Article February 28, 1953 Issue

AWAKE TO THE GENUINENESS OF BEING

FREDA SPERLING BENSON

Genuine prayer is essentially the awakening to that which already is. By letting God be All-in-all to us we see that creation is permanently spiritual and perfect. Through prayer we demonstrate genuine consciousness instead of choosing its counterfeit. We let the light of Truth dispel the darkness of ignorance. We begin to find in our mental premises the strong, harmoniously active "new man," of whom Paul spoke, where we thought the weak, helpless "old man" used to be. The effect of true prayer is to bring about a change of thought, or healing, but this change comes from the realization that in the realm of spiritual being there is nothing to be changed, for there is no sickness or materiality in God's kingdom. Since God, the all-harmonious, infinite One, could not create discord, we know that all that is being changed is our own misconception of being.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Christian Healing" (p. 9): "Life in matter is a dream: sin, sickness, and death are this dream. Life is Spirit; and when we waken from the dream of life in matter, we shall learn this grand truth of being." The dream existence, or supposition that life and intelligence are material, seems to hem us in. We awaken from this illusion by turning away from imitative mortal thinking to the one Mind, to the realization that this Mind is All, the only Mind, our Mind.

When Jesus prayed he gratefully acknowledged the presence of infinite Soul, God, where dream and dreamer seemed to be. When confronted with an infirm man at the pool of Bethesda he saw the need of arousing thought which was absorbed in the evidence of the five material senses to the ever-presence of Spirit. This awakening resulted in healing. Jesus knew that the complicated predicaments of mortals can never be solved by their staying in the dream.

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