Article September 16, 1950 Issue

BE YOURSELF

VIOLET MAY BRENZIKOFER

SOMETIMES we hear the remark, "Be yourself." This is meant to remind someone to be natural, free from artificiality. All admire this naturalness. Many are yearning and striving to attain it, but fail because they believe that they are incomplete, lacking in qualities essential to attain happiness and success. They do not know how to overcome their deficiencies, because they are not acquainted with the truth concerning themselves and believe evil to be real and often more powerful than good.

Here Christian Science comes to their rescue, for it teaches that man is perfect and complete, made in God's image and likeness, and that good alone is real and powerful. "Be yourself" becomes thus a helpful, even a challenging admonition. To be oneself, in its true sense, it is necessary to understand something of God and of man's relationship to Him. In Christian Science we learn that God is the ever-loving Father-Mother and man His perfect child, spiritual and complete, expressing joy, health, strength, and beauty. God eternally maintains man in this perfection and completeness. Man possesses, therefore, at all times all that is needed for his happiness and progress.

Jesus was constantly being himself because he understood his true selfhood, or Christ, to be the expression of God's nature. Thus he could declare (John 10:30), "I and my Father are one," and this knowledge of his oneness with his Father gave him dominion over all material conditions. He was constantly aware of his own natural, innate goodness and purity, and this awareness of his true selfhood enabled him to realize the true selfhood of his fellow men and thus to overcome their beliefs in sin, sickness, and death.

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