I was startled awake at 3 a.m. by a loud screeching sound.
After hurtling out of bed and doing some sleuthing, I discovered one of my son’s old electronic toys intermittently malfunctioning in the closet. After trying to open the battery case for a while, I realized the screw had been stripped, so, short of throwing the toy in the woods or bundling it in a blanket until morning, I was liable to hear it go off again.
But then I realized that it was the kind of device that records the sounds of what the user was doing. My son had been playing with his friends, and the last recorded sound bite was them screeching into the microphone. That’s when I got the idea: Replace the noise with a better message … Aha. So I pressed a button and recorded several seconds of peaceful silence. Done.
As I went back to bed I suddenly realized that this whole incident served as a useful spiritual illustration.
How many times a day do worries pour in about our work, our family, or maybe we’re just disturbed about something in the news? We may be tempted to just “shut off” the concerns and get back to our tasks, ignoring the greater need.
But that’s not enough. In order to experience progress and healing that embraces all, we need to replace disturbing messages with actual spiritual, peaceful truth. Above all, we have to acknowledge divine control. After considering this idea for several minutes, I noticed that some nausea I had been experiencing (due to hurtling out of bed in fear) dissolved. I soon fell back asleep.
How interesting that Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Monitor, didn’t just want to curtail the noise of aggressive and often morally questionable journalism. Her news organization aims to find the kernel of dignity and truth that lies beneath the surface of difficult global situations and amplify this message, so that Truth, another name for God, can be more clearly seen and felt.
Although the Monitor’s reporting of news is non-religious, at the heart of each issue is the Golden Rule that Jesus taught: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (see Matthew 7:12). The Monitor’s object is “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” To take this a step further, its mission is “to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent” (Mary Baker Eddy, “The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” p. 353). In her discovery of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy wrote the Christian Science textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” The book emphasizes and explores this Science, which reveals the spiritual and whole nature of each man, woman, and child.
In one passage we read, “In Science man is the offspring of Spirit. The beautiful, good, and pure constitute his ancestry. His origin is not, like that of mortals, in brute instinct, nor does he pass through material conditions prior to reaching intelligence. Spirit is his primitive and ultimate source of being; God is his Father, and Life is the law of his being” (p. 63).
A maturing understanding of this message, this spiritual fact, helps us see that we can solve problems by praying and listening to God from that basis. We can also act on the clear divine direction that comes from this listening. It’s all about seeing that, when we identify with spiritual truth instead of the screeching of hopelessness, things come into focus. We tend to see a better way.
So how do we put this into practice? Step by step and thought by thought – with sincerity and trust that, when we decide to replace harmful messages with better ones, we’re not just pressing “snooze” on an annoying issue and letting someone else deal with it. We’re refusing, with grace and grit, to let anything get in the way of productive, health-giving, and substantial God-derived messages. And our practice of this fulfills a great need in the world.
