Recently my family and I had the honor to attend a screening of an iconic film in the history of cinema: “Wings of Desire” from 1987. In this movie angels are wandering the streets of the divided city – divided by the infamous Berlin Wall. The angels are invisible to humans but their influence is being felt. Dressed in trenchcoats and expressing a solemn focus and unwavering mercy towards people they comfort the distressed and give some inspiration to the inhabitants who are feeling by the most part isolated and burdened by the division, oppression, and lack of freedom. The movie is almost a silent movie, you hear quietly the thoughts of people as they are riding the subway, sitting in their apartments, walking the streets of Berlin, studying in the State Library of Berlin. The angels are standing behind the scholars, sit next to people and listen quietly before putting a hand on a shoulder in a reassuring way. Each time this is happening the individual has a gentle renewal of hope, a quiet uprising of courage, an idea how to make peace with someone else.
A key figure in the movie is a trapeze artist, portrayed by Solveig Dommartin. After learning that the circus who had employed her, had gone bankrupt she is sitting in her trailer and contemplating life, its meaning, its purpose. At one point she ponders this momenteous question: “How shall I live?” She is quiet for a while and thinks: “I wonder whether this is the right question. Should the question not rather be “How shall I think?”
Yes, I thought, you have a point. If we are reaching an impasse and have the question: “How shall I live?” in front of us, we can continue to be fruitful and constructive and transform it into the question “How shall I think?” I find it easier to think about life’s fundamental decisions in terms of thought as opposed to material settings or circumstances. It is like the birds flying above the divided city Berlin and not being incarcerated by a lethal wall of division. Thinking is flexible and possible. The power to think is the mightiest of all gifts, my grandmother used to say. “The time for thinkers has come,” says Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health. Paul says in his letter to the Christians in Rome (in the New Living Translation): “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”
When I recently was overwhelmed by a pain attack of unbearable proportions I prayed for release and for a way forward. It was an inconvenience (isn’t it always?) as I was with a friend in a public place and didn’t want to spoil neither our evening together nor the evening for others. I felt the wordless assurance that Mind, the source of all intelligence, is present, guiding me well. I felt that my question: “How shall I live?” gently morphed into “How shall I think?”, too, and I felt sustained by all wisdom and knowledge of divine Mind to guide me. The pain was still there but I felt the oneness with divine Mind – and this oneness is much more real than it seems to be surreal or transcendental, really. It is a real option. In this consciousness is no pain, no worry – and it unfolded me that pain was not enshrined in a body but a proposal to thought. “How shall I live?” became “How shall I think?” and this question was answered in that moment with “Think like me”, think with Life and Love.
More than grateful I watched the pain disappear, and as my friend and I finished our evening with a lovely dinner, I was one again with Life and Love. My ride home on my bicycle was swift and happy, and I couldn’t wait to tell my husband about this healing. We are more, so much more, than a small soul trapped in a human body. As prayer, courageous action, conscience, hard work have eventually overcome the Berlin Wall in 1989 and turned the city into one of the most iconic cities of Europe I felt in our own individual way we can overcome, too, because we are not in it in the first place. Our desires are prayers, and they have wings, helping us to rise from limited views to a perceive a bigger picture. We just have to keep working.
