Living Totally in the Spiritual Context
Gertrude Bayless,
C.S.B., of
Centering her message on what she
calls "the spiritual context of living," Gertrude Bayless, C.S.B., of
The lecturer, a practitioner and
teacher of Christian Science, was at one time assistant
to the dean of the
Mrs. Bayless was introduced by James Jordon, a local member of The Mother Church. The following is an abridged text of the lecture:
We're starting on a spiritual adventure today, and we'll be exploring some new "kingdoms of thought" together. I'll be talking about how we progress by finding ourselves in ever larger contexts, about how we can live every aspect of our lives in one infinite context, and about how the understanding of this context heals the world.
The context of God
Our first point is that it's natural for us to progress by finding ourselves in ever larger contexts. We might think of the way a baby progresses naturally by coming into the context of the family circle, and then into the still larger contexts of the nursery school, grammar school, and high school. And as he progresses out into his career, he finds himself in ever larger contexts. We all progress this way, don't we?
A similar thing happened in
religion. One way we progressed in religion was by recognizing ever larger
contexts there, too. The context of God is His kingdom. Do you recall how the
pagan god had a tiny kingdom, confined to one place, like the Sphinx in
New Testament progress
But what about the progress brought by the New
Testament? Christianity expanded our concept of the
Remember how Jesus expanded our concept of the kingdom of God by his parables . . . the leaven expanding till the whole was leavened, the tiny mustard seed growing until it became a bush, the talents doubling?
And where did Jesus send that small band of
followers on the last day he was with us? "Go ye into all
the world, and preach the gospel to every creature," he told them
(Mark
So Christianity expanded our concept of the
Concept advances inward
But Christianity also expanded our
concept of the
No dividing up love
So here in the New Testament, the
Since God is Love and God is All, all love must be God's love. God's love is the only kind there is. God cannot be divided up, so love can't be divided up.
Fighting comes from the notion that each person has his own box of love. He can open it up and give out love, or clamp down the lid and give out nothing at all. When a person clamps down the lid and gives out nothing at all, we call it coldness or hate. But it's really nothing at all. Hate's not a thing, it's simply the absence of love. An absence of something is nothing. So don't be afraid of it or react to it. Because hate is really an absence, never a presence.
The natural way
How natural it is to carry out Jesus' rule about loving our enemy! God loves everybody. You may be saying, "Only God could love the person I'm thinking of." But God does love everybody, without one angry feeling. So we don't have to manufacture love. All we have to do is express God's love. This is the natural way to love. I've seen marriage fights healed, parent and child relations harmonized, bitter in-law quarrels settled, through the practice of God's love this way.
Practicing God's love makes all our relations unselfish, sweet, and vigorous. If this practice of God's love is all you take home with you this afternoon, the whole lecture will be worthwhile.
So far, we've talked about how our concept of the
Breakthrough in Christianity
Christianity today is witnessing a
consummate breakthrough: the recognition in Christian Science that this
What's the point of exploring this context, this
environment? Our spiritual environment, the
What makes the needle of a compass point north? It doesn't have anything to do with what the compass is made of, how big or how small it is, or even how we hold it, does it? The needle always points north because of a larger context - the environment of Earth's magnetic field. That environment directs the compass - we might say it gives the compass its special worth and value and usefulness. Separated from that context, that magnetic field, the compass would be worthless. But that can't ever happen.
'In him we live, . . .'
We can think of man in a similar way. His
environment is the
Now sociology says that a human being is largely shaped by his material environment - that is, by the way his family and community treat him when he's growing up. For example, if somebody else in his family gets more attention than he does, he may grow up feeling that others are worth more than he is and his individuality is suppressed. If he lives in a home where TV commercials surround him with sleek men and women speaking reverently of their personal gratification, he may grow up feeling that self-fulfillment is about all that counts.
Peter's impetuosity transformed
And he will be imprisoned in this
limited, narrow context until he breaks free from the environmental
conditioning by finding himself in the
That's what happened to Peter,
Jesus' disciple. He probably grew up in an environment where he was rewarded
for being first in everything. He was impetuous, remember? But Peter's
impetuosity was corrected and transformed when he found himself in the
Probably each of us longs to break free, the way Peter did, from some conditioning, some personality trait, that holds us in a kind of mental prison. Maybe it's a bad temper we think we can't control, or maybe we're afraid to stand up for what's right, or maybe we procrastinate, put things off. But none of these things are true about the man that God creates and loves.
Spontaneous expressions
The absolute, spiritual truth about environmental conditioning, as taught in Christian Science, shows us how to progress out of the faulty context of humanly circumscribed thinking into the infinite context of God's ideas.
The two main theses in environmental conditioning are, first, that the trait starts in early childhood, and second, that it becomes a habit. But the absolute truth is that God makes all the conditions for man. God is our Mother and Father, and the true Mother and Father of everyone we know. Our only real family is the family of God. In God's family there's no sibling rivalry; brothers and sisters don't have to compete, for God's love is unlimited.
Women and men in God's kingdom cannot be conditioned with bad habits. God's children are spontaneous expressions, and so cannot be automated or habituated. In the infinite context of God's kingdom, where we really live, our development is good, healthy, and progressive.
When we realize these powerful, spiritual forces of truth clearly enough, they contradict and demolish the false conditioning.
