Today I am specifically thinking of the refugee crisis we are facing in Europe and our attempts to respond with love and help. I remembered Peter's second rule about hurrying!
He said, My second rule is: “There’s plenty of time if you don’t hurry.” This too, is more applicable to your mental state than your physical state, although it applies to both.
During World War II my mother was in London going to a railroad station when the sound of an air raid siren sounded. She saw a man coming leisurely down the steps of his house pulling on his gloves and she said to , rather flustered – “Have I time to get to such and such a place before the bombs start falling?” And he said, “Yes, Madam, you have plenty of time if you don’t hurry.”
The entire talk follows:
Administration and Technical Services Department
The First Church of Christ, Scientist
Boston, Massachusetts.
October Inspirational Meeting (From some years ago)
Speech given by Peter J. Henniker-Heaton
(Received as type written document. Retyped, proof read, and entered into computer 2009 by Rick Stewart CS, Dresden, Germany)
It’s nice to be with you all this afternoon and to have this opportunity of thanking those of you who have done so much for us, unseen, making life easier for us and caring for us in so many ways. You’re not as big an audience as we had this morning, but you’re much better behaved. You’ve at least come further forward and that’s awfully good.
I gather that your committee has invited me to speak on the strength of one qualification. In forty years, nearly, of married life, my wife and I have only moved our address once. When we did move, it was a beauty. Twenty years ago, we moved from London to Boston. Of course, that was a longer journey than the one you are going to make in your move here. But, it’s not really the distance, the physical distance,that matters. What matters is the spiritual thinking which goes into a move like this. We are hoping that as each department moves into its new quarters, it will not only include its physical equipment and capabilities: but will also, at the same time, include its spiritual and mental potential in every way. So I’m going to spend a little while drawing lessons from my own experience with moving. It may be helpful to you for your experience with moving.
I’ve thought of five rules which I hope you may be able to apply in different ways. They’re going to be stated quite briefly, so don’t be afraid. The first is: “Declare the end from the beginning.” That’s based on a statement by the prophet Isaiah, put into God’s mouth. “I am God: and there is none else. Declare the end from the beginning.” Whenever we have an important project to face up to, hopefully, we will take our clue from this verse and from the very beginning recognize that it is complete in every detail. Jesus, before he raised Lazarus from the dead, thanked God, and before he fed the multitudes, he thanked God. We too can always recognize that every right activity or idea exists at the stand-point of completeness already, and before we make any move we can thank God that it is complete and recognize that this is so, and right now. I have found it very useful whenever I have a large or difficult project, or one that has to be cared for, for a short while and before I do anything else, I sit down or stand still and recognize that it is already complete in Divine Mind and I have yet to see it appear. If it has to be sent somewhere when it is completed, I very often, as a first step, sit down and address the envelope in which it is to be delivered. This is a symbol of my recognition that it is already complete. So when I came to make my move to Boston, my wife and I, before we did anything else, recognized the move as absolutely complete in every detail. And I am sure that you, as you contemplate your move here, although the physical distance may not be so great, you can nevertheless find advantage in recognizing that it is already complete if your declare the end from the beginning.
My second rule is: “There’s plenty of time if you don’t hurry.” This too, is more applicable to your mental state than your physical state, although it applies to both.
During World War II my mother was in London going to a railroad station when the sound of an air raid siren sounded. She saw a man coming leisurely down the steps of his house pulling on his gloves and she said to , rather flustered – “Have I time to get to such and such a place before the bombs start falling?” And he said, “Yes, Madam, you have plenty of time if you don’t hurry.” That’s a good lesson for us all, I think. Of course we find the same lesson in the Bible where it says, “He that believeth shall not make haste.” And Mrs. Eddy once said to her household, “When you have a hill to climb, see that you are already at the top.” All these are pointing out the fact that if we really do these things in an orderly fashion and know that he that believeth shall not make haste, we can expect that they will come without hurry and without delay. Another way Mrs. Eddy put it was “according to my calendar, God’s time and mortals differ.” Well, we need to do everything in God’s time, not in mortal's time. Actually when I was first invited to come to Boston to head the “Home Forum” page, I had a lot of unfinished business in England, and it didn’t seem right to come at that time. The suggestion came that if I didn’t go immediately or very soon, I’d miss the opportunity and wouldn’t be asked again. But, at that same time, I thought well “What’s God’s time?,” and if I did what was right for everyone in England, it would also be right for everyone here and for myself. I wrote back and said I wasn’t ready to come yet, but if the invitation could be renewed in three year’s time, I would. And it was renewed in three year’s time.
