"We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw," The Complete Poems and Plays—1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p.56 writes T. S. Eliot hauntingly. In contrast, the Christian Science textbook gives this spiritual definition of man: "The compound idea of infinite Spirit; the spiritual image and likeness of God; the full representation of Mind." Science and Health, p. 591 Is man essentially hollow or stuffed with insubstantial trivialities? Are we unsupported except by leaning on one another? Or do we represent infinite Spirit, God, who forever maintains His own image and likeness?
Though we may not realize it, such questions, posed in many different ways, confront us daily. It is tempting to accept emptiness as a fact of existence and to begin stuffing something into it. Instead, recognizing that fullness is the correct measurement of both man and his God offers an entirely different way of learning and living. The Bible is replete with records of inspired moments when spiritual vision has revealed in some way that "the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." Ps. 24:1 Mary Baker Eddy, author of the spiritual definition of man quoted above, gained through her Bible study a joyful sense of God's allness. And she came to understand and to prove in many different ways the wholeness of the ideal man, especially through her study of Christ Jesus' life.
This is not to say that the Scriptural writers or Mrs. Eddy ignored the emptiness that T. S. Eliot observed and depicted. Could it be that the spiritual vision of earlier writers shed a light that exposes the hollowness of a merely material sense of existence? More important, these spiritual thinkers have pointed the way of escape from materialism to fruitful lives, which lay waste to the wasteland itself. The sharper one's awareness of the contrast between material emptiness and spiritual fullness, the greater the desire to make one's experience coincide more exactly with the divine, the actual, and to help others in that direction.
