Almost as if spoken, the words from the Bible (Gen.1:1), "In the beginning God," came to the writer as she stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona watching the floodlight of dawn unveil a drama of color and space. The restrictions of time, boundaries, distance, and materiality momentarily vanished in the presence of this rainbow-tinted immensity. Her thought turned to a paragraph in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" where Mary Baker Eddy writes (p.240): "Nature voices natural, spiritual law and divine Love, but human belief misinterprets nature. Arctic regions, sunny tropics, giant hills, winged winds, mighty billows, verdant vales, festive flowers, and glorious heavens, —all point to Mind, the spiritual intelligence they reflect."
Though Mrs. Eddy has explicitly stated that Christian Science bears no resemblance to pantheism, yet throughout her works she expresses a genuine appreciation of natural wonders and uses them to illustrate the variety and beauty of Spirit's creation of ideas.
Many fantastic legends clothe the origin of the Grand Canyon in mystery, but geologists explain it as the result of the operation of natural forces over a period of from eight to ten million years. To the student of Christian Science, these geologic findings present an impressive resemblance to the revelation of the flawless and eternal qualities of the spiritual man, the only real man. Natural scientists regard the Grand Canyon as the most striking example of erosion by the cutting action of running water filled with silt and sediment, of frost, wind, rain, assisted by chemical action, faulting, gravity, and growing vegetation. It is estimated that the river, if its present velocity is maintained, will continue deepening the gorge at the rate of a small fraction of an inch each year, thus uncovering more and more of the glory of the rock walls. It is very important to note that this process cannot add to or take away from the beauty of the rock, which has been there from the beginning.
