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Docta Ignorantia XXI Ritual Actually, I am serious, as you are aware that I am. Christian Science is full of ritual formulae. Science and Health is a most carefully wrought, meticulously scripted work. MBE has revised it several times, each time building what she feels is language which is
We have previously remarked her efforts in these regards. Science and Health is a set of formulaic expressions crafted by MBE and associates for these purposes stated above. Formulaic expressions are rituals, par excellence. The languages are meant to do things, specific things, and this makes the language formulaic, or, ritualistic. Science and Health is most carefully worked for just this purpose. Ritual is unavoidable. Christian Science has a set order of service, set prayers, set healing procedures and a very set Sacred Literature. All of these are rituals. All are using language -- which, ultimately, is Das Wort, Logos -- to achieve specific effects, which are identifiable and stated. Healing is just one of these that MBE had in her set of desirable effects. And rightly so. The entire religion, like every other religion, comprises the deliberate use of ritual formulae to gain this effect and that. MBE's objection to ritual you either do not understand or you think I am one of the ritualistic clergy she condemns. My sense is that you do not understand MBE or Christian Science, but I am willing to be proved wrong about that. My sense is that neither you nor the Church understand MBE and that this is why both of your lives are in turmoil. Your rejection of such an obvious thing as the basing of Christian Science on ritualistic formulae is the most recent indication suggesting to me that you do not understand Christian Science. Saying you are 'orthodox Christian Science' suggests the same thing. Emotionally, this is going backwards, like these silly Episcopalians who think that the way now leads through fundamentalism. Nostalgia, not religion, is being grasped at here. Without ritual there is no religion of any denomination. The purpose of religion is forward progress towards a goal, an inner goal, by means of activities (piety) which arrange circumstances to a propitious demeanor. That is, religion is earning Grace and receiving Grace not earned. MBE, as every Sage, objects to brainless, inept and improper ritual, of which there is always plenty. She does not object to ritual per se. She cannot, for, her religion is comprised of it. Physicists' so-called non-linear time is still linear. It's just an invention requiring 22 dimensions (i.e., still a closed system) and it is not used for ordinary work, just for stream theory, which is a specialized branch of quantum theory and of no use outside itself. The thing is not kairotic at all, and it is not useful (vernacular) outside its construct. And just within its construct it is poly-linear, incomprehensible and surd -- 22 dimensions -- meaning, useless. The country has finally woken up to this fact and taken appropriate action to shut down the 'super collider.' If physicists were kairotic -- which is vernacular -- they would have started a religion. You should read their flame wars on the Internet news groups! Such a cabal of loutish misanthropes. Why do you suppose them puissant? So, in Christian Science practice you do deal with fear often first? I suspected as much. There is no more a Christian Science Church than there is an Episcopalian one. It's back to the monastery for all of us. Back to basics. In this sense, orthodox, yes, but forwardly, not within something which isn't there any longer. MBE would not associate herself with the Mother Church today any more than Jesus would with the Catholic (Greek, Roman, Episcopalian). The tenants in the parable are those bodies. They are also these bodies, so long as we do not use them to practice Zedekah (Dharma). Today, Zedekah for Theologians is the monastery, actual or virtual.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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