God does feed us. He feeds us in the only way infinite Love could—abundantly and to our joyous, complete satisfaction. The spiritual fact is that because God expresses Himself in self-perpetuation, self-renewal, self-sustenance, His image and likeness, man, consciously experiences this same boundless measure of satisfied, uninterrupted preservation.
God continually reveals this fact to human consciousness in promise and fulfillment. The Bible gives liberal illustration of Love's perfectly balanced economy, made evident in human experience. And now in our time the promised Comforter has been brought to mankind in Christian Science, through the spiritual discovery of Mary Baker Eddy. In her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," we are shown that these evidences of God's provision for man are the natural outcome of divine law. Thus they need nevermore be regarded as rare, speculative phenomena and so mistakenly termed miracles. This Christ Science, when fully acknowledged and understood, establishes forever in one's experience the immortally operative law of God's loving, balanced economy. The ways in which nutriment was provided for the Israelites, for Elijah and many others, illustrates the operation of this law.
Because God, Spirit, the creator, naturally expresses Himself in an entirely spiritual universe, man and the universe—His manifestation—reflect only the divine Life; they subsist upon and reflect His substance. In their conscious feeding upon divine intelligence as their substance, they continually "taste and see that the Lord is good," as the Psalmist sang (Ps. 34:8). How presumptuous then for men to insist that food and nourishment should appear only within the narrow, limited, restricted pattern and mode which human thought concedes as logical! How unreasonable to assume that the divine economy of God for His universe could possibly follow the always unbalanced pattern of toil and unequal gain, of scarcity or useless superfluity, of tedious accretion and difficult disposal—the picture usually presented by the material senses.
Here, however, even a student of Christian Science may say: This is all very well from the standpoint of absolute divine metaphysics, and I know that Christian Science can prove every point it presents. But with the world situation as it now appears, with normal production and distribution so topsy-turvy in many countries, with famine increasing and the memories of desolate years, what is the practical application of these truths for those whose need for food is both chronic and acute?
Let us refer to one of the Scriptural incidents wherein the master Christian fed the multitudes. And let it be definitely understood that those who thronged to hear the teaching of that great administrator of human welfare did receive food—the sort of food to which they were accustomed and which met their human need. Our Saviour proved that while God's infinite provision is not restricted to the customary mode of human procurement, nevertheless its manifestation always conforms to the individual's present need.
In Science and Health we read (Pref., p, xi): "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural."
The naturalness of good in the consciousness of the Master made it impossible for him to conceive of man as depleted, famished, exhausted, undernourished, displaced, or as wanting any of the self-perpetuating elements native to divine being. To him it was just as logical that five thousand men should thus be sustained and satisfied as that he himself should be. His unreserved identification of all selfhood with the ever-operative divine Principle, Love, naturally and substantially replaced in human consciousness the fraudulent imposition suggesting a hungry selfhood outside of God's being. Thus the bread and fish appeared in abundance as the normal, knowable evidence of ever-available spiritual substance.
Long ago a young girl who knew little of Christian Science and its study had made a decisive change in occupation and residence. Because of previous failure to be fully obedient to God's law of the balanced economy of being, she reached her new home in a large city barely able to pay for her room for one week and without money for food; and the new work was not yet ready for her.
Realizing that in all justice she alone should face this self-created mesmerism of lack, she spent two quiet days in her room without food, making little headway in gathering her scattered convictions to the point of realizing where her relief lay. The third day she made some futile calls in the immediate neighborhood, seeking temporary employment. In acute discomfort she tried to recall fragments of statements from the Christian Science textbook which she had heard read at church services.
On the morning of the fourth day, in spite of the sense testimony of weakness and distress, her thought became suddenly very clear and quiet. She realized with simple directness that the sort of thinking which had produced such a situation could not be expected to banish it. She saw, too, that the characteristics which, through self -justification, had been allowed to bring about the present discomfort, should be the first to be ruled out in seeking a solution. Pride, personal inclination, belief in a particular human background and type, were all seen to be the husks of prodigality. Within a few hours after thus facing the issue, she had arranged for temporary work of such a nature that she received not only her meals, but a tender, healing lesson in grace and humility.
More than twenty years later this woman, now a consecrated, grateful worker in a Christian Science branch church not far from that same city, sat in her comfortable home again contemplating the question of procuring food. She was now faced, not with her own problem, but with the need of taking a healing part in her country's solving of apparent food shortages.
With one ration book food must be provided for herself, household help, a pet dog, and various guests. Vegetable gardens and chicken pens were in many places replacing lawns and flower borders. With little available land and scant outside help, she considered the question of tilling the soil. Strong within her, however, was the conviction that her entire energies and abilities should remain in her service to the Cause of Christian Science. She saw that the present situation was not dissimilar to the one of so long ago, in that the solution could not possibly lie in the same realm of consciousness in which the need seemed to exist.
As she set to work with her concordances to the Bible and our Leader's writings, every reference on such words as food, produce, nourishment, yield, fruitage, harvest, reap, and so on, was deeply pondered.
In the days that followed, the windows of heaven indeed were opened. Not only did the Scientist witness a renewed succession of healings through Christian Science treatment, but remarkable things transpired in her larder. Food came from many sources. Delicacies she would not ordinarily have had, unusual garden produce, homemade butter, staples, even prepared food from friends' kitchens, came in steady streams. Some were the result of special arrangements suddenly found feasible; many were totally unexpected. All came with the gracious quality of love. Some required immediate use and further sharing of their fresh abundance; others were preserved for the next winter's use.
When the restful, sustaining consciousness of man's oneness with the Father is realized, the tillage is rewarded—the satisfied senses of Soul replace the famine of human want. It is not time, nor the growth of illusory matter-substance, but growth in spiritual understanding, which yields this fruitage. Science and Health asks (p. 183): "Can the agriculturist, according to belief, produce a crop without sowing the seed and awaiting its germination according to the laws of nature? The answer is no, and yet the Scriptures inform us that sin, or error, first caused the condemnation of man to till the ground, and indicate that obedience to God will remove this necessity."
In our Leader's writings, the reference to hunger is sometimes linked with spiritual impoverishment. Since divine Love feeds man, the illusion of hate is starvation. Even the indulgence of dislike, aversion, revulsion, and cold reserve are likewise modes of this self-inflicted malnutrition. Deliberate disobedience to God's demands means turning one's back to the feast which divine Love has spread.
Conscious of the sustenance of godliness, Jesus cried to his heart-hungry disciples, "Take, eat, this is my body" (Mark 14:22). Those of us who have named the name of Christ in divine Science dare not acknowledge a less spiritual sense of substance in this hour when called upon to share our bread, our living understanding, with a world in need.
