Over the past few years it’s been encouraging to follow reports, particularly in The Christian Science Monitor, that show world governments taking a stand for honest innovation. For example, at the G20 summit in Turkey in November 2015, “The leaders of the G20 nations—including from major cyber powers such as Russia, China, and the US but also from Brazil, India, and Indonesia—approved this latest UN GGE [Group of Governmental Experts] report [on cyberspace norms] and called out several specific norms, including most surprisingly the prohibition on commercial espionage.” This summit, along with other international agreements and actions, has contributed to a modest but significant decline in “commercially motivated cyber espionage” between nations (see “What it’ll take to forge peace in cyberspace,” csmonitor.com, March 20, 2017).
This is good progress. I would even see it as evidence of the influence of the universal Principle or Truth we call God, moving individuals and nations to a greater expression of goodness, honor, and integrity. While there are complex challenges yet to be overcome in this arena, further reform and victory can be expected because the law of God, good, is operating in human consciousness, awakening mankind morally and spiritually, which naturally results in improved ethics and more honest actions. Creative integrity reflects the nature of divine Principle, Love, and clearer views of Principle will result in a strengthening of honesty, unselfishness, and moral courage.
Whether individually or as a nation, we never need to feel driven to plagiarize or steal ideas, because we’re each fully endowed with all the God-given capacities we need to make an honest, valuable, and unique contribution to the world. As children of God, we don’t exist to take from each other, but to genuinely give expression to the rich qualities and capabilities replenished in us each moment by our divine source. I think the spirit of this is brilliantly conveyed in a Scripture about the building of a temple dedicated to God’s holy name. It says: “Lord our God, all this abundance … comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. I know, my God, that you test the heart and are pleased with integrity. All these things I have given willingly and with honest intent” (I Chronicles 29:16, 17, New International Version).
Creative integrity reflects the nature of divine Principle, Love.
Those who exhibit a talent for innovation actively exercise an abundance of creative attributes such as ingenuity, unconventionality, vision, adaptability, curiosity, courage, efficiency, fearlessness, perseverance, resourcefulness, etc. And these are qualities we can all authentically express and value, because God has given to each of us freely and impartially the ability to express them as His spiritual reflection—to utilize them in fresh and fruitful ways for the benefit of all. It’s also natural to express boundless originality of thought, because it too emanates from God, who is the one Mind or infinitely creative intelligence we uniquely reflect.
The commonly accepted worldview of man as a physical being with a brain that functions with varying degrees of intelligence can veil this expansiveness of thought. But the freeing perspective Christian Science brings is to show us that we’re purely spiritual, all springing from a single divine consciousness that’s conceiving us as individual expressions of its own brilliant originality and unlimited comprehension. Our nature as reflections of the one divine Mind is wonderfully declared in an Icelandic translation of Genesis 1, verses 26 and 27, quoted by Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as follows: “And God said, Let us make man after our mind and our likeness; and God shaped man after His mind; after God’s mind shaped He him; and He shaped them male and female” (p. 525).
The understanding of God as Mind, and of man’s relation to Mind as its reflection, can only strengthen innovative endeavors. But a personal sense of mind and self separate from the one infinite Mind must be put off through humility. A humble yielding to divine Mind’s all-knowing intelligence and inspiration demonstrates Mind’s freshness and creativity, unhindered by false limitations of human thought. The opposite, matter-based model of finite mind and existence may appear to hold mankind in a mold of limited good, spawning things such as dishonesty, competitiveness, lack, selfishness, banality, and plagiarism. But right where that inverted model appears to be, the Christlike reality of Spirit and divine Love’s allness is shining with full effulgence—breaking through the clouds of materialism to reveal the truth of what we are as Love’s upright, original, giving, satisfied, and extraordinary spiritual expressions.
It’s this truth of our Love-defined and Love-impelled spiritual being that’s constantly calling humanity to contribute to mankind’s advancing demonstration of loving more selflessly, expansively, and honestly in every arena of endeavor, including innovation.
In The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Progress is the maturing conception of divine Love; …” (p. 181). In many ways there’s daily evidence of how humanity’s conception of divine Love is growing, leading our global family in more unselfish directions. In particular, I look to the Monitor as a news source committed to recognizing and reporting on this progress—daily shining a light on how divine Truth and Love are impelling mankind’s spiritual freedom and salvation. Specifically on the innovation front, I love reading Monitor articles that feature innovation for humanitarian purposes. A 2016 piece reported a “boom in innovation by individuals who want to make a difference,” noting that such people are “marrying their creativity and smarts with a desire to help humanity” (“The entrepreneurs easing suffering, one invention at a time,” csmonitor.com, May 25, 2016).
It’s inspiring to see humanitarian innovation grow, yet far more than this, we can also expect to witness greater proofs of human needs being met in ways “outside the box” of the human paradigm altogether, more akin to what Christ Jesus demonstrated when he fed over five thousand people from a few loaves and fish. Jesus turned away from a limited, physical sense of things and beheld the sustaining infinity of divine Love abundantly, inexhaustibly, and unfailingly meeting the needs of its entire spiritual creation. He understood the completeness of Love’s provision for all and demonstrated how it embraces and practically meets every human need. “… to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good,” we read in Science and Health (p. 494).
We can be so grateful for innovations that benefit humanity in a variety of useful ways, but mankind’s progress isn’t simply a product of new inventions and technologies. True progress occurs as we individually and collectively yield to the universal Christ, Truth, and see that we all are actually created in the likeness of divine Spirit, which endows us with infinite capacities for loving, blessing, and doing good. This dawning recognition of the unlimited goodness of Spirit reflected throughout creation is what really compels mankind’s advance—triumphing step by step over every false claim that life is confined in matter.
Going forward, it’s inevitable that mankind will make great progress in overcoming and ultimately triumphing over a conventional, finite, material sense of intelligence and existence. This happens as individuals awaken to the unending originality of infinite spiritual being, everywhere unfolding as the manifestation of limitless Mind and all-sustaining Love. Each individual can realize and faithfully live her or his Christly nature as an expression of Truth’s impeccable integrity, Mind’s brilliant originality, Spirit’s unlimited freshness, and Love’s boundless giving—and in this way contribute to humanity’s awakening to true freedom and to the greater worldwide demonstration of genuine originality of thought and honest innovation that serves humanity’s universal need for spiritual progress.
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.
