It’s a wonderful thing to feel the palpable, intimate presence of divine Love, when we’re conscious to some degree of God’s allness and our identity as His reflection. This exalted state of thought, which we seek daily to more fully achieve, is the consciousness of Christ, Truth—the spiritual consciousness that knows only what God knows and contains no erroneous suggestions about any intelligence, power, or existence apart from God, good.
When I have felt a sense of oneness with God, I have wanted to remain in the “secret place of the most High” (Psalms 91:1), the “house of the Lord” (Psalms 23:6), but have sometimes reluctantly felt I must leave the consciousness of Love to go about my daily affairs. Mortal mind—the belief that there is a supposed mind apart from God, the divine and only real Mind—would argue that we are separate from God, and that while we can sometimes be conscious of spiritual existence during a few limited activities, such as quiet prayer, it is certainly not practical to remain in this Christly consciousness as we go about the rest of our day.
Though I knew mortal mind’s concept of separation and dualism could not be true if God is all, the suggestion was still troubling to me, so I reached out to God for answers. This statement from the Bible was reassuring: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). I reasoned that if God is ever present, there can never be any activity that takes place outside of His allness. So whether we’re running an errand, engaging in a sport, completing a work assignment, making a plan, mastering a new skill, or socializing with friends, we can correctly identify ourselves as God’s spiritual idea and affirm that we are in His presence. Everything we do can be done to express and glorify God. We always know our names as we go about our day; in the same way, we have the right and ability to know our spiritual identity, our true selfhood.
Jesus, knowing that man is spiritual and inseparable from God, never accepted the suggestion that he or anyone else must depart from the consciousness of God’s presence.
A few years ago, as I was reading a Bible account of Christ Jesus feeding the multitude of over five thousand people (see Matthew 14:14–21), I realized that it provides a powerful rejection of the supposed necessity for separation and dualism. The multitude had been listening to Jesus all day and were no doubt feeling the influence of the Christ embracing them in divine Love, identifying them as God’s children. But there was a fundamental human need to be met—food for the multitude. The disciples mistakenly believed they had to depart from the true consciousness of being that the Christ was imparting and reason from the material senses about how best to feed the people. Despite their good motives and uplifted thought, the disciples assumed that divine Love was not capable of meeting the practical need, so they told Jesus to “send the multitude away”—away from the Christ, we might say, the consciousness of Love and of their proper identification as God’s ideas.
However, Jesus, knowing that man is spiritual and inseparable from God, never accepted the suggestion that he or anyone else must depart from the consciousness of God’s presence in order to engage in any right activity, or for any need to be met. Jesus replied to his disciples with the statement, “They need not depart.”
Those four words of Jesus leaped off the page at me when I was reading this story in the Christian Science Bible Lesson. Of course! Man as God’s reflection never needs to, and in reality never could, depart from the divine Mind that made him, knows him, sustains him, and loves him.
It is important to note that the biblical account doesn’t stop with Jesus simply affirming that they need not depart, and then implying that the people didn’t need human food because they were fed by divine Love. Instead, God’s abundant care for man was manifested practically with a supply of bread and fish for the multitude, who remained embraced in Jesus’ consciousness of the presence of God’s infinite, compassionate love.
God, Mind, always knows and supplies every need of His idea, man. So whatever the situation is, we can look confidently to divine Love to meet our needs—to open our thought to see abundant possibilities right where we are, and to give us the ability to know exactly what practical footsteps we may need to take. It would actually be pretty illogical to believe we must leave the consciousness of divine Love in order for Love to meet our human need.
“Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness,” Mary Baker Eddy explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 332). So regardless of the human venue or activity, we can feel God’s presence, understand His allness, experience His goodness, and know ourselves as His reflection just as clearly as if we were reading Jesus’ words in the Bible or attending a church service. The more we follow Jesus’ example of watching, praying, and yielding to the divine Mind as our only Mind, the more we experience the healing Christ in our daily lives and demonstrate our true, Christly selfhood.
I was overjoyed to have this confirmation that there is absolutely never a necessity to depart from the Christ, from the consciousness of that heavenly presence of Love and the clear sense of myself as Love’s reflection. The insight brought to thought one of my favorite statements in Science and Health: “When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness” (p. 264). Praying to remain more and more consistently in that spiritual consciousness enables right reasoning in any circumstance, opens our eyes to the practical ways that God meets every need, satisfies our right desires, provides the spiritual insight to direct our human footsteps, and brings about the perfect completion of right activities.
I still seem to depart from the consciousness of the Christ, Truth, more times than I could keep track of throughout the day. Yet, I have a profound peace in the growing conviction that as God’s spiritual idea, I can never actually dwell anywhere else but in the consciousness of Love. And the more I put this conviction into practice, the more God’s qualities—such as wisdom, joy, and peace—infuse every aspect of my experience, blessing me and all those around me in very practical ways.
