“Fake news” is something we hear a lot about these days. It’s so pervasive in today’s media world that it can be difficult to know what news sources can be trusted. Often we read news based on rumor or exaggerated truth. I am grateful for The Christian Science Monitor and its balanced, careful reporting, which can seem like a safe haven from the barrage of negative news reports.
I have found another safe haven from the confusion of fake news: Church. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, who also established the Monitor, defines Church in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as “the structure of Truth and Love” and “that institution, which affords proof of its utility and is found elevating the race, … casting out devils, or error, and healing the sick” (p. 583). And she asked that the following be shared with the congregation in every Church of Christ, Scientist, each Sunday before the Lesson-Sermon is read from the Bible and Science and Health: “The canonical writings, together with the word of our textbook, corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present, and future, constitute a sermon undivorced from truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses, and divinely authorized” (Explanatory Note, Christian Science Quarterly).
One time I went to church in a weird mood. Something that had happened in my past was coming back into thought, and it was bugging me. It was a bad experience based on some lies that had been spread about me. I went through the motions of the church service, but I was continually distracted by these negative thoughts that seemed to be dragging me back into the same emotions I had been feeling in the past: shame, confusion, and hurt. Trying to will myself to fight back against this emotional onslaught just made it worse, and it got to a point where I felt as if I would have to leave the service. Just at that moment, the First Reader, who conducts the service, was reading the Explanatory Note quoted earlier, and the words “undivorced from truth” were the clearest thing I’d heard that whole morning.
I have found another safe haven from the confusion of fake news: Church.
I knew the readings I would be hearing for the rest of the service were texts compiled from the Bible and Science and Health, books written by honest, spiritually minded writers who were imparting God’s truth to man. Mrs. Eddy wrote: “The works I have written on Christian Science contain absolute Truth, and my necessity was to tell it; … I was a scribe under orders; …” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 311). Starting from the standpoint that God is All and only good, and that man and the universe reflect God spiritually, Christian Science takes a radical stand for what is real—“divinely authorized”—and what is not. I realized that there would not be an ounce of a lie in anything I would be hearing during the service, and my thought immediately calmed. In fact, as I listened to the service, it brought a feeling of “rewinding,” as if every bad experience I’d had was reversing itself and the truths in the Lesson-Sermon were replacing them in my thought.
Now, I haven’t had an experience like this every time I attend a church service in a Church of Christ, Scientist! However, I have taken this experience to heart, and now I cherish the knowledge that every service in a Church of Christ, Scientist, is filled with Truth—no lies or fake news in sight!
Knowing that divine Truth is readily available to counteract a lie at any time is a bastion against “fake news,” and a promoter of honest progress.
