When wildlife conservationists capture water buffaloes, they can actually keep them corralled with walls of burlap. The animals could easily barge through the barriers, but because they can't see through them they believe they are solid.
A water buffalo roundup may be remote from our lives, yet doesn't this have a familiar ring? Haven't many of us let a problem buffalo us into believing it was a stone wall we could see no way through? Time and fear would solidify these convictions. Trying to dissolve complications humanly often makes more opaque the very problem we would see through. Our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, writes, "They who discern the face of the skies cannot always discern the mental signs of these times, and peer through the opaque error."Miscellaneous Writings, p. 347
It doesn't matter whether one's walls appear to be disease, lack, false personality traits, age, loneliness, or red tape. Christian Science shows us they are mere delusions with less substance than a mirage. In all the creation of divine Mind there is no blockage to man's free and immortal being. As we understand this, the rays of infinite Love prevent the buildup of error in our consciousness and dissolve the seeming mortal resistance to Truth.
Consider what an obstacle Saul of Tarsus presented to the disciples who yearned to shout from the rooftops the wonderful gospel of Christ. The Bible tells us: "At that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem .... As for Saul, he made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison." Acts 8:1, 3 Surely the disciples prayed for freedom from this harassment. And it is not inconceivable that these prayers played a humble part in the conversion that changed Saul to Paul and transformed him from principal persecutor to prime promoter of Christianity. Certainly, through their prayers and growing spiritual insight the disciples gained greater freedom. Following the account of Paul's conversion, the Scriptures record, "Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied."9:31 Like the walls of Jericho, the hindrances that the disciples faced weren't brought down with battering rams. They crumbled before a spiritual strategy, all-encompassing and Godglorifying.
God's man, totally innocent, is never a victim. Indeed, innocence is a defending, healing power because it is a spiritual attribute of omnipotent Mind. Man, God's pure, spiritual idea, is never thwarted in his right activity in Mind. And we can prove this in our daily living.
Before the days of trimesters and regular summer sessions, the particular school I was attending at the university offered an extra "Intersession" of courses. I wrote to the registrar requesting an application for it and received a reply that none was required; I needed only to present myself on opening day. With trunk packed for the full school year, I returned to college. The next morning, when I gathered with other students for Intersession, the dean's assistant (I didn't know she even knew me) singled me out and, in a voice fringed with icicles, said I could not attend the classes. She refused my request to see the dean and told me she would discuss the matter with him and talk to me later. When I returned for her answer, neither her manner nor her message had changed. Knowing my grades did not warrant such action, I was buffaloed.
The rest of the morning I walked the empty campus declaring, sometimes aloud, the truths of man and his relation to God that I had learned in Christian Science. Before lunch I telephoned an advisor of the Christian Science organization at the university, and she gave me further spiritual reinforcement.
It was early afternoon when I felt impelled to return to the campus. Just as I arrived at the outer walk leading to it, I came face to face with the dean's assistant. The icicles were gone! She embraced me as though I were a long-lost friend and informed me I could attend Intersession. Permission was even granted for me to take courses that added up to more credits than were normally allowed. Divine Love had enabled me to see through the barrier of mortal personality to God's spiritual idea, and this spiritual seeing had brought freedom to pursue rightful human activity.
There is no element of resistance in Christlike consciousness, but in daily living, mortal will is often the impediment in our path. Human will sees an ignorant, sick, or cantankerous person where there is none, for God's child expresses perfection. Christ, Truth, gives us spiritual perception to look right through the errors that appear so impenetrable and behold the real man. This is how we instruct mortal mind that it cannot defy God and deify personal ego.
There is no inconsequential thought, and often we, like those water buffaloes, make our own barriers to freedom. Pride, cynicism, impatience, prejudice, restrict mind and body. So does the belief that we can't stop being annoyed, or distracted, or that we can't stop seeing another's faults, which is only the other side of the claim that we can't express the divine nature.
When the arguments of error seem to whirl like notes from some annoying phonograph record in our thinking, we don't have to remove them from consciousness note by sour note. In one sweep we can lift the entire recording from the spindle of mortal mind and end its senseless noise—replacing it with the harmonious, spiritual facts of man in the likeness of God. Nothing can thwart our progress but the opaqueness of our own thought; nothing can fence us in but the boundaries of our own understanding—and then, only in belief.
We need never let the errors of a mortal heritage or heredity assume stonewall proportions in our experience. A material past is not the architect of man's life. The crumbling foundation of this belief is the claim that we or our forebears ever had a history of living in matter. Right where mortal mind would attribute a cause and an effect to evil, both we and our so-called ancestors continue to exist in our true identity— already perfect and safe in eternal Life. Man is and always has been spiritual, divine Mind's idea. He is never confronted with matter or its conditions.
Another illusory barrier is the belief that business or household demands, persons or places, keep us from being as consecrated in our study of Christian Science as we would like. The fact is that human circumstances cannot hinder, indeed, have nothing to do with, our true consecration. It grows in the garden of the heart and blossoms in thought, and we can always tend it there in sacred privacy no matter what the outward situation. With patience and persistence we will witness the burgeoning of new opportunities for quiet study and prayer. In the universe of Mind, man is eternally endowed with the constant consciousness of all that is good, joyous, and productive.
Our real, spiritual being is based upon God's law. Divine law gives us the authority to speak fearlessly to error and impersonalize the evils that confront us. As we learn to exercise God's law in Christian Science and see the would-be barriers dissipate in our lives, we can confidently look outward at the political, economic, and social barriers in our community and the world, and help penetrate them with beams of Truth and Love. Christian Science breaks down barriers with the spiritual fact of their nonexistence. It reiterates Christ Jesus' promise to those who have faith, "If ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea: it shall be done." Matt. 21:21
