While visiting a prison, I talked with an inmate who told me what it was like to have a glimpse of spiritual reality. He said it made him feel "like a man again." He did have individual worth!
He had believed he was a hapless product of heredity and environment, starting out in life with a handicap. But through his study of the Bible along with Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, a book I had given him, he was beginning to see more clearly that he was God's spiritual image. He had never stopped being the "somebody" God created him to be.
What this man saw is in a degree similar to the vision of spiritual reality St. John describes in Revelation: 'And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away ...." Rev. 21:1. John referred to this vision as "new" because up to that point it had not been revealed to him. But he was seeing the eternally true nature of creation in all its perfection and glory. How can we discover this spiritual goodness and experience it in tangible ways? How can it heal and bless our communities?
