Article January 9, 1932 Issue

The Light of Gratitude

NELLIE B. MACE

Our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, has thrown a beautiful illumination upon the nature of gratitude where she says (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 164), "What is gratitude but a powerful camera obscura, a thing focusing light where love, memory, and all within the human heart is present to manifest light." This metaphor is seen to be strikingly significant when it is considered how a camera obscura, by means of a properly arranged chamber and lens, provides for the clear imaging of an object upon a surface where the light is focused. Students of Christian Science are coming more clearly to understand that gratitude is as a sacred mental chamber of love and remembrance, where, through the lens of spiritual recognition, the light of good is focused upon consciousness which is sensitive to the truth, that is, receptive of good.

This quality enables one to perceive the present actuality of God's love, which is being continuously made manifest to men in innumerable and bountiful ways. Becoming conscious of the ever present reflection of God, good, necessarily involves an excluding from thought of the mortal opinions, beliefs, fears, and pangs opposed to the longed-for harmony. The mental effort to hold all one's thinking to the harmonious and the eternal minimizes all phases of erring belief until, obliterated in its own nothingness, error ceases to seem discernible, is inexistent to spiritualized thinking, and good alone is acknowledged and realized; and thus gratitude, the "powerful camera obscura," is found to be healingly "focusing light" where loving thought is ready "to manifest light."

This holding of thought to the real, while at the same time excluding from it all phases of erring material belief, is a true offering to God, such as was referred to by the Psalmist when he said, "I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord." It is noteworthy that, having taken this view of sacrifice to God through thanksgiving for good, the Psalmist closed his Psalm with the exhortation, "Praise ye the Lord." Adoring thankfulness, such as is expressed in these words, is the only attitude possible to through which, through glad and humble remembrance of His ceaseless mercies and blessings, advances toward ever clearer vision of the allness of God and of His love for His manifold reflections. As many have found in applying the teachings of Christian Science, the pure gratitude which can devoutly and understandingly praise God "for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men," truly aids in the healing of disease and in the harmonizing of discordant conditions in the affairs of daily living.

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