If you had walked into the newly opened Christian Science Publishing House in 1935, you would have encountered an astonishing piece of art—a three-story, stained-glass rendition of the world. Known as the Mapparium, this remarkable globe continues to delight tens of thousands of visitors each year. As you stand on a bridge in the center of it, looking up and down and all around, you see the world from the inside looking out and in an entirely new light. It compels a whole new perspective on where we live and even who we are.
Tremendous political, social, and economic upheavals have reshaped the landscape of thought in the years since the Mapparium’s debut, pointing to something essential about why this beautiful globe sits in the heart of the building that publishes resources for and supports Christian Science activities worldwide. The progress and welfare of the whole world requires a growing understanding of the Science of being—the nature of God, Spirit, originating and governing all—and its practical application to daily life.
What Mary Baker Eddy discovered through her own healing from the power of Spirit alone and in her newly oriented study of the Bible was that the spiritual laws undergirding Christ Jesus’ ministry are timeless and universal. The instantaneous cures of acute, chronic, or congenital conditions in the first century were not miraculous, but involved a new understanding of God that our Master taught to his disciples. To catch this sense of life as entirely in and of Spirit is to be “born again.” And in Christian Science, this fundamental spiritual pivot is understood to be a comprehensive letting go of a material, genetic sense of self, a rediscovering of the true child of God we’ve always been, and living from that new standpoint.
