From the Chaplaincy Team

Identity affirmed: the story of Gillian

Gillian is a seven-year-old girl who cannot sit in school. She continually gets up, gets distracted, flies with thoughts, and doesn't follow lessons. Her teachers worry about her, punish her, scold her, reward the few times that she is attentive, but nothing improves as Gillian does not know how to sit and cannot be attentive. When she comes home, her mother punishes her too. So not only does Gillian have bad grades and punishment at school, but she also suffers from them at home.

One day, Gillian's mother is called to school.  In the interview room, the teachers speak of illness, of an obvious disorder. “Maybe it's hyperactivity or maybe she needs a medication”, they say.  During the interview, an older teacher arrives who knows Gillian. He asks all the adults, mother, and colleagues to follow him into an adjoining room from where Gillian can still be seen.  As he leaves, he tells Gillian that they will be back soon and turns on an old radio with music.  As the girl is alone in the room, she immediately gets up and begins to move up and down chasing the music in the air with her feet and her heart.  The teacher smiles as his colleagues and the mother look at him with a mixture of confused and compassionate feelings.  So he says: "See? Gillian is not sick. Gillian is a dancer!"  He recommends that her mother take her to a dance class and that the teachers make her dance from time to time. Gillian attends her first dance lesson and when she gets home she tells her mother: “Everyone is like me. No one can just sit there!"

In 1981, after a career as a dancer, opening her own dance academy and receiving international recognition for her art, Gillian Lynne became the choreographer of the musical "Cats."

Hopefully all “different” children find adults capable of welcoming them for who they are and not for what they lack.  

Long live the differences, the little black sheep and the misunderstood. They are the ones who create beauty in this world.

From Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy (pages 470: 23 and 477: 20)

Man is the expression of God's being. If there ever was a moment when man did not express the divine perfection, then there was ... a time when Deity was unexpressed... without entity. 

Identity is the reflection of Spirit, the reflection in multifarious forms of the living Principle, Love. Soul is the substance, Life, and intelligence of man, which is individualised, but not in matter. Soul can never reflect anything inferior to Spirit.