Article May 3, 1941 Issue

"As a watered garden"

MONITA CALDWELL GIESECKE

A WATERED garden is a lovely thing. We find in it beauty, fragrance, and refreshment. The gardener knows that the secret of a lovely garden is in careful cultivation. From this fact can be gained an inspiring lesson by the student of Christian Science. For each has a garden to cultivate, a mental garden which needs careful tending and watching to keep it free from the weeds of error that would clutter it and choke the new growth which has sprung up from the seeds of Truth.

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, has written (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 160), "To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relation with the divine, the spiritual, and the eternal, is to individualize infinite power; and this is Christian Science." This statement shows us how important it is to keep our consciousness pure. Our mental garden must be kept clean and free from any weeds of error that would hinder our growth or prevent us from keeping our consciousness "in constant relation with the divine." It was through his conscious unity with God that Christ Jesus healed the sick and the sinning. The conscious oneness of God and man is the Mind "which was also in Christ Jesus." Darkness is turned into light, and sorrow into joy, when we let this Mind be in us. As Christian Scientists, we desire above all else to attain progressively this state of spiritual consciousness.

A student once worked diligently for several hours weeding her vegetable garden. She finished her task with that satisfying sense of work well done, only to find after a few days that the weeds were sprouting anew. On examination, she found the roots to be very deep and strong. It was a some-what tedious task, probing deep into the earth to exterminate the roots; but as she worked, she saw that this experience was very much like her efforts to overcome self-love, self-justification, self-pity, and that the reason why these errors reappeared in her mental garden was that their roots had not been eradicated. As she probed deeper mentally, she saw that the root which needed to be cast out was belief in the reality of a material selfhood apart from God.

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