Hello, Friends – This email continues our once-a-week email on Friday written by regular participants in our Fillmore Wings Study Program.
This week’s post is by Marty Keller, leader of Sunday morning's Unity Correspondence Course with Marty Keller and Capital City Unity.
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9/11 and the Presence of God
Sometimes the pain and fear become so intense, so overwhelming, that despair floods our spirit and we seem to forget God—as if the experience is evidence of God forgetting us.
One of the greatest gifts that Myrtle and Charles Fillmore gave us is their recognition of the facts of our human organism. Even as they understood that we make our world with our thoughts, they also understood that we start out our lives as infants and children fashioned by the race consciousness. Emilie Cady put it this way in the first chapter of Lessons in Truth: “Every man believes himself to be in bondage to the flesh and to the things of the flesh.”
The flesh: bone, sinew, nerve, blood, brain. All subject to the laws of nature, waxing and waning through the course of human life.
And we humans don’t just experience pain and fear as individuals; we also face collective traumas that wound whole groups of people—nations, even. The twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 is just a stark example of the suffering that regularly occurs around the world.
Does all this trauma cause too many of us to believe that God has forsaken us?
We often forget that when the Fillmores attended that lecture by Emma Curtis Hopkins’ associate E. B. Weeks in 1886, “Myrtle was desperately sick and they did not know where to turn,” as James Dillet Freeman writes in The Household of Faith. “They had tried everything else that they knew about, and all had failed. They had reached the place where they were willing to try anything.”
Myrtle herself writes,
I myself was once an emaciated little woman, upon whom relatives and doctors had placed the stamp “T. B.” And this was only one of the ailments—there were others considered beyond any help, except possibly the changing of structures through an operation. There were family problems too. We were a sickly lot, and came to the place where we were unable to provide for our children. In the midst of all this gloom, we kept looking for the way out, which we felt sure would be revealed.
And, as we know, revelation came that very night. In her Healing Letters she writes,
You ask what restored me to vigorous health. It was a change from the old, carnal mind that believes in sickness to the Christ mind of life and permanent health. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2).” “As he thinketh within himself, so is he (Proverbs 23:7 A.V.).” I applied spiritual laws effectively, blessing my body temple until it manifested the innate health of Spirit. These wonderful laws will work for you too when you apply them diligently and in faith.
We often overlook that essential word, “diligence.” Faith, perhaps, we understand, but Myrtle reminds us that faith alone may not be sufficient to change “old, carnal mind . . . to the Christ mind of life and permanent health.”
And this is where the Fillmores bring powerful insight to the practice of changing our thoughts and thereby our world. In the Unity Correspondence Course that we have been studying in group sessions for two years now, we read how we humans have three aspects or dimensions of Mind: superconscious, conscious, and subconscious.
The superconscious is Christ Mind, in which we live, move, and have our being, but the conscious mind is where we humans become aware of this fact. The subconscious is where the work is, for
Besides being the storehouse of memory, the seat of habits, realm of feelings, the controller of the vital physical functions, the subconscious phase of mind is also the mind of instinctive desire. It is the total of each individual’s own thoughts as well as the whole of the inherited race thoughts and beliefs. The subconscious phase of mind works subjectively; it has no power of choice. It . . . is constantly bringing forth according to what has been stored in it, thus building man’s body and his environment. (Correspondence Course, Series 1, Lesson 5)
The subconscious phase of mind is where our belief that we are “in bondage to the flesh and to the things of the flesh” first took residence, just as Myrtle’s early belief that she was “an emaciated little woman” took residence. Her “relatives and doctors had placed the stamp ‘T. B.’” and so her subconscious mind reached the conclusion that she was sickly from these premises presented to her.
Spiritual realization requires diligence in discovering our subconscious beliefs, desires, and thought patterns. We need to see these in order to transform them. Just as Myrtle did with the cells of her body, we must similarly praise and love the cells of our subconscious, see in them the truth of their actual reality, acknowledge and validate their source in God Mind.
“Everything in God is in man . . . when he is quickened or made alive to the Christ consciousness, he ‘makes’ an imperishable, incorruptible body and world of pure Spirit substance” (Correspondence Course, Series 2, Lesson 6). Our task is to “quicken or make alive” our conscious contact with the Superconscious, the Christ Mind, which is permanently accessible whenever we choose to focus on its presence.
This takes diligence; the subconscious mind is vast. The belief in “bondage to the flesh” is hidden there. We know that it took Myrtle Fillmore two years of diligent, consistent, and patient meditative practice to bring about a permanent shift in her subconscious beliefs about the truth of her body and being.
Similar spiritual exercise leads us to abide with equanimity the inevitable times when the pain and fear become so intense, so overwhelming, that despair floods our spirit and we seem to forget God.
Twenty-five years ago, the nation experienced a collective trauma when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by members of al- Qaeda. For many, this was a searing moment of fear, anger, and helplessness. People flooded the churches all across the land, seeking solace from the sense of dislocation, unreality, and bewilderment.
Unity churches were prepared, by virtue of our training by the Fillmores, to look past the violence and our reactions to discern the presence of God. We could repeat the essential truth in Charles Fillmore’s declaration that “Man’s salvation from sin, sickness, pain, and death comes by his understanding and conforming to the orderly Mind back of all existence” (Christian Healing, p.42).
I remember the talk that Dorothy Pierson gave at my church, Christ Unity in Sacramento, the next Sunday; she called it “Sitting by the Bedside of the World.”
Like a doctor with a powerful presence, she reminded us that everything that happens in our world of flesh and bone is an opportunity to resurrect our human mind into the Christ Mind. In her gentle but confident voice, she led us to the truth of our being. She did not pretend that people were not suffering or grieving. She simply reminded us that, regardless of our human experience, we are always and inextricably in the presence of God. “I’m in the flow of ‘I don’t know,’ but God does.”
Yes, so often in our lives the pain and fear can become so intense in our bodies that we can hardly bear it. It happens to us individually and collectively. But the Fillmores remind us that even in these experiences we abide in the loving presence of God. Myrtle wrote in her Healing Letters,
Jesus Christ is not merely a divine man who lived many centuries ago and whose life and works are to be considered past history. He is alive today. He is with us now. His words, “Lo, I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20), are His living promise to each of us. The Christ presence within our own soul is the Great Physician who has wisdom and power to heal and to adjust in divine order every function of our body temple.
So even when pain and fear cause us to temporarily forget God, God has never for a moment forgotten us.
– Marty Keller
Return to Fillmore Wings Newsletters
Hello, again, one more thing – Right now we have four ongoing Fillmore Wings groups meeting. THERE IS NO PREREQUESITE for entering a class. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PARTICIPATE, but we ask you to identify your name in the Zoom session and try to turn on video if possible. To join in, go the Events page for days and times; look for these classes:
- Sundays–Unity Correspondence Course with Marty Keller and Capital City Unity
- Tuesdays–Fillmore Wings Study Program with Rev. Mark Hicks
- Fridays–Fillmore Fridays with Rev. Melissa Hill Greenbaum
