The Marshall Space Flight Center received this query from a young correspondent: "What would happen if you shot your rockets at an angel?" These are a child's words, but they touch a live issue. Many adults ask themselves, Does modern technology mean we have outgrown spiritual values?
No one in all history has lived more effectively than did Christ Jesus. The hunger of multitudes and the anger of the winds submitted to his control. He gave new orientation to character, healed stubborn physical conditions, revived the dead. Civil, military, and ecclesiastical authority combined to crucify and bury him, but he emerged from the tomb alive and active. He left no doubt where he placed his confidence. "It is the spirit that quickeneth," he said, "the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63).
Jesus lived effectively because he remained unimpressed by any presentation of the physical senses, however persuasive or formidable. He knew that man and the universe, together with the laws that constitute, govern, and describe their nature, are in their eternal essence purely spiritual.
Space rocketry has perhaps shot down the naive concept of angels. To this concept Mrs. Eddy refers in Science and Health. She writes (p. 298), "Angels are not etherealized human beings, evolving animal qualities in their wings."
While mankind were almost wholly illiterate and thought was largely pictorial, symbolic angels in stained glass or gold leaf could usefully teach and tell stories. Today literacy is increasing, and humanity is learning to separate more clearly the spiritual elements in thought from the material. Naive attachment to symbols is now more apt to obscure than enlighten. It is as well that rockets have actually penetrated into space and found no "etherealized human beings" there.
But angels still have their place. The word "angel" derives from the Greek word for "messenger." Mrs. Eddy, on firm ground both etymologically and spiritually, offers this definition of "angels" (Science and Health, p. 581): "God's thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality." No advancing technology can shoot down, crowd out, or retire these angels.
A hymn begins, "Science, the angel with the flaming sword" (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 297). The intuitions of Christian Science enable us to divide, as with a sharp sword, between the spiritual and the material. In responding to them we follow the example of Jesus, we begin to live more effectively, and we progressively demonstrate that the sole and determining factor in every situation is the spiritual one.
The threat to human life and well-being presents itself in varied forms. As violence of war or recklessness on the roads. As temptation to delinquency or suffering from disease. Or as the mesmeric cradle-song of merely material affluence and success.
Whatever form the threat takes, spiritual intuitions bring swifter release than the most highly developed technological procedures; they offer surer protection than the most complex automated early warning devices. They steady and alert thought; they renew energies. They assure and reassure us that Spirit, God, is the divine Principle of the universe, with infinite power and intelligence, and that man, made by Spirit in Spirit's likeness and acting under spiritual law at all times, once he is understood in Science, is more than a match for any material situation. Finally, they inspire whatever human footsteps are wise and desirable.
Spiritual intuitions, the angels of God's presence, come to us constantly. It is for us to admit them to thought and entertain them there. They must be grasped and, if need be, wrestled with; their full implication must be understood. The discipline of spiritual thinking is no soft option; it is more thorough and specific than the plotting of a missile's trajectory or the countdown for an interplanetary rocket.
Measuring up to its exacting standards, we find the spiritual fact appropriately evidencing itself on the human scene. For doubting Thomas, Jesus demonstrated indestructible spiritual identity in the only way Thomas could understand.
For us, the spiritual fact is likely to provide evidence of its presence in health of body, vigor and inventiveness of intellect, supply of all proper human needs, steadiness of character, and increasing exercise of those Christly graces which Paul described as "the fruit of the Spirit"— "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance" (Gal. 5:22,23).
Students of Christian Science have made useful contributions in many areas of human endeavor. These include physics, engineering, and astronautics. Recognition of Spirit, God, as the sole source of intelligence and action fosters and promotes both pure thought and applied skills.
Technological advance, keeping to its own role, need not hide from individual or nation the ultimate concerns and spiritual ends of life; it can subserve these. Mrs. Eddy, in an interview with a journalist, stated her high regard for contemporary invention which serves humanity. It certainly shadows forth, even if dimly and incompletely, men's gradual release from matter and material thinking, from the inert, the nonintelligent, and the limited.
Throughout all eternity man's true being is spiritual and infinite. It expresses and individualizes the divine allness of Spirit. Human progress is basically a step-by-step demonstration of this fact. Mrs. Eddy writes, "Every step of progress is a step more spiritual" (The People's Idea of God, p. 1). Later in the same paragraph she adds, "The footsteps of thought, as they pass from the sensual side of existence to the reality and Soul of all things, are slow, portending a long night to the traveller; but the guardians of the gloom are the angels of His presence, that impart grandeur to the intellectual wrestling and collisions with old-time faiths, as we drift into more spiritual latitudes."
Rockets, like other technological products, will continue to serve their human purpose. The dedicated men who operate them merit humanity's respect and appreciation. But angels, scientifically identified as "God's thoughts passing to man," are ready to help us at every stage of our experience more effectively and more continuously than any material invention.
On the threshold of history angels spoke with Abraham and Moses. They were present in the dark hours of Gethsemane and in the glory of the resurrection morning. They are here today, speaking to our hearts and minds. They are by the sickbed and in the prison cell, in the office and classroom, in the laboratory and by the production line, in traffic snarl and in remotest solitude. They bless us here on earth; and if men should reach the utmost galaxy of the farthest island universe, angels will be waiting to bless them there.
Angels were active before the first rocket sputtered skyward; they will be active when the last of today's rockets, however immense of thrust, however micro-miniaturized of equipment, has passed into history or museum.
Spiritual intuitions are always ready at the point of human need. Yet they are forever out of reach and range of destruction, whether by sudden detonation or slow obsolescence. Spirit is substance. Spirit and its creation remain eternally untouched by the material or physical shadow. God's values are spiritual and permanent. As we let these values identify our nature and inspire our action, we have the surest defense against every phase of evil and the firmest base for effective Living at all levels.
