“An Experiment in Faith: Spiritual Living through Transformation”
It doesn’t seem so long ago Seaside had a building dedicated to housing our movement’s archives. I’d just walk up to the back property and stroll through the bookshelves lined with the rich history of Religious Science and New Thought. Just the thought propels me to remembering the scent of all those books. It was fun to be able to pick up any one I wanted and flip through the pages, maybe even find a signature of Dr. Holmes in one them. It was an exciting time to observe the beginning of technology we could now use to share Ernest Holmes with the world. Volunteers would come to play by scanning our legacy of Dr. Holmes and putting his words online for the world to see. Alas, the Archives found its way home to Golden Colorado and my joy of picking up a hard copy of a book was gone.
Yet the direction in which the Archives has been able to move, thanks to your financial contributions and those of others, is making more and more of Ernest Holmes’s work and that of his contemporaries readily available online for all of us to enjoy from wherever we may be in the world.
I just read a wonderful booklet of Ernest Holmes that conveys how important our differences are and is in alignment with our movement’s April theme of Spiritual Living through Transformation and Evolution. It is the space for newness that makes evolution possible. All you have to do is go to the Archive site, http://shop.scienceofmindarchives.org/product-category/free/,and select ‘Free.’ There are volumes of booklets available to you that you can download right at your fingertips. In the one I just read, “An Experiment with Faith,” Holmes wrote, “When God put us here He made each one of us just a little different, and if Divine Intelligence made each one of us just a little different, as though each one were a new mold, then the greatest adventure in life would be an experiment with ourselves to see what we could do with this Thing that is within us.”
I love adventures, and it appears our beloved founder is challenging us to discover how Spirit is uniquely seeking to express through each of us in our own distinctive way. The beauty of diversity isn’t meant to divide us but to enrich our life. If each book sitting on the Archive’s shelves or scanned online contained all the same stories it would be boring. The richness is the diverse offering that awaits our recognition. Diversity of thought and culture and religion and ideas has been the strength of this country. The differences of perspectives are a joy to be explored … part of life’s exciting range of infinite possibilities, not something to be anxious over, but rather something to embrace.
The convergence of diverse thought is necessary if we are to face the new challenges of our time. As every generation before us came together to move through their challenges of the day, so we too are sitting with the answers to respond to today’s call. Until we honor the voices of diversity of opinion, we will not have the freedom to evolve in a new way. Each step forward comes from the interchange of ideas rather than the insular development of a single perspective. So do as Dr. Holmes advised us for transformation and bring that “Thing that is within us” to life and honor your part in moving the grand adventure forward.
“I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable…has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn