Article October 24, 1936 Issue

Joy

D. MURIEL SAVARY

Joy is often declared to be dependent on the prevailing conditions in one's human experience. If our lot appears to be difficult, our task toilsome, the burden of prolonged sickness or lack continually before us, it may seem easy to allow depression, anxiety, fear, and a host of other joyless and belittling thoughts to enter our consciousness and settle down there. Yet, in those moments when we have allowed the sunlight of some happy thought about a friend, a kindly act, or a loving work to enter, it has for a time dispelled the gloom, and we have found even our surroundings illumined with a warmth and happiness before unseen.

Christian Science, understood and practiced, fills our lives with joy. It makes happiness permanent, dependent on God—not occasional and fleeting, dependent on matter. It gives us the true concept of man as spiritual and free, no longer subject to material conditions of living, but subject only to the life-giving law of God, of good. This law frees from the bondage of sickness, lack, failure, or sorrow by showing us the unreal nature of this bondage.

Thus to the thought lifted in joy and gratitude to God for His glorious, perfect creation, of which man, made in the image and likeness of God, is the highest idea, sickness begins to assume a different aspect. It is seen to be but a belief in matter, claiming precedence over God, a belief occasioned through ignorance of God and of man's true, spiritual nature. And when the truth is realized, sickness disappears as naturally as mist before the morning sunshine. However heavy the mist, the warm sunshine causes it to evaporate. So does the belief in sickness melt away before a joyful acknowledgment of the allness of God, which pierces the mystification of mortal thought and dispels the belief and manifestation of disease.

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