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On ideals

When we let the light of Christ, rather than matter-based concepts, shape our goals and actions, “restored lives and healed hearts” are a natural result, as this poem puts it.

  • By Elizabeth Mata

Christian Science Perspective audio edition
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What happens when we idolize
others (if I could only be like them)
or clench some guarded scheme,
and then it all comes crashing into
dark waters of an unmapped sea?

Then what?

Better to lose fugitive ideals
dangling from shaky chance and
human opinion – “what ifs”
that shift and slant and hang
by a thread – that don’t come
from God, who is all good.

Take in through prayer the full
outpouring of the Christ ideal
– God’s gift of unfailing perfection,
profuse in goodness, holiness, beauty –
that comforts and delights like the
streaming sunlight warms the Earth.

In quiet oneness with God, we take
long, adoring looks at this ideal that
lights up in us as our spiritual selfhood
– unscathed by material concepts.
As yielding children of God, Soul,
our right desires merge genuinely,
freely, with its divine presence.

This divine model demands a steady
eye to sculpt thought from its blessedness.
Then restored lives and healed hearts
are no surprise.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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