Article November 17, 1956 Issue

THE PILGRIM'S JOURNEY

JOYCE CHANDLER PARKS

Are you a pilgrim, a wanderer searching for freedom, happiness, peace? Today many wander up and down the earth in search of something stable. Some of these people, through oppression and war, have been uprooted from their native lands. They are placed in camps, or they wander homeless, hungry, and disheartened. Like the children of Israel in ancient days, they seek freedom from tyranny, although they also desire food, clothing, and shelter. But the true search today, as then, is really the search for God.

To find God and to learn of His unchanging law of Love bring the joy of which the Psalmist wrote (Ps. 119:54), "Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage." The Pilgrim Fathers, who crossed the ocean and helped to found a new country, sought freedom to worship God as their conscience dictated. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered the land of spiritual freedom and divine law, wrote of them in "Pulpit and Press" (p. 10): "On shores of solitude, at Plymouth Rock, they planted a nation's heart, —the rights of conscience, imperishable glory. No dream of avarice or ambition broke their exalted purpose, theirs was the wish to reign in hope's reality—the realm of Love."

In this realm of Love we find God, for the Bible tells us that "God is love" (I John 4:8). Here is the reality of our hope. And each pilgrim who makes the decision to begin his spiritual search and who enters the land of Christian Science does so, like the Pilgrims, in the sacred solitude of his own thought. His Rock is the Christ, Truth, and on this Rock he establishes his understanding of man's oneness, or unity, with God, the Father, as demonstrated by Christ Jesus. The understanding of man's identity as the spiritual reflection of God, Spirit, is vital for the success of our journey from the material sense of life to the spiritual, because God is Life. We must understand God as ever-present, unerring Principle, which governs the entire universe in perfect order, beauty, and grandeur.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

"A GLEAM OF GRATITUDE"