Editorials

The weekend of a friend’s wedding, the Christian Science Sunday church service was on the subject “Ancient and Modern Necromancy, alias Mesmerism and Hypnotism, Denounced. ” The service had been listed in the weekend program as one of the events, so two members of the wedding party who knew nothing about Christian Science decided to check it out.

“He is risen!”  This was a vital greeting to early Christians. Vital as in “essential,” but also alive, energizing, inspiring.

The Bible book of Judges tells of Deborah, an outstanding woman living in Israel, when the Israelites had been in captivity for twenty years. Deborah was a prophet, or seer; one who perceives reality as spiritual.

Questions open the door to wonderful things. For example, for mankind to go to the moon, the quest had to start with questions: Is it possible? How can we do it? Clearly, the answers were there and we went to the moon.

I recently had a thought-provoking chat on a cab ride to church.   The subject of spirituality came up, and it turned out that my driver was an earnest believer in reincarnation.

He was a composer who had gone bankrupt, was a deeply depressed man, and was derided as a “German nincompoop. ” One day, though, a friend visited him and asked if he would write music to accompany Bible verses that had been compiled into a libretto.

I was surely the least well-off person in the room at the Thanksgiving Day service. Churchgoers from the well-to-do neighborhood I was visiting gave thanks for things my 20-something self just didn’t have: homes of their own, marriages, careers.

What a different story the Gospels would tell if people had been reluctant to ask Jesus for his help. We wouldn’t know about the woman who suffered 12 long years with hemorrhaging if she hadn’t struggled through a crowd to reach Jesus and find healing.

In the Preface of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,  the book that sets forth the divine Science of Mind-healing that Jesus practiced, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished” ( p. vii ).

The 2022 Open Doors “World Watch List” of the 50 countries where Christians are persecuted the most makes for sober reading. And while 68 percent of these countries are Muslim-majority nations, a recent Pew report showed that globally Muslims suffer harassment in almost as many countries as Christians, often from followers of other faiths.