One Wednesday evening after church, my husband and I decided to drive over to a nearby nature preserve for a walk with our dog. On the way, we were talking about how Christian Science is a moral Science and how our practice of it is correlated with how near and dear good is to our thought.
The chapter titled “Christian Science Practice” in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy begins with several pages describing the devotion to good of a certain woman in the Bible, as expressed in her response to Christ Jesus. The implication, my husband noted, is that to practice the Science of the Christ we need to begin with that same love of good and willingness to sacrifice a personal or material sense of our interactions with others.
We had been doing deeper spiritual study together during our state’s pandemic shutdown. This had made us both more conscious of the need to exclude the carnal mind’s negativity from our thinking and embrace what the Bible refers to as “the fruit of the Spirit”—“love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22, 23).
God is always present and powerful, regardless of the evidence confronting the physical senses.
We were talking about what a difference this had been making in our lives, when suddenly our car hit something in the road and one of the tires blew. As we pulled over to the side, the contrast between our Spirit-centered conversation and the material predicament we faced was jarring. Being stuck on a remote country road with a flat tire and no cellphone reception seemed problematic, but we saw in this situation an opportunity to prove that God is indeed always present and powerful, regardless of the evidence confronting the physical senses.
My husband decided to hike back up the road to a ridge, where he might be able to use his phone to call for help, and I sat in the car thinking about what we’d just been discussing, namely, that siding with divine good is the beginning of scientific prayer—the kind of prayer that brings healing.
This passage from Science and Health came to me: “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts” (p. 261).
Siding with divine good is the beginning of scientific prayer—the kind of prayer that brings healing.
It was something I’d memorized in Christian Science Sunday School, but now I was seeing it anew as a moral imperative. We side with what is enduring, good, and true—not to effect a change in some temporal bad condition, but because to do otherwise is to disrespect our Father-Mother God, to deny Her ever-present goodness. It is not enough to pay intellectual lip service to the idea that God is wholly good, incorporeal, divine, supreme, and infinite. Such spiritual facts are not a metaphysical Jedi light saber that we pull out when the business as usual of an acceptable material existence is troubled. We have to live in accordance with Truth by consistently rejecting the thoughts that would oppose these facts of God’s nature, preferring spiritual sense to material evidence, and the consciousness of Love to personal sense.
So thoughts stemming from the premise that our situation was a disruption of God’s wholly good provision, that frustration and irritation were appropriate reactions, or that we were left on our own to find a solution were all morally unacceptable. It was right and necessary to reject those thoughts and to affirm God’s present goodness.
I looked up. My husband had disappeared over the ridge about half a mile up the road, and a truck was pulling up behind me. I got out and was met by a young man asking if I needed help. I explained about the tire and that my husband had gone for help. “I work at a tire store,” he said. “I can get you going in a few minutes.” His girlfriend went off in their truck to find my husband, and the tire was changed in a remarkably short time.
In the afterglow of experiencing God’s loving care, the goodness that is always there, we give thanks and feel the blessedness of our true condition as God’s children. But this understanding must become our “meditation all the day,” and we need to take to heart God’s precepts that enable us to reject the thoughts that would oppose the fact of Love’s full-time supremacy (see Psalms 119:97, 104).
In every moment we have the opportunity to understand the infinitude of Love by reflecting the morality which has its source in the Divine. Spiritual sense, patience, humility, and kindness express divine good and open the way, day by day, to the reality of the boundless good that God has prepared for us all.
