Life, Truth and Love the pattern make,
Christ is the perfect heir;
The clouds of sense roll back, and show
The form divinely fair.
(Mary Alice Dayton,
Christian Science Hymnal, No. 51)
For several months I would awake each morning with the words of this familiar hymn playing in my head. And it wasn’t just in the morning. They would come to my thought often during the day. At first, I didn’t think much about it. After all, many of us have had, at one time or another, a popular song playing over and over in our mind.
But it occurred to me that perhaps I was being challenged to understand a deeper concept regarding patterns, a concept that is at the very core of our being. We encounter all kinds of patterns in our lives: economic patterns, weather patterns, behavioral patterns, and demographic patterns, to name a few. The more I pondered the words “Life, Truth and Love the pattern make,” the more I wondered just what this pattern looks like.
It dawned on me that the words “Life, Truth and Love the pattern make” illustrate the precise spiritual fact that contradicts the prevalent material belief in hereditary theory and DNA. The theory of life as physical includes genetic patterns and DNA sequencing and coding. But the spiritual fact that creation, including man, is patterned after God, after divine Life, Truth, and Love, puts down the belief that creation is material and made up of a material pattern; it points to the divine pattern of man as the spiritual reflection of Spirit, God.
The five material senses deny this and can be quite convincing in suggesting that our material bodies and the physical universe are the actuality of creation. In her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy asks, “What is the model before mortal mind?” She goes on to say: “Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model? The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your life-work, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models” (p. 248).
Fortunately, through Christian Science, we have been shown the perfect model—perfect God and perfect man—the higher, spiritual pattern for us to keep before our thought. Christian Science defines God so beautifully with the synonyms Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love (see Science and Health, p. 465). Understanding these synonyms individually and collectively elucidates God’s power and allness, revealing Him as wholly good, loving, and sending forth only perfection, expressing it in His idea, man. Through these divine synonyms we can deepen our understanding of God and man in an infinite number of ways. As I’ve thought specifically about the synonyms Life, Truth, and Love together, and studied Mrs. Eddy’s writings, I’ve learned more about their particular relevance to creation.
Think about how powerful it is to understand creation to be the emanation of Life, Truth, and Love, not made up of matter.
In the Bible’s first chapter, Genesis 1—the divine record of creation—verse 26 tells us: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion.” The plurality here, the “us,” is the one infinite God. Mrs. Eddy elucidates this Bible passage by explaining: “The name Elohim is in the plural, but this plurality of Spirit does not imply more than one God, nor does it imply three persons in one. It relates to the oneness, the tri-unity of Life, Truth, and Love” (Science and Health, p. 515). Therefore, creation does not originate from multiple sources but from the triune Principle: Life, Truth, and Love. It is this Principle which ensures man’s being as made in the image of God.
In Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mrs. Eddy writes, “Our Master understood that Life, Truth, Love are the triune Principle of all pure theology; also, that this divine trinity is one infinite remedy for the opposite triad, sickness, sin, and death” (p. 63). How revolutionary to think that the divine remedy for all disease, including hereditary maladies, is firmly established in the trinity of Life, Truth, and Love. This triune Principle is the true blueprint of our spiritual individuality. It shows that our heritage and identity are spiritually rooted in the divine, the spiritual, rather than the material, and specifically rooted in the tri-unity of Life, Truth, and Love.
Think about how powerful it is to understand creation to be the emanation of Life, Truth, and Love, not made up of matter. This spiritual understanding brings a wellspring of energy, vigor, and vitality to one’s life. It teaches us of the uninterrupted law of Love, maintaining, supporting, and caring for every one of God’s children. It reveals that the only generational “patterns” are in man’s direct relation to God, who is man’s Life. They consist only of uninterrupted perfection, healthfulness, sturdiness, and strength, all built on the foundation of Truth, which cannot become deformed and cannot break apart, deteriorate, or disappear.
One illuminating moment that came to my thinking through these ideas was the idea that Jacob’s ladder, as presented in the Bible, could be considered a direct spiritual counter fact to suggestions of DNA. It was powerful to me to think about how absolutely relevant the truths in the Bible are to our modern experience today. The story of Jacob’s ladder and its spiritual significance offers a dramatic contradistinction to genetic and hereditary theories.
Before Jacob saw this ladder in a dream, he laid his head on a stone, which could be thought of as symbolic of the cold, hard belief in a temporal matter-based heritage. But his true heritage and Father are soon revealed. We read in Genesis that Jacob dreamed and beheld “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (28:12). In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy explains that angels are: “God’s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality” (p. 581). It was the “pure and perfect” pattern of Spirit that Jacob was glimpsing, God’s perfect spiritual conception of man and the universe. This spiritual understanding casts out evil, including the belief in material creation and genetic and hereditary theories. In its spiritual interpretation, this ladder represents the understanding of our indissoluble being as an idea in the divine Mind, in the consciousness that keeps us in perpetual and eternal health and harmony; it clearly illustrates God’s care and protection.
The omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of God are infinitely greater than the belief that life is simply a combination of atoms. Consequently, genetic theories do not have the authority and power to determine one’s true identity or uniqueness. They cannot gain jurisdiction over our experience, and it isn’t a human family tree that dictates our health and well-being. We see that beliefs of hereditary illness, traits, or tendencies have no authority, validity, credibility, or existence when we prove, through spiritual growth and understanding, that the only “patterns” are spiritual patterns of good. The true essence of each one of us is derived from God, divine Life, Truth, and Love.
