Some years ago, I got the idea to sit quietly by a window before dawn and write down when and how light first appeared outside our home. Each morning I took care to notice the precise instant a tree took form, the sky blushed pink, the iris turned lavender. I came to recognize how gently and inevitably the features of the landscape assumed their true color and shape. As dawn unveiled them, I witnessed them not as old and dark, but as vibrant, finished, and beautiful.
Through studying Christian Science, I’ve seen something similar – but much more profound. I’ve learned how dedicated watching for spiritual light makes all things new. I’ve seen how an understanding of God, the source of all light, lifts shadowy material beliefs about me and others, revealing radiant, pure, spiritual views. The Bible identifies this spiritual light as the Christ – the Truth that Jesus embodied and reflected, by which one’s identity and existence are illuminated as limitless, safe, loved, and purely good.
The Christ calls us to look beyond the perception of human existence as a bleak, destined-for-death experience and recognize that we actually live in a larger sense of life – divine, infinite Life, or God, which is always lovely, fresh, continuous, and new.
Whenever it seems as though “the world is sad with dreams of death” (Elizabeth C. Adams, “Christian Science Hymnal,” No. 188), it’s an especially important time to take this deeply spiritual Christ-illumined watching to heart. And the teachings of Christian Science are foundational to this work.
Why? To put it simply, the Science of Christ reveals unequivocally that God is all good – only good. Evil is therefore no part of God’s creation, and each one of us, as the child of God, is solely the expression of good. That means disease, contagion, lost opportunity, depression, lack, etc., are not truly part of us. They are dark, fear-fraught beliefs that we can prayerfully confront and overcome with the law and light of divine Science. As the discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, puts it, “Sickness, sin and death are the vague realities of human conclusions” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” pp. 297-298).
Mrs. Eddy also explains, “Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are waking dream-shadows, dark images of mortal thought, which flee before the light of Truth” (Science and Health, p. 418). It takes dedication and courage to deny the reality of dark, matter-based “images of mortal thought” and affirm the continuity and presence of spiritual Truth, especially when those forms look scowling and scary.
It takes vigilance, yes. But it’s invigorating work when we know it’s the Christ doing the illuminating. And it brings physical healing, today as in Jesus’ day.
Here’s a modest example. At one point, dazed by media reports and caught up in the sorrows of the world, I was feeling ill and feverish. I prayed, but I hadn’t surrendered to the all-embracing light of Love, God.
So I mentally got down on my knees next to what seemed like a very dark thought-window and watched for the Christ light to arrive. I read that week’s Bible Lesson from the “Christian Science Quarterly.” I got very still. I listened. I watched. As I did, radiant Christ light came pouring into my thought.
That Bible Lesson was so full of strong, unequivocal, and comforting spiritual ideas that by the time I finished, it was absolutely clear to me that God, Love, is the only power, and that sickness, sadness, hate, and even death are only supposed manifestations of a flawed, material collective imagination – “the vague realities of human conclusions.”
I wasn’t voicing and illuminating Truth; Truth was voicing me, illuminating me – and I no longer felt separate from it. Even the word “God,” which before this experience had begun to feel stale and overused to me, started to ring true beyond any human concept. It was a new awareness of my oneness with an all-good God. It lifted the sadness, and before long the symptoms of illness were completely gone. I was already perfect, safe, and new. The Christ light simply showed me so.
Every moment, this pure spiritual light is pouring over our precious, beautiful world. The one and only good, God, is dawning right now where it has always dawned – in consciousness.
We can recognize and feel this for ourselves and for everyone and step out into the full light of Christ that reveals us as complete, perfect, safe, and forever new.
Adapted from an article published in the Dec. 28, 2020, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
