A Mother’s Love

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father."

As a tribute to that love and to mothers in every form they take, we offer an excerpt from an undated letter sent from Mother Holmes to her beloved son and daughter-in-law, offered here unedited from the letter in her handwriting.

Dear Hazel & Ernest,

I have no gift with which to show my love for you but I give you a deep and abiding love, a wish that the coming year may bring to you great spiritual and material realizations. I wish you to know that you have made my old age a very happy one. I cannot express to you how happy I have been living with you in a home so harmonious that it is deeply felt by all. I truly appreciate all you have done to make my life one of ease and enjoyment and nothing has been left undone to minister to my needs in any way.

I am happy for and wish you for your success in a work so deeply interested. A work of love and desire to help others to that spiritual realization of its true meaning and I believe you have brought comfort to more people than you know. I sometimes wonder where your ideas come from, what I know thru meditation and true communion with the source of all Good. I believe that Religious Science teaching as you present it will be known in far places. And I am made glad in your happy way of presenting it.

People tell me how they love you and I say I am quite fond of him myself. God bless you. He does and always will for you are a bringer of good tiding and of His care and love. I am happy that you both are so deeply successful in the work so dear to you. Again I say, I have no gift but of love and appreciation of those so dear to me.

— Learn more about Mother Holmes in Rev. Dr. Marilyn Leo’s book, Mother of a Mystic: The Life of Anna Columbia Heath Holmes, available at https://shop.csl.org/product/mother-of-a-mystic/.

Your First Teacher

By Rev. Christian Sørensen, D.D.

Your first teacher was your mother, whose arms were created to bring you peace and comfort. Her heart was to give you love so you might find your own. Her blood connected you to your ancestors so you would never be alone in this world. You were not kept forever in the confines of your yard but sent into this world to find your strength, which may have been the bravest thing your mother ever did. She let you go to your self-discovery. Mothers are walking, breathing miracles. Your mother sacrificed so much for you to enter the world.

This day [May 9, Mother’s Day] is to remind you to find the gratitude in your depth and to express it mom ’s way. Allow positive mother memories to activate your heart so your love connection beyond time and space becomes the delivery system for what is more beautiful than flowers.

The maternal nurturing energy of the feminine is not bound by birth or gender. Let your love and appreciation go forth from you to all those amazing expressions of God ’s love, those spiritual mothers who help birth your soul ’s journey with their grace — the ones who encouraged you when you were down, who were there for you when your heart and soul ached and who reminded you that you are a child of God.

— Entry for May 9, Daily Guides, May 2021 Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine

Peace With Justice

By Ernest Holmes

Unity does not mean uniformity. Unity means a oneness of purpose. Unity means what is best and safe for the majority without losing sight of each member of that majority and each location in it.

This is the system upon which our country has grown and prospered and no doubt there are many defects in it because, after all, we are all human beings. But it is infinitely stronger than it is weak, and upon its preservation rests the hope of the world.

Amidst the present day confusion, we should not lose sight of another great and wonderful thing that is happening. That which was born in faith must be kept through faith. As never before, our thoughts, our meditations, our hopes and our prayers must rise in one common accord. And you and I should form the habit of taking definite time each day to pray for peace with justice, for there is no peace possible without it.

We should take time each day to pray, to know and to meditate on the thought and to meditate affirmatively, with complete acceptance that our leaders everywhere are being guided by the all-sustaining Wisdom and upheld by the all-sustaining Power of good.  And we should pray for the peace of our own minds, that we shall not become confused.

But faith without works is dead. We should not only pray, we should act, each contributing the best he has to the common purpose, each willing to make any sacrifice necessary, not a

sacrifice reluctantly made but as one who offers all that he has to give for two great purposes: one, in a certain sense, a selfish one, for we all desire self-preservation, but the other in the greater sense that there can be no individual self-preservation without the preservation of all.

— Excerpted from “This Thing Called Life: Spiritual Armament” by Ernest Holmes, a talk given on Sunday, August 6, 1950.