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Show Moon - 63 woman with sad patient eyes who knew and suffered all and still would forgive her anything. For a long time after that she'd go into the church on her way home from school. She watched how the others prayed, saved her allowance, and bought a string of glass beads at the dime store. One day her mother came into her room and caught her kneeling at her bed, the beads strung awkwardly across her fingers like drops of water. She leaped up embarrassed, ashamed. But her mother smiled calmly and explained why Joy might not want to become a Catholic. They believed, she said, in a horrible death, in thorns and whips and vinegar. They believed in the tortures of penance, the fires of hell. "What do you believe?" Joy said. Her mother paused arid a look of surprise crossed her face. "I believe in love." Tears sprang into her eyes. For that moment, Joy caught a glimpse of her mother as someone just like herself. This was an astonishment, a door bursting open to aTiidden garden. For the rest of that year her mother took Joy to the Christian Science church instead of the church James had chosen. Joy soon came to delight in this new Sunday school where the teacher nodded happily at her questions: Why are people mean to each other? Why is the world so lonely? What happens when you die? Do you think God could love a person like me? This teacher, whose eyes looked seriously right into hers, had answers. The reason for evil, for all forms of human pain, was Error. People just looked at life from the wrong perspective and thought they saw evil when in Truth there was nothing but God's love. Mary Baker Eddy's Father-Mother God was so entire, so perfect, all |