If you live in the Philippines and have lost your house or worse to a typhoon, or if a family member has just passed on because of illness or even supposedly natural causes, “Nature: Friend or foe?”may be an easy question to answer. But Christian Science shows that we can progress beyond a sense of nature as being our physical foe to think of it as being spiritual, good, even sheltering and supportive. The understanding of nature as spiritual can not only protect us against what seem to be the whims and ravages of nature, but also heal illness.
What is nature? We may all know the Big Bang theory that would say that the universe was created from an explosion billions of years ago. The theory of evolution, the fundamental Newtonian “laws” of physics, and the physics of the 20th and 21st centuries, which have determined that matter is not the fixed substance that it was once considered to be. But apart from these changing theories about physical reality, stands eternally a spiritual reality in which God is infinite, perfect Being and we all reflect Him as His children.
Christian Science starts from the biblical premise that God is infinite Spirit, the only substance, and that His creation is spiritual since it’s formed by and reflects Spirit. This creation, though truly natural, isn’t based on anything material, since matter, which represents limitation, is but the supposed opposite of God. Mary Baker Eddy, a deep student of the Bible, wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “In one sense God is identical with nature, but this nature is spiritual and is not expressed in matter” (p. 119). Though we can’t see this spiritual reality physically, it does exist concretely, and is always surrounding us. Enduring and dependable, it is always supporting us.
