Recently I came across a diary that my dad had kept as a teenager in Germany during World War II. The first page is just a column of numbers and a few letters. Right away I recognized them as citations that had been copied down from the Bible Lessons in the Christian Science Quarterly. The Nazis had outlawed Christian Science during the war, and I have read or been told many firsthand accounts of how Christian Scientists had gone to incredible lengths to smuggle the then current Quarterlys into Germany, because members felt empowered knowing they were reading and being sustained by the same Lessons that were being studied and applied by students of Christian Science all over the world. Having the current Lesson mattered to them. Having a tangible way of participating in a united, prayerful effort to bring peace to a war-torn world gave them hope and purpose. Once the Lessons made it into Germany, the citations were copied down in a way that would simply appear to be a list of numbers on a page if they were intercepted by the Nazis. And then they were distributed through a kind of underground network throughout Germany. The whole thing brought to mind the kind of images you see in a suspenseful spy movie.
But when I turned the page, I gained a deeper appreciation for what these Bible Lessons meant to the people who received them. The first line of my dad’s entry read, “Das Schießen ist noch bedeutend näher gekommen.” (The shooting has come much closer.) I froze for a moment when I read those words, imagining what Dad must have been dealing with as a sixteen-year-old in a war zone he couldn’t get away from. As I looked up some of the passages from the Lesson-Sermon on the previous page, I could easily understand how much it must have meant to read, for example, Psalms 40:11: “Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O Lord: let thy lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me.” This was no movie; this was what he and so many others were experiencing in their day-to-day lives. And the words from those Bible Lessons were something more than soothing words. They were a lifeline that spoke to their hearts and for their hearts, strengthening them in the midst of great adversity. In 1939, before the war began, there were 84 Christian Science churches and societies in Germany. During the war the number dropped to 0. But just five years after, they were up to 119.
There’s a really important point to take away from accounts like this. These experiences are about more than our relationship with a book called the Bible. They are about tangibly experiencing the actual God that inspired people to write the Bible in the first place.
