Yesterday, we finally were able to see Mary Poppins Returns. I am so grateful. It was just what I required right now, especially with the Sacred Journey of Childlike Wonder about to start today. The movie was magical. There were so many deep and metaphysical topics and messages. I just loved it.

One timely message for me was its focus on the mystery of death. If you’ve ready my recent past blogs, you will know that this topic has been close to my heart these last few months. The question that Michael Banks asks in his soliloquy to his dead wife, “Where did you go?” struck me deeply. It is the question that I have heard most recently from many who are experiencing the death of loved ones, including myself. “Where did they go?” 

I wish I could say I have the answer, but all I have is what I can believe right now. As the reading in the Science of Mind text this morning reiterated. “It is done unto us as we believe.” We cannot know anything outside of our own beliefs. However, what we can do is expand those beliefs and change them should we desire to do so.

There was another scene in the movie concerning a woman (Meryl Streep) an eccentric person who was able to fix impossibly broken things. However, she had a belief that she couldn’t do anything on the 2nd Wednesday of the month. Her whole world literally turned upside down. During the course of Mary’s visit with her, she came to understand that as she changed her perception of upside-down by going with it instead of against it, her whole belief changed about what she could do and not do on that day shifted.

Of course, this is a fundamental tenet of our Science of Mind teaching. Change the way you look at things, and they things you look at change. I think Wayne Dyer said that. We know that we might not be able to change what happens, but we can change the way we perceive what happens, and the experience does change because we have changed.

So let me go back to this idea of death and where our dear ones are. I do not believe in a suffering Universe. I cannot believe that our loved ones can be stripped away from us with no way of seeing them ever again or experiencing them ever again. There has to be an answer. In the film Mary Poppins Returns, they talk about the person being within us. Michael Banks sees his wife’s smile in his son’s eyes, for example. I believe it is even more than this. I do not have the answers, but I believe that they are coming. In fact, the answers are here, I just haven’t been open enough to recognize them.

This is my spiritual work right now. I must be able to change the way perceive everything. I must look for the good everywhere. If my world is upside down, I must turn myself with it and I will see that it was never upside down at all. I just wasn’t resilient enough to understand that I had to change too. I have to respond to the changes in my life with the underlying understanding that there is something wanting to be known and this experience is bringing that knowing to me. I am expanding into the Infinite, and it will take whatever it takes to bring me back to my true self.

So, I must turn to the death of those I love and go with it, feel everything, but use my feelings for something good. Strive to listen deeply and hear what the Universe is saying. I must stop trying to see him or her the way I saw them with these eyes. I must realize that things are different now. Things are not worse, because I can’t talk to my mom in the flesh or hug her. Things have just changed and can be even more amazing. It is done unto me as I believe. I can start looking at everything differently, knowing there is good, and that as they said in the movie, “there is a place where lost things are…”. It’s just not where I am presently looking; it might be where I am presently feeling.

Love and Aloha,

Rev. Rita