Since I was a little girl, I have always wanted to fix problems, make things better, and keep those I care about safe. Being raised in a Christian Science household, I was taught early on that when things went wrong, I could always turn to God and prayer for help. And I did feel the comfort and healing that comes from trusting God. But lots of times I was thinking, “Great! I can use God to help me fix things.”
The problem was that as much as I wanted to make things better, in all honesty I saw the problems as being bigger than God, and in great need of me to personally make things right. As I grew up, I found that while I had some success in seeing God’s goodness and supremacy, my efforts to “use” God to help me fix problems weren’t working out so well.
Through many humble moments of prayer and my exhaustive and futile attempts to use mental gymnastics to fix things, I came to see I was holding to several misperceptions and ultimately reached the following conclusions.
God isn’t relying on us to fix a world filled with problems
To think from a basis that God needs us to repair a broken world, is to make a god out of human selfhood, and to put self before God. It is true that God needs every individual to express His own completeness and each one of us is an essential part of God’s kingdom. But to be thinking that we have somehow been hired by God to be a constant mechanic, to continuously repair a bunch of broken-down people or to turn a world of war, famine, poverty, inequity, sickness, mental illness into a world of peace, supply, equality, and health, isn’t accurate. This would mean we’re seeing ourselves as a kind of medium for God’s work. But God is All-in-all. God is the creator. As Jesus said, “The Father . . . doeth the works” (John 14:10).
Rather than God, divine Love, requiring us to make things right, the need is always for us to wake up to the reality that God’s work is done. As we understand, express, and glorify Him, things adjust and the harmony that has already and always existed comes into view. This does take effort, but this effort is not about exerting human control. It’s about this false sense of a controlling, human selfhood yielding to the truth of our spiritual identity and its place in and under God’s eternal governance.
God’s idea (what we are) and the human mind are not the same
Christian Science is not a tool we use to shape a limited human mind or selfhood into something better. Christian Science is about realizing that right where the limited human mind appears to be letting in more or less light and Truth on any given day, there is actually the full capacity and awareness of man’s God-maintained and perfectly governed identity. And an awareness of this fact allows for the appearance of a fluctuating human mind and its illusory results to fade and the full facts of man, each of us as a God-caused idea, to appear.
For the longest time I thought that, while ultimately I was spiritual, somehow God was working with what He and I both saw as an imperfect human. I thought that (with enough work!) I would become spiritual. And when my progress was frustratingly slow, I blamed myself.
Then a Christian Science practitioner helped me see that man, God’s spiritual idea, is who I already am, not who I will become. He directed me to references in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the primary work of Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, that showed God’s true view of man. These statements included the following: “In divine Science, man is the true image of God” (p. 259), “Man: God’s spiritual idea, individual, perfect, eternal” (p. 115), and “Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God’s image and likeness; . . .” (p. 475).
I saw that a perception of a frustrated God and a frustratingly slow-to-understand human who was in the process of becoming spiritual, had never come from the teachings of Christian Science and therefore had not come from its Discoverer! That suggestion had come from mortal mind, which seems to obscure our spirituality and our relation to God. The teachings of Christian Science have always been that God’s view of man is that he is a good and perfect creation. God is never trying to make an incomplete, imperfect human being into something whole.
Mrs. Eddy identifies the deeply Christian basis of Christian Science when she writes: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (Science and Health, pp. 476–477). As God’s sight is revealed to be our sight, we free ourselves and our neighbors from false impressions that would obscure the present facts about our full capacity and freedom.
Prayer in Christian Science is not like a video game we play where we work hard to “level up” and earn spiritual points so God can rejoice that we finally figured things out and can now reward us with spirituality. God sees no mortals regressing or advancing or trying to pull themselves up by the bootstraps from limited means, intelligence, and supply. God sees us each as His perfect, obedient, and spiritually strong idea. This is what God has seen and always will see.
Divine Mind alone is the source of man
There is so much focus in society on learning to rely on the so-called human mind, selfhood, or personality for success and well-being. But this is mortal mind’s attempt to distract us from the fact that as God’s idea we are already complete, whole, standing tall, and reliant on God alone for all we have and are. Since God has already made and given man the kingdom, man should not and cannot rebuild it. Science and Health makes the following statement that helps break down the human mind’s false claim of being able to do this: “Those instructed in Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that God is the only author of man” (p. 29).
Mortal mind’s false claim that humanity is its own author and originator is a lie about the source of our well-being. Mind, God, is our reason for existing, and our well-being depends on God, divine Love, not a human mind or selfhood, for its eternal and ever-present wellness. Man as God’s idea is real, substantial, and the false concept of a human mind is the counterfeit. Our safety, sureness, security, and success do not depend on a selfhood separate from God, good. God has not employed us to create a perfect life. God expresses in each of us the perfect, divine Life and has given us the ability to discern what He has already done.
Christian Science is not about good-minded humans developing spiritual perception and personal abilities to make the world whole. Christian Science is about realizing the perception God has given man to discern the present kingdom of heaven and the health and harmony God gave and gives all. As Science and Health says, “Man is not made to till the soil” (pp. 517–518). I take this to mean, God did not make us to use human effort, or even to use prayer, to try and clean up a mess.
We are God’s ideas, living in God’s universe of harmony. We are fully capable of discerning this truth and rejecting the mistaken thinking that would obscure this eternal fact. You are, and forever have been, the loved and lovable idea of God, and there is no other mind able to convince you otherwise.
