The naturalness of harmony

Too often we tend to believe that disorder is as natural a part of life as harmony. Appearances certainly support this conclusion. Conflicts between nations continue. Millions live in poverty. Crime and disease are widespread.

But are these conditions natural, inescapable? Human knowledge may insist they are. Yet a spiritual perception of the Bible's message leads us to a different conclusion.

For example, don't Christ Jesus' words ''Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect''n1 imply that perfection is not only attainable but is the normal state of man as God created him? Each of the Way-shower's healing works brought to light something of the order of God's creation described in Genesis 1.

n1 Matthew 5:48

Jesus defied appearances. What the physical senses label ''reality'' he proved fleeting and insubstantial. What seemed to be fixed facts - blindness, deafness, palsy, a withered hand, death itself - he exposed as illusory, the temporal product of unenlightened human thought. The Master's career illustrated the eternal truth that God is Love and that Love neither creates nor permits evil.

We can begin proving this truth now. The task may seem formidable in view of individual struggles and the complex issues facing mankind. But must we be hypnotized by the appearance of evil and wrestle with it as a stubborn fact? If there is one all-powerful God, then evil is not a stubborn fact but a lie, neither natural nor inescapable.

Exposing the lie may take persistence, a willingness to take a stand for that which is invisible to the physical senses, for the unopposable goodness of God's spiritual creation. But following Jesus' example in thought and life, we can do this and begin to prove for ourselves, even if in small ways, the naturalness of harmony.

A few years ago I was ill with diarrhea. Disorder seemed very real. But I had learned through Christian Science that the supposed tangibility of discord is a deception; that what seems substantial to the physical senses can be proved evanescent through a perception of the uninterrupted harmony of man's actual, God-created being.

The need in this case, then, was to bring to light through the power of God the truth of my identity as perpetually well and controlled exclusively by God. I had to see that I wasn't actually a mortal trapped in matter, the slave of physical conditions, but the spiritual image of my creator, with every function under His perfect jurisdiction. I asked a Christian Science practitioner to help me in this effort through prayer.

Within a day after the practitioner was contacted the situation had improved considerably, and in another two days the healing was complete. We didn't treat the body with drugs or with any other material remedy. Instead we realized, in the depths of prayer, that I was actually spiritual, perfect, expressing the nature of my creator; that harmony, not disease, was the present fact of my being. Our realization of this truth superseded and destroyed the false evidence called disease.

The power of God to heal can be applied to the full range of human challenges. It can even be applied to global problems. Our prayers in behalf of the world do have a healing effect - even if we can't always see this, and even if it seems mountains must be moved - because God is omnipresent, and His law is supreme.

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes: ''If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of God , or Truth, and doubts the supremacy of good, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil and doubt them, and no longer think it natural to love sin and unnatural to forsake it, - no longer imagine evil to be ever-present and good absent? Truth should not seem so surprising and unnatural as error, and error should not seem so real as truth.''

n2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 130-131. As we're willing to admit that life is infinitely more and better than what the physical senses suggest, and that God is indeed God, the only power and totally good, we'll prove in our own lives the naturalness of harmony. Daily Bible Verse I Know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil. Jeremiah 29:11