“Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.” (Jer. 18:6.)
Mrs. Eddy, on the necessity of spending hours daily in uninterrupted meditation: “In that hour of prayer, discard all your sense of self-hood – that is involved in the belief of birth, heredity, association, time, decay, death. By the grace and authority of God close your thought firmly against the interference of mortal beliefs. Hold yourself open to the plan of God and closed to the plots of satan. Rise into the spiritual forces of your own being and destiny” (from Judge Hanna’s memoirs).
Mrs. Eddy once told a little girl suffering with consumption: “Don’t you know, dear, that you haven’t any lungs to cough with, not to be consumed? You are God’s child’; and she talked the truth to her and told her what she was as God’s idea, and to know that she was well; and the child stopped coughing and was instantly healed” (from “Overwhelming Evidence” by Ralph Spencer).
Contrary to what Mrs. Eddy told the little girl, “old theology” asserts that God created lungs so that He might then un-create (i.e., destroy) them: lungs to cough with and finally be consumed after months and years of suffering — presumably so that the patient might achieve some kind of spiritual growth through putting up with misery in this “vale of tears.” By the same conflicted logic, we might as well say that God created eyes to go blind with and ears to go deaf with.
The belief in the existence of mortal organs serving mortal ends is an unspoken dogma that Mrs. Eddy instructs Judge Hanna to dump unceremoniously in the “DISCARD” bin.
Mortal mind hates being clay in the Potter’s hands and desires to take for itself some (if not all) of the glory of God by having a hand in its own shaping.
Personal sense invented physicality to disprove the existence of God.
All that mortal mind designates as the so-called “seasons of life” — from “birth” via physical procreation to the “demise” of the physical body — are mirages, hindrances, and distractions to keep me from following the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”