Seeing life whole
But sometimes when we look at our
lives and see how our experience seems to be broken into separate parts - how
we have a family life, a career life, a social life, a church life, and a
public life linked to world events - we're tempted to think, "Christian
Science says there's only one real environment, the
The Discoverer and Founder of
Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, asserts that there is such a context, so
infinite that there can't be any other. Let me read what she says in her
textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "God
is the infinite and infinity never began, will never end, and includes nothing
unlike God" (p. 249), Doesn't that give us the
idea of one context - the infinity of God, the all-inclusive
Love's forces
all-embracing
This brings us to another point:
that the ultimate context, the only context there really is, is this spiritual
What is our spiritual environment,
this
Healing seen as
correction
What is Christian Science healing? One way to look at it is as a correction. In daily healing we let the Christ, the true idea of God, correct everything we do. Christ expresses the power of God which Jesus manifested, and that's why we call him our Saviour. He corrects and saves us from all error. This correction of our thought, feeling, and action is always needed. Even the best human thought has to be corrected.
Let's consider our compass again. As we know, the needle on the compass points north, to the magnetic north pole. But that's fourteen hundred miles from true north. True north is in the direction of the geographic pole, not the magnetic pole. And unless we correct the error in our compass we can go off course as much as a quarter mile for every mile we hike. We'd never get to our destination that way.
Something to sight on
Fortunately, there's something we can sight on to correct the error in our compass. What is it? The North Star, Polaris, of course. You see, the North Star aligns with true north, so by taking a bearing on the North Star, we can correct the error in our compass and head exactly for our destination.
In hiking, then, we look to the North Star for true north, to correct the error in our compass. And similarly, in healing, we look to the Christ, the true idea of God, to correct the errors in our thinking; and our thinking affects our whole experience, including our bodily health. The Christ corrects such errors as the environmental conditioning we've been talking about, as well as hurt feelings, sickness, and sin.
The Christ always with us
. . .
The Christ is always with us, as
near to us as our thought, to show us what is actually going on right here in
the spiritual
How? There's a Christly way of doing everything constructive. The Christ erases every error and replaces it with the understanding of God's goodness. Take jogging, for example. Maybe we're jogging for the wrong reason. Maybe we're doing it to improve our bodies. But the Christly way to jog is to do it in order to express God's marvelous nature in freedom of movement, and in endurance.
Mrs. Eddy tells us about Christ here in Science and Health: "Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness" (p. 332).
. . . showing
the way
So Christ is the spiritual truth and life that Jesus manifested so fully and completely. Jesus showed us how to live our lives, and the Christ continues to speak to human thought today - and for all time - showing us what is actually going on right here in the spiritual kingdom of God. We experience healing in Christian Science by listening to the Christ and letting the Christ, the true idea of God, correct everything we think and do.
I know a woman who really works at
living totally in the spiritual context. She was traveling in
She leaned her head against the
cool and prayed. And the first thought that came to her was a reassurance she
had heard as a child: "God goes with you wherever you go." Then
perhaps the Christ corrected her thought, because a verse from the Bible came
to her: ". . . whither shall I flee from thy presence?" (Ps. 139:7).
And it slowly dawned on her that God had not followed her to
Thinking and feeling
united
The woman was thinking clearer, but still feeling awful. Gradually she began to feel the presence of God that she had been thinking about. Thinking and feeling united and her body responded. Within a few minutes, and without any symptoms, she was well enough to go back to bed and sleep for the rest of the night. She had proved that she lived totally in the presence of God.
But how is it that God, Spirit, who knows nothing about the human body, healed a bacterial invasion of the body? Let's go back to the compass again. The North Star knows nothing about our compass, but its true north corrects the compass. Similarly, God, Spirit, knows nothing about the human body, but His true idea, the Christ, corrects our thought -and therefore our body - and heals us.
Once in a while the question comes up: Doesn't Christian Science teach people to deny their bodies, to deny stomachs, kidneys, and even human reason? No. Like the compass, human reason and the body are useful, and we want to keep them in good working order. Nobody's going to throw his compass away when he's hiking through a trackless forest. But we do have to correct the compass if we expect to get to our destination. Human reason and the body make mistakes, too, and we call these mistakes sin and sickness. But the Christ is always present to correct these mistakes and heal us.
A working environment
Another point I'd like to consider
today is that the
To me, as one individual, world
problems have sometimes seemed almost overwhelming. And yet in my own community
work, I have found Mary Baker Eddy's experiences encouraging. Her
accomplishments were worldwide, and her interests ranged from supervising her
rural estate in
One pressing issue in her day was
Single frame of reference
But her understanding of God and
His Christ helped Mrs. Eddy to break through this confusion and reach
conclusions on
Mrs. Eddy didn't think of her
religion in one context and world problems in another. She reached her
conclusions on
A key distinction drawn
Mrs. Eddy thought
The theory of evolution didn't cause Mrs. Eddy to lose one whit of faith in the Bible or in her understanding of spiritual creation - and that may be a helpful point for us to consider. For many thinking people today, the great despair seems to be how to reconcile impressive scientific discoveries with what the Bible says about life and creation. But isn't the Bible a history of spiritual development, a record of living in the infinite context of God that we’ve been talking about.
Forces aren't 'out there'
From this vantage point in the infinite context, we can make our own spiritual breakthroughs. We can break through public confusion today and get a more spiritual idea of economics to help heal inflation, or a more spiritual idea of the “big bang” theory in astronomy, which is sending astronomers back to study the book of Genesis in the Bible.
In our spiritual adventure together, today, we're now arriving at our
destination. And where do we find ourselves? In the infinite
context of the
Haven't we discovered today that we're no longer reaching out for the
powerful forces of God - that we have them already,
where we are, in the
In His presence
Stretching past
the North Star - bigger than what we'll discover the material universe to be -
is this infinite
As we leave this hall, we're not
walking out into another sphere. The
© 1980 The Christian Science Board of Directors