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Truth speaks all languages

Whatever our background, wherever we are, and whatever the circumstances, the healing message of Christ speaks to all of us – in a way we can each understand.

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Alexander Spatari/Moment/Getty Images
  • By Susan Stark

Christian Science Perspective audio edition
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What would you have thought if you had come all the way from Libya to Jerusalem for a Jewish harvest celebration and heard a new message in your own language from people who didn’t know that language? And you weren’t alone. The person from what’s now Turkey heard the message in his own language. And visitors from Rome heard it in theirs.

That’s what happened a scant 50 days after Christ Jesus’ resurrection and less than two weeks after his ascension. What took place was extraordinary. On what Christians know as the Day of Pentecost, a mighty sound of wind was followed by “tongues like as of fire” resting on the Christian apostles, “and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost” when they spoke to the surrounding crowd (see Acts, chap. 2). They spoke in different languages, and the listeners received a message of hope and salvation – each in his own language.

What those listeners heard that day, many for the first time, was that Christ Jesus overcame death and then ascended. In the days and years that followed, many would go on to discover that Jesus’ message of Christ, or Truth, really was available for everyone, everywhere, to understand and practice, reforming and healing lives.

Today, no matter where we find ourselves – mentally or geographically – Truth speaks to us. We can count on it to reveal our true, spiritual nature and heal us. We are free to accept our own true self as created by God, divine Spirit, and find our potential for good as healers for ourselves and others.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, recognized that Christ speaks to each individual without regard to race or creed or country. Her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures identifies Christ in this way: “Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness” (p. 332).

You can recognize Christ, or the spirit of Truth, in every inspired good, honest, intelligent thought you have. The divine voice can come as the conviction that goodness has more power than evil if we are in a mentally dark place or difficult circumstance. It can be the confirmation that you are well and whole because God has made you so.

Plenty of thoughts that aren’t from God come to us. A downward-pulling emotion or even a sick feeling isn’t a message from Truth. Christian Science helpfully categorizes such communications as mortal error, the opposite of Truth, and not from God. Fearful thoughts can be silenced by every spiritual intuition that tells us of God’s power, presence, and guidance.

Routine human thinking – limiting habits of thought – would argue that divine communication is confined to a certain time in world history, or in one’s own life. Or say to us that it is possible for others to experience their unity with God, good, as His expression, but not for us. But each prayer that affirms that we are all the children of one God, the loving, all-powerful Spirit, destroys some resistance to Truth.

People embraced the Christ message at Pentecost, and this receptivity to Truth continues into the present. We are an important part of it as we listen to the spiritual intuitions from Truth that come to us minute by minute and let them transform how we think and act.

A testimony of healing originally in the online Russian edition of The Herald of Christian Science shows in a quiet way the reach of Truth to the receptive heart. A woman from the country of Georgia read a pamphlet on Christian Science in Russian and started to see healing from what she was learning from it. Her part-time teaching job became full-time, and she was named best teacher in her school. When she received a pay raise, the extra money she earned allowed her to help family and friends. She was healed of back pain. The truths she was learning from Science and Health were her daily support when she moved to a new country, and she went on to be healed of recurring menstrual cramps. She said, “Christian Science showed me how to listen to God, and it is still showing me the way to live. God is always with us!”

As we look out on our world, we too can bear witness to the Truth as it speaks to each and every one, in a way that is meant just for them.

Adapted from an editorial published in the May 2022 issue of The Christian Science Journal.

For a regularly updated collection of insights relating to the war in Ukraine from the Christian Science Perspective column, click here.

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Mark Sappenfield
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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”:

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