Editorial June 2, 1962 Issue

"A grave guardian"

Helen Wood Bauman

A study of the letters and messages of Mary Baker Eddy to the members of her Church convened in their Annual Meetings shows the importance she attributed to these occasions. In her letter to the members assembled in June, 1899, she wrote (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 125): "Brethren, our annual meeting is a grave guardian. It requires you to report progress, to refresh memory, to rejuvenate the branches and to vivify the buds, to bend upward the tendrils and to incline the vine towards the parent trunk."

What could better guard the members—keep them safe—than the requirement to report spiritual progress? Divine reality lies about them. Are they becoming increasingly conscious of this realm of Spirit? Do they grasp the laws governing God's kingdom more and more capably, bring them to bear upon their present experience, prove with growing authority the superiority of divine laws over so-called mortal laws of sin, disease, limitation, and death?

Nothing humbles the individual Christian Scientist more than his recognition of the infinite power of Spirit, which is his to demonstrate but which he knows is often obscured by his yet undestroyed materialism. He is guarded from conceit and personal ambition by his need for reporting spiritual progress—dominion over the errors that the understanding of Christian Science alone can destroy.

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Editorial
Our Annual Meetings
June 2, 1962
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