Article May 21, 1921 Issue

Growth

KATHRINE JONES

IN order to grow, we must steady our purpose. Desire for spiritual growth must be guarded and nurtured until it loses all vacillation and is characterized by steadiness and reliability. So long as there is a motive not in accord with Christ, Truth, we cannot say that our desires are wholly pure, or that our purpose is wholly one. It may not seem an easy thing to have one's purpose always in line with the highest. One's intention can, however, be trained and corrected and purified and loved, until it begins instinctively to unite itself with good. After a certain stage of development is reached, it is not so much the avowedly evil influences that one must guard against as it is one's absorption in material things generally. A home, a business, a profession, a person, are normal interests in human life, in so far as they are given only their rightful proportion of attention, but the spiritual worker must be ever alert to keep his daily activities and interests alive to his main purpose, that of understanding God.

A simple aid to growth is to live in the present. We seem to be breathlessly pushing on to a future time that never comes, with our gaze fixed so far ahead that we fail to see the opportunities of to-day. We may say to ourselves, "Nothing important will happen to-day." But how do we know but that it is on this day that we shall specially need to pray to be delivered from temptation, or but that it is on this day that a special blessing will unfold to us? If we can realize that to-day is just as important as any in our lives, that divine Love is even now unfolding His loving plan for us, we can begin at once to realize the heavenly peace and joy we have heretofore considered should be ours only in some elusive future time. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health (Pref., p. vii), "To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings."

To have a wholly right idea of the present we must learn to think metaphysically of the past also. In order to be perfectly free we must learn that whatever illness we may have been healed of was always false belief, and had no more divine cause at the time when we thought we had it than it has now. To illustrate: Suppose that at one time a person suffered from a fear of a specter, and that now the apparition troubles him no more. Well, if he still thinks it was ever real he is liable to have that specter bother him again, but if he realizes that it was always wholly unreal, even when the fear and suffering seemed most intense, he cannot possibly suffer from it again. The past is healed in regard to it, and he shows that he is healed by rejoicing in the light and by no longer insisting on the terrible nature of the specter. He begins to see that growth in Christian Science involves the understanding of the spiritual man's unbroken, continuous, absolute perfection.

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