Article May 6, 1922 Issue

Springtide Consciousness

M. ETHEL WHITCOMB

Spring, a great teacher, is here, speaking to us through bud and blossom, through perfume and freshness, through song and sunshine, of the eternal springtide of Love divine. Have we ears to hear? Are we responding to its call? Is every thought awaking to freshness of endeavor, unfolding in newness of purpose, exhaling the fragrance of unselfed love, and joining in songs of thanksgiving? "With each returning year," our Leader tells us in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 330), "higher joys, holier aims, a purer peace and diviner energy, should freshen the fragrance of being." With this awakened sense of life, all belief in age and depression flees away.

Spring comes not only with messages for the poet and artist, but with a vital, living call for those who are burdened, weary, discouraged, or weighted with pain. And Christian Science interprets the call. This I learned in an hour of need. The winter had been crowded with work—both day and night; and with spring it seemed to my clouded sense that I must take time alone with God for prayer and study, or a collapse would surely come. At the very moment when this suggestion was pressing upon my thought for acceptance, added work was given me to do that demanded every moment. I knew that a spiritual idea, a message from God, if I could but hear it, would lift me above the mist. My heart turned to divine Love, prayerfully asking, What is my need? From the infinite source of Mind came the answer: Newness, springtide consciousness! How arousing! How awakening! So unlike anything that I had heard from Love before! So different from the quiet sense that had seemed to be my need! I began at once a search, that proved so joyous, for all that was written in the Bible and in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" on this rare subject of newness. My heart was thrilled by a diviner impulse as I read from Romans, "We also should walk in newness of life;" and Mrs. Eddy tells us in Science and Health (p. 249), "Let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, bringing us into newness of life." As I pondered how to obey, and to walk in "newness of life," a fuller sense of the beauty and bounty of infinite, ever present Life flooded my thought; and Love whispered: His compassions fail not; they are new every morning. All that divine Mind imparts to creation,—vitality, energy, health, vigor, inspiration,—new, forever new!

At the moment of this enlightened sense the telephone rang. Then came the words of Scripture, "We should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter." Suddenly I saw that my thought had been slipping into a rut, and had been accepting the belief of being humanly busy ("the oldness of the letter"), instead of gaining daily new views of God, of man, of life, of love, and taking this fresh joy of heaven into my work. Now everything was changed. I took a stand for springtide consciousness, and ran to the telephone to "serve in newness of spirit." Every one who came for help that day was greeted in newness of love and joy. My church work took on a new glow; each act was done as if for the first time. The fragrance and tenderness of divine Love illumined my being, and bathed each duty in sunrise light. Every prayer was winged with new expectation; and I sang "unto the Lord a new song" of thanksgiving. When night came, I found that the shadows of weariness and overwork were swallowed up in the radiance of Truth,—all because I had walked for one day in "newness of life." I now understood more fully the command, "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." Thought conformed to this world's thinking grows weak, deadened, dreary, and earth-bound; but, renewed by holier aims, enlightened by conscious unity with God, it transforms body and affairs.

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