Today there are many alternative approaches to healing available to explore, and different practices for achieving inner peace. These practices may claim to be spiritual, but many really don’t go any farther than just the action of the human mind and body. It’s important to understand what pure spirituality really is. In Christian Science, it’s the recognition of ourselves and others as the image and likeness of the one perfect God. It’s learning to know God and our relationship to Him.
Any one of us can certainly appreciate spirituality wherever it occurs, and for anyone who experiences it. But we also need to realize that the term spirituality, especially the notion of so-called “popular spirituality,” has become a catch-all phrase for fashionable trends in thought—trends that may seem attractive and helpful, but really don’t produce lasting spiritual results. What kind of trends? Some examples would be alternative medicine, homeopathy, mysticism, yoga, meditation, and something I’ve seen recently on Facebook called “spiritual massage.”
And, like anything that becomes broadly popular, or even goes mainstream, spirituality can become diluted—maybe even to the point where we lose sight of what it really is. We could even be pulled into thinking that some of these other practices are just like Christian Science, or that they’re complementary to it.