Halfway across the Atlantic I received a form to fill out, in regards to “what is your home address?” I started to put down none and then recalled, well, if everything’s unfolding according to God’s plan and to God’s time, then I have a home waiting for me in Boston. So, instead of putting down no home address, I put , “don’t know it yet.” Then I realized it really would be waiting for me in God’s time. The day after we arrived in Boston, my wife found an apartment in the block we wished to live in and it was the only one left at that time. That evening I signed the lease. We’ve been very happy there in the twenty years since then. So my second rule, “he that believeth shall not make haste” or rather in the same way as “there’s plenty of time if you don’t hurry.
My third rule is “Expect the unexpected and make the most of it.” And if we do this, when the unexpected comes as it nearly always does, when you’re making a move in some way or another, instead of thinking it may be an obstruction getting in your way, you at once agree to acknowledge that it is an opportunity, something that is going to help you along and it will turn out much better than you had anticipated.. When we started, my wife and I, to get our things and documents together in coming to this country, one of the first unexpected things that happened was I discovered that my wife, instead of being a good Britain, was a Pakistani. According to American immigration law, your basic nationality is determined not by your parents, but by the place you happen to be born in. My wife’s father built railroads all over the length and breadth of India. So she happened to be born in Lahore, what was then India, now Pakistan. So when I came here I had a brand new Pakistani wife. The second point was that in the India of those times, they didn’t have any registration of birth, so she had no birth certificate. The best they could come up with for the immigration authorities was a baptismal certificate. She’d been baptized in the Cathedral of Lahore. It had the date on which she’d been baptized, and then it said a very interesting thing. The next column said, “said to be born on such and such a date.” And so I had a sealed and certified, officially and ecclesiastically witnessed document that my wife was only said to have been born. This is very interesting from a Christian Science point of view because we recognize that man as a son of God, existing with God through all eternity, is never really born in the flesh. This is part of the mortal record, said to have been born in the flesh, but here was an acknowledgement that my wife was only said to have been born by mortal evidence. So look out for whatever unexpected things, unexpected good things may come your way in the move and don’t miss them.
My fourth rule is, and remember I’ve only got five, so I won’t carry on too long; my fourth rule is: “leave all unnecessary baggage behind.” Sometimes we’re so intent on deciding what we will take, that we don’t give sufficient attention to deciding what it is we won’t take. But that’s just as important both in the mental and the physical sense. St. Paul says, “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.” Well, a move is a very good time to decide to forget those things which are behind and reach forward to those things which are before. At the time we came from England, there were very tight and rigid exchange restrictions. Under the law, we couldn’t bring a penny out of England, we couldn’t bring any of our small savings or anything. With great difficulty, I persuaded the Bank of England to lend me $100. This $100 went along with a decision we made on our own part. We only brought with us our clothes and one packing case of favourite books, ornaments and little things like that. Every thing else we left behind. We were coming to a new world and we wanted it to be a new experience. We gave all our accumulation of eighteen years in our former apartment to friends and relatives and said if we ever came back, we might ask for them and if they’d lost them or sold them or burned them, we wouldn’t hold them responsible. The last day at home, we had a party for our neighbors and they all said goodbye to us. They then carried off from our house any remnants which remained. So we started anew in this country. It was like being married all over again after eighteen years. Since salaries in the Publishing House where I was going to work, even allowing for inflation, were nowhere near where they are today, we didn’t furnish overnight. It took quite a long time to earn enough to furnish our apartment properly. But in the meantime, we got old crates and covered them with bits of cloth and various people lent us this or that. Also we got some quite useful temporary items from the large trash room in the corridor of our apartment building. One of my English friends who arrived about the same time was having to do much the same. She complained that she never found anything of much use in the trash room. I told her you must elevate your concept of trash, and the very next day, she found a very beautiful wrought iron flower stand which she carried off with joy to her apartment and although she is now married and has a beautiful home full of lovely antiques, this wrought iron flower stand which she found in the trash room, still ornaments her home. Another thing I left behind, which I would like to just tell you briefly about, was like this. When one came here, to the United States, in order to get a working visa, one was required to get a thorough medical examination at the United States embassy in London. I passed with flying colors but in the course of the exam the doctor asked if I had ever had any serious illnesses. I said I’d been discharged medically from the Naval Services and at that time the board of doctors had diagnosed me as suffering from an incurable form of paralysis and he said, “well, that can’t be right: if you’d had that, you wouldn’t be here and he refused to enter it on my record. Of course, he was doing better than he knew, because one of the reasons I’d been healed of this condition through Christian Science was that I knew the spiritual truth that it had never been part of me and never part of my record at all. Anyway, he struck it out and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And so the medical verdict cancelled an earlier medical verdict and I left that whole business entirely behind me. So, if you in your move really are careful and take what you need but leave all unnecessary baggage behind, we don’t know what things we may manage to shake off and we don’t know what kinds of flower stands you may find along the way to incorporate in your new quarters.
