The word spontaneity has a ring of joyous freedom—unlabored, effortless, and unrestricted. True spontaneity springs from the heart, like the spontaneity of a smile. Children express buoyancy and spontaneity because of their freedom from the restrictions and fears of material-mindedness. Sometimes one may lose this priceless sense of spontaneity and joy, and a heaviness and dullness—almost a deadness —may seem to envelop him, giving a feeling of merely existing rather than living. Through the study of Christian Science we learn to know God as omnipresent Love. We learn man's oneness, or unity, with divine Love, which liberates thought from fear, allowing the joy and spontaneity of Love, which is Life, to be manifested.
Jesus lived Love, and so expressed the fullest sense of Life, the spontaneity of Love in action. He proved that knowing God aright is Life eternal, is joy eternal—the true spontaneity. But how to know God aright is a question which has puzzled many. John, the beloved disciple, found that it is through love that we understand God, and he voices this in his admonition (I John 4:7), "Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God." When God seems remote and unknowable, John's words (verse 8), "He that loveth not knoweth not God: for God is love," show us how we may draw near Him. We understand God as Love by loving.
To know God, then, we must love; to feel and enjoy the spontaneity of Life, we must love; to heal and be healed, we must love. It is living love, knowing nothing else, which heals and saves and is expressed in spontaneity and joy. As we enlarge our concept of God. Love, this is inevitably manifested in an enlarged experience, and we come to comprehend in some measure the boundless, limitless wealth of Love. Love releases our thinking from a restricted, personal sense of existence to the consciousness of a life more abundant, joyous, harmonious, and free. Thus we begin to realize man's infinite capacities and capabilities as God's reflection. Mary Baker Eddy tells us in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p.390), "It is our ignorance of God, the divine Principle, which produces apparent discord, and the right understanding of Him restores harmony." Knowing God aright, we know ourselves aright.
