How Do You Relate to Others? (Summary)
Josephine H. Carver, C.S.B., of Boston, Massachusetts
Member of the Board of Lectureship of The Mother Church,
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston,
Massachusetts
There is a spiritual and scientific basis for getting along well with others, according to a lecture given here last Sunday by Josephine H. Carver, CSB.
People need to be understood as they genuinely are, to be appreciated as what the divine source has made, Mrs. Carver declared.
"This is something far nobler," she said, "than surface appearances. We can look in on the heart, the motives that make a man tick and so live in the realm where there is no accuser and no outside to Love. Your neighbor is included in that Love and your health is because of that Love."
A Christian Science lecturer and teacher from Boston, Mrs. Carver spoke at the invitation of First Church of Christ, Scientist, at 114 Church St.
Helping others, and getting along well with them demands the meekness that Christ Jesus expressed, the lecturer maintained.
"Genuine meekness," she said, is "that spiritual quality that responds only to good. Meekness is that great strength which doesn't react to others no matter what they say or do."
Mrs. Carver brought out that the scientific basis for relating effectively to others is indicated throughout the Bible.
"For every Christian," she said, "the life of Christ Jesus is always the supreme example of how to conduct oneself with goodwill toward others. His method was not indignation and blame and those other self involvements such as the ugliness of self-pity, self-will, self-justification and self-love. His method in dealing with all temptation was to blame not others, but only the one evil, or, in his words — and this is according to the original text — "the evil one."
Continuing, she said: "His meekness and selflessness made him so thoroughly God-involved that he knew the only God there is is impartial in His love. He presented to men the true idea of God, the eternal Christ, and man as God's perfect likeness. And that's what the Christ reveals.
"With Jesus this sense of the primary relationship, that is, man's relationship to God, was well established. It made him continuously a blessing in those relationships to others around him. He comforted them. He healed them. He taught them how to have freedom from the self-inflicted hurts of a personal sense of life."
Improving relationships and health on a Christian basis demands something of the individual, Mrs. Carver asserted.
Quoting from one of the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, she said: "The ways of Christianity have not changed. Meekness, selflessness, and love are the paths of His testimony and the footsteps of His flock."
Mrs. Carver called upon her audience to recognize and apply a spiritual understanding of God as the one source of existence.
"We can let this understanding," she said, "direct and govern all our relationships with people. Then we find we're not dependent for our peace and freedom upon what others do or don't do. We depend upon the divine Mind — the Mind that is also invariable Love. This understanding is valuable beyond estimation."
She added: "The strength of real meekness is in that it enables us to first correctly understand ourselves, that is, the spiritual facts about ourselves, then to maintain a correct view of others and so respond not to fictions but only to what man really is."
The title of the lecture was "How Do You Relate to Others?"
[Delivered January 16, 1972, under the
auspices of First Church of Christ, Scientist, Winchester, Massachusetts, and
published in The Winchester Star of Winchester, Massachusetts, January 20,
1972.]