Article March 25, 1950 Issue

BEHOLD GOD'S GOOD CREATION

CONSTANCE S. SAMMIS

The writer had been pondering the thirty-first verse in the first chapter of Genesis, "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." Suddenly it occurred to her searching thought. Why, this verse is a direct command for me and all men to stand still and behold the beauty and perfection of God's universe. Although some translators have not included the word behold in this verse, the King James Version serves us well by rousing us to behold, to see, the grand harmonies of creation. Are we not to see and rejoice, as does God, our creator, that everything real is harmonious, lovely, undying, and "very good"?

After all, this is the healing process—to behold the present harmony of all that is real and the unreality of the inharmonious, or limited. "Healing is revealing," someone has said, in other words beholding spiritual reality here and now. Defining "earth" on page 585 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy writes, "To material sense, earth is matter; to spiritual sense, it is a compound idea." This definition has always been of inestimable comfort to the writer, for it shows her that in reality we do not leave earth for heaven; we do not "go somewhere" in the ascending of our consciousness. When we stop seeing creation as material, limited, and decaying and learn to behold it scientifically as a spiritual, compound idea, the realities of earth's beauties, undecaying and harmless, are clearly discerned as spiritual, with not a clinging hint of materiality or finiteness.

The writer sometimes sits in her garden and enjoys the loveliness around her. She revels in the view of the near-by mountains, snowcovered in winter, admires the shimmering gray-green leaves of the eucalyptus trees in the sunlight, and marvels at the swift flight of an iridescent hummingbird that lives in the garden. In her early days of Christian Science study she could not always overcome a feeling of sadness that all the beauties and satisfactions of earth must be left behind, as she then thought, for the more ethereal pleasure of heaven.

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