Rejoice!
You are a good idea—wholly good, because created by God, infinite good. You are also a healthy, intelligent, immortal idea because your Maker is perfect, harmonious Spirit, supreme intelligence, deathless Life. This is the good news Christ Jesus came to prove. He showed us we are all God's children, ideas of divine Mind, not helpless prisoners of the flesh.
Wherever he went, the Saviour's grasp of the truth of spiritual manhood freed people from sickness, from addiction to sin, even from death itself. For instance, where others saw a physical person afflicted with leprosy, Jesus saw—with God-inspired understanding of the truth —a spiritual identity. The sufferer was healed instantly.
Christian Science echoes in astonishing measure the healing, harmonizing works of the Master. Mrs. Eddy, not content with her own healing by the Christ-power, sought persistently to understand the Principle behind the healing, the divine law that would make Christ-healing available to everyone. Her success means that we now know from her writings— proved to be inspired truth by innumerable healings of human discords— how to receive from God the spiritual insights required for overcoming human difficulties.
Our basic need, Mrs. Eddy makes clear, is to get to know ourselves and others as spiritual identities. In the degree that we do this, our improved, spiritualized vision brings about improvements in our bodies and outward circumstances. This happens because all human experience is really mental, not material. What we seem to see, hear, touch— cognize through the so-called physical senses—seems to constitute our thought of ourselves and our environment. This limited, distorted, matter-dominated mortal outlook needs to be corrected by spiritual truth, as Jesus corrected it, for harmony to be established in the place of discord.
We don't have to wrestle with complicated processes of psychology or physiology. When Jesus said "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free," John 8:32; he was revealing his own method of solving human problems—and what a solver of problems he was, even walking out of his own tomb after his crucifixion! He knew that the spiritual truth of being, the eternal fact of perfect creator and perfect creation, is sustained by the all-power of God.
Isn't it clear that all-powerful, eternal, spiritual fact, prayerfully received into the heart and understanding, must dispel every mistaken view of creation, every supposition of disease and discord contrary to the truth? The mental nature of the mortal illusion of life in matter means that only mental misconceptions have to be cleared away—not a "reality" called disease but the mental misconception that disease exists; not frustration, loneliness, despair, but the mental misconception that such evils could ever exist for an instant within the all-embracing goodness of God.
But if we are to get a real grasp on the truth of our perfect, spiritual identity, an intelligent and confident grip on Spirit's harmonious man, our true selfhood, we may first have to free ourselves from the vagueness that general human thought inculcates about spiritual things.
A newcomer to Christian Science, particularly, may have initial difficulty in seeing himself as a definite spiritual idea. He is familiar enough with a physical body, which can be measured with an inch-tape or weighed on scales, but an idea may seem to him formless, nebulous. Is he to think of himself as some sort of shapeless atmosphere of benevolence emanating from a divine realm? Is he made up, in his real selfhood, of good qualities such as kindness, justice, compassion, integrity, all somehow floating around without definite form?
Let us see if we can understand better what "form" really is. No one questions that a house or a bridge has definite form to human perception, but we don't always realize that we are also familiar with purely mental form.
For instance—to give a very simple example—if we want to sell our lawn mower, we don't pour out a jumble of words at random and hope they constitute a well-constructed advertisement. Instead, we think about the machine's make, age, type, means of propulsion, and so forth, and arrange these thoughts to suit our purpose of clearly identifying the mower.
We all know that if we are to express intelligence in an advertisement, a business letter, a public talk, or anything else, we need to organize certain specific thoughts in relation to each other and to the purpose they are to serve. This intelligent, purposeful arrangement is form.
But if even human reason imposes order on its material to achieve predetermined ends, we can be sure that God, divine Mind, creates all identities as exact, distinct, perfectly designed formations. Mrs. Eddy makes this plain. "The divine Mind," she tells us, "maintains all identities, from a blade of grass to a star, as distinct and eternal." Science and Health, p. 70;
Our Saviour and Exemplar, Christ Jesus, journeyed revealingly in this world through the mortal illusion of life in the flesh to the realization of the fullness of his real identity as spiritual idea—the conscious, total sonship with God that he demonstrated in the ascension. Although he always knew himself to be God's child, Mind's idea, this understanding did not involve him in cloudy mysticism; on the contrary, it made him the supreme practical healer and comforter of mankind.
The fact is, we have to rid ourselves of the general human belief that a physical body is something definite and a spiritual idea something vague. The exact opposite is true. Physical bodies are illusions, misleading suppositions destined to lose their hold on individual consciousness and eventually to vanish—yield to spiritual reality. Spiritual ideas, on the other hand, are the actual creation of God and must become increasingly known as the glorious truth of His creation. As Mrs. Eddy puts it, "Mortals will disappear, and immortals, or the children of God, will appear as the only and eternal verities of man." ibid., p. 476;
Being a good idea—as each of us is in his real selfhood—is to express, in a unique manner, all the excellent qualities of God. And since these qualities of love, purity, intelligence, immortality, and countless others are lovingly organized in the Father's design for man— that is, since they have definite form— our goal of true self-knowledge is not vague but God-defined. We can therefore be sure we will ultimately fully and explicitly understand and rejoice in our real selfhood as the idea of everlasting harmony. God's purpose is that we do so.
In learning to be prayerfully alert to spiritual intuitions, God's precious promptings meeting our human needs and at the same time lifting us to higher levels of spiritual understanding and joy, we are always moving toward more precise awareness of what we truly are. "It is the purpose of divine Love," writes Mrs. Eddy comfortingly, "to resurrect the understanding, and the kingdom of God, the reign of harmony already within us." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 154.