And now for my fifth and last rule for moving. And this is, “look up for good things unfolding out of God’s law, along the line of natural human normality.” Now for a story which illustrates what I mean. It doesn’t concern my move from England but it concerns another journey I made. When I was with the Monitor, I was once sent, as Monitor representative in a party of fifty newspapermen and TV personalities who were visiting Greece at the invitation of the French airlines and the Greek government. When we started from the New York airport, the Boston Herald man, who saw I was new to this kind of thing, came up to me and said, “Peter, I suppose you’re a Christian Scientist and I am a Catholic, but on this trip good old Boston stands together against the world.” All through the trip, he took the greatest care of me, in looking after me and showing me what to do and helping me in every way he could. But there was also another man travelling with us from Idaho who said his wife was a Christian Scientist and he took every opportunity of poking mild fun at Christian Science whenever he could or whenever he though he could, until we reached Delphi in Greece. At Delphi, we were taken up to the temple of Apollo and our guide said there was a good echo here and when she shouted there came an echo from the cliff opposite. But it wasn’t very strong. She didn’t have a very strong voice and so one our party said, “let’s all call on Apollo at once and see what happens!” So we did this and out of a practically blue sky there came a tremendous clap of thunder and a deluge of rain which drenched everybody to the skin in about two minutes except myself and the Boston Herald man. I had seen a little niche, a little opening at the back and as the first drops fell, I jumped back into it and I pulled my friend with me and we were quite dry. Well, the rain stopped and everyone else went running down to the motor coaches down below. The Herald man and I followed and he went to his motor coach and I went to mine. There, in the front seat of mine, was sitting this character from Idaho and as I came in he said, “Oh, here’s Peter, he’s a Christian Scientist. He doesn’t believe in rain. He’ll be bone dry……..Good God, he is !!!” Well, after that he treated me with more respect. But my points in telling you this story are, it has a great many points: 1. I hadn’t stood out in the rain and forbidden the drops of rain to wet me, but I’d been thinking and seeing throughout this tour that I was cared for by God in every way and not letting anything get under my skin. So in this moment of minor emergency, I was alert enough to see a place of refuge and to share it with my friend. If I’d been more alert perhaps, or thought better, I might have been able to prevent anyone from getting wet. As it was, I was dry, my friend was dry, and this character from Idaho learned a salutary lesson and so you, too, as you make your moves, can keep alert and see all the little things that come along the way, which unfold quite normally and naturally according to what I say, “natural human normality.” We don’t have to strike the waters of the Plaza pool and have them separate in front of us and walk across on dry land, but if there was a necessity, you could do that, but in a quite natural way. There is a lovely verse in the Bible, “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.” You wondrous things, they happen so naturally. That hymn, “How silently, how silently, the blessed truth is given” is the same way. But we don’t want to miss these good things, we have to keep our eyes open to see them. So now, my five rules are:
Declare the end from the beginning. God, the only Cause – Perfect Cause –perfect..
There’s plenty of time if you don’t hurry. “He that believeth shall not make haste.”
Expect the unexpected, and make the most of it.
Leave all unnecessary baggage behind.
Look up for good unfolding to God’s law along the lines of natural human normality.
I’d like to end by reciting or saying half a dozen lines from a poem which appeared in the Sentinel by Leah Bohn some years ago, referring to Jesus of Nazareth when he passed through the crowds who wanted to kill him.
Lo, through the midst of them he passed
Unharmed and free
Naught was there that the
To him, naught but the infinite to know and be.
In any move, if we want to avoid evil and enjoy good, it’s valuable to acknowledge our infinitude. We don’t have to think of ourselves as some limited person over here, or some other individual over there, with all his belongings and such. But if we acknowledge our infinitude, that means our thought will already be where we need it to be, then our bodies and our baggage will naturally follow.
To sum it up in one sentence, which should perhaps be my sixth rule:
Acknowledge your omnipresence: then permit your bodies and baggage to come where you are. Thank you.
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