According to Christian Science the real man, spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as created in the image and likeness of God, is coexistent with and inseparable from God. Christ Jesus alone completely exemplified this perfect man. He proved his sonship with God by overcoming all manner of sickness, sin, discord, lack, and even death, and finally gave the supreme proof in rising above human sight in what is known as his ascension. Christendom has generally held that when Jesus rose out of the physical sight of his disciples, this constituted his ascension. Christian Science makes apparent that his ascension included all his work as he was about his Father's business, and was completed when, his life mission accomplished, he disappeared to material comprehension.
Jesus taught that each of us can follow him as we attain to a like spiritual understanding of God and man, for he said, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also." It is possible, then, for each of us today, in the degree that we follow in the Master's footsteps and reflect the Mind which was in him—the divine Mind which is God —to rise above the beliefs and ills of the flesh and attain to man's heritage as God's image and likeness. Our continuous overcoming of the flesh and all error is our spiritual ascension; and we can daily so apply and live the teachings of Christian Science that we steadily approach closer to the culmination of our ascension above material sense to the full realization of perfection.
There are many factors which enter into our individual spiritual ascension. Let us briefly consider three: prayer, gratitude, and love.
Mrs. Eddy's teachings about prayer differ radically from the concept generally accepted, that cf mere supplication or the repeating of written formulas intended to meet specific needs. Prayer in Christian Science is earnest striving to know God, to realize His allness and man's perfection as His likeness. Our prayer of petition is not an attempt to instruct God as to our wants; it is not an asking for material things, but for spiritual understanding and unfoldment. Prayer in Christian Science is a conscious communion with God that brings us closer to God. Mrs. Eddy beautifully gives the highest concept of selfless, healing prayer where she writes in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 150), "In speechless prayer, ask God to enable you to reflect God, to become His own image and likeness, even the calm, clear, radiant reflection of Christ's glory, healing the sick, bringing the sinner to repentance, and raising the spiritually dead in trespasses and sins to life in God." Through the "speechless prayer" of communion with God, not of selfish importunity for material things, are we enabled to do the Christly works which advance our steps in spiritual ascension.
And gratitude! How it illumines our pathway, lightens our burdens, helps us onward from sense to Soul! One need not wait for the manifestation of health, supply, fulfilled desires, to be grateful. Jesus was grateful before blessings were humanly externalized; he knew that all good belongs to man because God is good, and that man has all that God gives —and we today can live that same gratitude. We can be grateful for Christian Science, grateful that through its teachings we are learning to know God as He is, to know how to approach Him in right prayer, how to avail ourselves of His love. We can hold to that gratitude in our thinking and express it to the needy ones at our Wednesday testimony meetings and through testimonies prepared for our periodicals.
Are our demonstrations delayed? Does a claim of sickness, sin, lack, or discord hold on tenaciously despite earnest work in Christian Science for its elimination? Perhaps we are not grateful enough. Perhaps we are thinking and expressing gratitude only for benefits we ourselves receive or hope for. Let us widen our thought and be grateful that another has been healed, that another has been blessed, that good is for all. Gratitude indeed availeth much. Let us not limit it to ourselves, but be grateful that all mankind can come under the healing wings of Truth.
As we are grateful for the faithful Way-shower, so should we be grateful to his faithful follower, Mary Baker Eddy. Let us be grateful for the work the Master did for the salvation of mankind, and for the final and complete revelation of God which came to our Leader, the revelation and teaching which make our spiritual progress possible. How human gratitude for material favors fades into insignificance when we contemplate the magnitude of gratitude we should feel for what has thus been given to the whole world!
Paul wrote, "Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three: and the greatest of these is love" (Am. Rev. Ver.). And we might say that of prayer, gratitude, and love, the greatest is love. Love illumines prayer and gratitude, for Love is All. One cannot pray to God understanding without loving Him, cannot be grateful for good received without loving the Giver. John, the beloved disciple, wrote, "God is love," a statement quoted and enlarged upon many times by our Leader. God's love for man is shown in ways infinitely beyond human desires or outlining. Spiritually to ascend to God, we must understand Him, and we cannot understand Him without knowing Him as Love. Just as necessary is it for us to love our fellow men, for while Jesus said that loving God is the first and great commandment, he also said that the second is like unto it, namely, that we love our neighbor as ourselves. We love man by knowing man for what he really is—the perfect, eternal, everliving reflection of God. We ascend spiritually nearer to God as we gain the correct understanding of what God is and what man is. Knowing that the real man reflects God's qualities and attributes, surely we can love man as we love God.
Spiritual healing was practiced by the early Christians for about three hundred years after the time of Jesus. Then this power was seemingly lost. Love had not lost its power to heal, but men had lost their concept of God as Love, and without love there is no true healing, for as Mrs. Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 113), "The vital part, the heart and soul of Christian Science, is Love." When she discovered rules of spiritual healing practiced by Christ Jesus, and taught in Christian Science how those rules can be applied to solve every human problem, Mrs. Eddy brought to suffering humanity, as basic to her teachings, the great fact that God is Love. We must know God as Jesus knew Him, we must love God and man as Jesus loved them, if we would do the works he did and progress in our ascension.
The ascension, then, is rising out of the belief that man is material and subject to sin, disease, and death, to the realization of man in God's image and likeness. It is so clearly knowing the allness of God that we prove the unreality of that which is not of His creating. Ascension, therefore, is not vicarious through the experience of Jesus; it is individual for each of us. It begins when, through living the teachings of Christian Science, we start our journey from sense to Soul. It continues and advances in each overcoming of some phase of error, each good thought and deed, each honest, sincere striving for the Mind which was in Christ Jesus.
Jesus told Nicodemus that "except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God," and that to enter into this kingdom one must be born of the Spirit, not of the flesh. Might we not, then, liken ascension to the new birth, to the giving up of materiality with its false pleasures and pains, the turning from that which confers no lasting joy, no eternal substance, no everlasting life, no all-inclusive love? Our life is not subject to the supposedly inevitable experience called death, but must go on in ever-widening unfoldment, as by faithfully treading the paths our beloved Master trod we gain a higher understanding of the Life which is God.
In an article entitled "The New Birth" in "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy writes (p. 15): "The new birth is not the work of a moment. It begins with moments, and goes on with years; moments of surrender to God, of childlike trust and joyful adoption of good; moments of self-abnegation, self-consecration, heaven-born hope, and spiritual love." Then she continues on the same page: "Only through the sore travail of mortal mind shall soul as sense be satisfied, and man awake in His likeness. What a faith-lighted thought is this! that mortals can lay off the 'old man,' until man is found to be the image of the infinite good that we name God, and the fulness of the stature of man in Christ appears." Is not this ascension?
