Article August 29, 1931 Issue

Spiritual Enlightenment

ETHEL WAINRIGHT

A beginner in Christian Science, seeking healing, does not always readily accept the fact that his real need is to know more of God and of his own relation to God; to gain that spiritual understanding with which he can rectify what to him seems to be a purely material, financial, or physical difficulty. From a study of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, however, he soon learns of the spiritual law of God governing all real being. In the experience of others he may see the beneficial result of the operation of this law through the understanding of prayer. Then he may ask himself, Do I really know how to pray? Since the day when the disciples, realizing the difference between their Master's consciousness of God and their own, said, "Lord, teach us to pray," humanity has been reaching out for a better understanding of prayer.

It is significant that the first chapter of the Christian Science textbook should deal with the subject of prayer. Among many striking statements in this chapter one simple one has perhaps stood out to most seekers after Truth (p. 1): "Desire is prayer." So simple is this partial explanation of the profound question, What is prayer? that while we marvel that we have not seen it before, we set to work to discover whither our desires are directed and to improve them. Thus we begin the journey Spiritward.

We may find that most of our desires are material, tending towards a more peaceful living in matter. But as we study further, we begin to see that man's real life is not in matter, and that he actually lives in God. Then we realize that our troubles are not so much concerned with what we are in truth as with what we have been mistakenly believing we are. Whereas unenlightened prayer may seek to change God's laws for man and the universe, the prayer of spiritual understanding corrects the errors within our own consciousness, and so reaches the root of the trouble in order to exterminate it.

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