “the activity of Christ” within us. For each of us, he says, this “seed of Truth” or “Christlike nature” is “our Saviour, our deliverer, our strong defense, our ever-present help.”
The real gold of this season emerges with Mary Baker Eddy’s words, “But the seed is in itself only as the divine Mind is All and reproduces all — when Mind is the multiplier and Mind’s infinite idea, man and the universe, is the product.”
Journal writer Helen Wood Bauman comments: “So unified is Mind’s creation that each of “its own images,” reflecting Mind, reflects all that Mind contains, includes by reflection every identity that peoples Mind’s realm.” Using different words but with the same intent, she goes on to say:
To know our real identity as the seed within itself, as the individual spiritual consciousness which includes by reflection all of Love’s identities, has a resurrectional, healing effect and expands one’s usefulness and his harmonious association with others.
Further, she notes:
Christ Jesus must have been declaring the truth of the integration of God’s innumerable identities when he prayed, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.” And again, “I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfect in one.”
Many of us have gloried in these words of Christ Jesus. And can you see how the “seed within itself” can represent both the activity of Christ within us (the Molter article) and God’s innumerable identities within us (the Bauman article)?
Mrs. Eddy writes: “If we say that the sun stands for God, then all his rays collectively stand for Christ, and each separate ray for men and women.” We can see how the sun, a symbol for God, and its rays, a symbol for Christ, illustrate the innumerable identities of His creation which are one in Spirit and purpose.
Yes, we have so much more to celebrate than a material harvest. We celebrate God’s infinite, indivisible creation, which is ours by reflection — and the harmony among all humans and all species that must result from this fact. Let this idea illuminate our prayers as we enjoy August’s bursting seeds, grilling heat, and sun-soaked landscapes!
Warm love,
Marivic Bay Mabanag
Executive Director
1 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 511. (“Science reveals only one Mind, and this one shining by its own light and governing the universe, including man, in perfect harmony. This Mind forms ideas, its own images, subdivides and radiates their borrowed light, intelligence, and so explains the Scripture phrase, ‘whose seed is in itself.’”)
2 Harold Molter, “The Seed Within Itself,” Christian Science Sentinel (December 7, 1957).
3 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, p. 508.
4 Helen Wood Bauman, “The Seed Within Itself,” Christian Science Journal (April 1952). See also Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 268 (“Look long enough … and you see the whole universe included in one infinite Mind and reflected in the intelligent compound idea, image or likeness, called man….”).
5 Id. See also John 17:21, 23 (KJV).
6 Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 344.