My daughter had gone to work in the Lake District of England six months before my visit. She had written letters full of excitement about her new activities. One of these was potholing in the limestone caves in Yorkshire.
This caused a shudder to go through me at the thought of being confined for hours underground, in restricted space. Claustrophobia was a condition I'd accepted as part of me since I was a small child. (Getting stuck in a doll's house for hours before my mum found me was an experience that seemed to justify my ongoing fear of enclosed spaces.) So it was with some amazement that when I was offered the chance of going caving in Yorkshire with an experienced guide, I accepted.
On the drive to Yorkshire, I thought about God's love for me and my companions. The power of God's love was certainly greater than my fear. I had also studied this passage from Science and Health before setting out: "The spiritual reality is the scientific fact in all things. The spiritual fact, repeated in the action of man and the whole universe, is harmonious and is the ideal of Truth. Spiritual facts are not inverted; the opposite discord, which bears no resemblance to spirituality, is not real" (p. 207). This lifted me to the insight that fear was just an inversion — no part of spiritual reality. The spiritual fact was that I live in infinite God, and there are no confined spaces.
