HOST: Home—what thoughts of love, contentment, and security come to us at the mention of it! Yet in our troubled times many find themselves without homes.

"The United Nations estimates that since World War I at least 130,000,000 people have fled or been driven from their homelands." In reporting this The Saturday Evening Post asks, "Will Ours Be the 'Century of Homeless People'?" [Reprinted by special permission of The Saturday Evening Post, © 1959 by The Curtis Publishing Company.] As the Post points out, "There always have been refugees, but today's bitter ideological revolutions combine with ancient racial and nationalistic grudges to produce an unprecedented constant population of 'stateless persons.' "

But even in peaceful countries many people are finding themselves uprooted. Millions have found their homes disrupted by divorce, the loss of loved ones, the scattering of children as they grow up. The building of highways and dams and other big projects have forced many people to move.

But whether we're rooted or uprooted, married or single, happy or unhappy, the subject of home concerns us all. How can we preserve the values of home in the midst of turmoil and change?

SPEAKER: What is it that makes a home? It isn't just a house. It isn't the furniture we have, the flowers and pictures and other things which make a house attractive. We may have all these things and still not have a sense of home.

We need something deeper to make the place we live in a home. We need oneness of spirit, love, understanding, and co-operation, a sense of peace and refuge, protection and order, and a desire to bless others. Isn't it true that what really makes a home is the way we think? The little daughter of an Army officer brought this out when somebody sympathized with her, saying it was too bad the family had moved around so much they didn't have a home. "Oh, we have a home," the little girl said. "We just don't have a house to put it in!"

So what really makes a home is our attitudes and outlook: the mental and spiritual qualities we express. Home, then, is a state of consciousness.

The Bible brings this out:

And Christ Jesus said,

HOST: How can these Bible verses help a person who is homeless or homesick or faced with disruption of his home?

SPEAKER: Those verses speak of the kind of bricks that really build a home: wisdom and righteousness, spiritual understanding, living in accord with moral and spiritual law. They tell us what kind of home is built with such bricks. It's a peaceable habitation, a sure dwelling, a quiet resting place, a house that can survive any kind of storm.

Where do these bricks come from? They come from God, who is Life and Truth and Love. Mary Baker Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 57), "Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love."

Now these bricks we've been talking about can be made our own wherever we go, whatever our circumstances may be. We find them within our own consciousness. We bring them to light as we understand God and our relationship to Him. Doesn't this show that actually our home is within our consciousness, spiritual, not something outside us, subject to material conditions? As we learn to live there, we're happy and safe.

No material power or circumstance can disturb or destroy a home built of such bricks. As the Bible says. "This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord." Christian Science shows that every Godlike quality of thought already belongs to man as God's own image and likeness. Otherwise, how could man be the spiritual idea, or likeness, of God?

The kingdom of God is already within us, Jesus said, within our true consciousness or selfhood, It includes all the elements of home.

HOST: So what you're saving is that the understanding of God and man's relationship to Him—and the living of this understanding—can give us a satisfying sense of home wherever we are.

SPEAKER: Indeed it can. As it says in Science and Health (p. 451): "Man walks in the direction towards which he looks, and where his treasure is, there will his heart be also. If our hopes and affections are spiritual, they come from above, not from beneath, and they bear as of old the fruits of the Spirit." Suppost' we turn to an actual example of this, the experience of a New Jersey woman.

HOST: It happened around the close of World War II. This young woman had been left with the responsibility of rearing her small son. They'd been living with her parents for five years. But then a change in family circumstances made it imperative for her to find a place of her own. But that seemed impossible because of the critical housing shortage which existed.

A student of Christian Science for many years, she gave the matter much prayerful thought. She was grateful that God had always taken care of her needs and felt confident that He would continue to do so. She knew that home and heaven were in consciousness, that home was not bounded by four walls or limited by place or circumstance, but was ever present and ever available, and that it included beauty, harmony, love, security, and happiness. She knew that her real home was secure and that God would reveal the right steps for her to take.

Then one day she was downtown shopping. She stopped in at one real estate office, but was told that they hadn't had a vacancy listed for over a year; there just weren't any apartments available. She went her way, still trusting in God. As she walked down the street, she felt prompted to go into another real estate office, one she knew nothing about and ordinarily would not have considered. Upon making inquiry there, she was told that only a half hour before someone had called and listed an apartment for rent, the first listing they'd had in over a year! The place met her need exactly. The landlady told her she didn't know why she had listed the apartment with the agent, since she could have rented it without doing so.

But that's not all there is to the story. This young woman worked in the high school library, which at the time was located across town from her new apartment. After she moved in, the high school moved to within three blocks of where she lived. To her this was a proof of the promise given in Isaiah, where it says (65:24), "It shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer: and while they are yet speaking, I will hear."