Five years ago I was an artist living outside any of the traditional art centers of the world, and suffering from a deep sense of artistic isolation. Today I am still an artist and still living in the same place, but I have been healed of all sense of isolation. The Christian Science Monitor was the channel through which this healing came about.
I can't think of any greater obstacle to progress than longing for the past, but this was one of my favorite pastimes, as I yearned for Paris and my student days there as a young painter. I longed for the kind of café meetings where artists had gathered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to share their insights, plans, and manifestoes. I felt cut off from compatible companions. So immersed was I in human idealism and self-pity that I forgot how artificial, pompous, and self-serving the Paris café gatherings had eventually become when they were no longer growing out of, and meeting, an actual need of the period. I even forgot how boring I had found them myself during my days in Paris! When at last I remembered, I finally turned to God for a solution to my sense of isolation.
Willingness to turn to God—to Spirit— for a solution really meant that I was willing to undergo a purification process. I wanted to feel at home and commune with compatible companions, and I longed for creative continuity. And these desires weren't wrong, because companionship, creativity, and continuity are spiritual ideas. But I was trying to bring these into my life through limited, or "unspiritual," means. I was looking to a limited human tradition for my answer, hoping to gather in some geographical location with persons who were all "out there" where I couldn't find them. But prayer led me to a passage in Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, that purified my approach: "Spirit diversifies, classifies, and individualizes all thoughts, which are as eternal as the Mind conceiving them; but the intelligence, existence, and continuity of all individuality remain in God, who is the divinely creative Principle thereof." Science and Health, p. 513.
