Editorial July 27, 1968 Issue

The Foolishness of Friction

Helen Wood Bauman

There are various frictions in human experience that are common to most people: friction with the world, with one's job, with other personalities, and even with one's human self. Friction can obstruct spiritual progress and interfere with health if its foolishness is not recognized and its eroding effect stopped. Christian Science shows one how to stop it. It turns the seeker of peace away from artificial situations, in which many minds, many prejudice, opinions, and phobias contend, to find true situations in the one divine Mind, God. There God's children, the ideas of Mind, or Love, abide in frictionless harmony.

In Mind's creation, there are no incompatible mentalities and no antagonisms that can produce friction and mental heat. We step out of scientific being when we provide an antagonistic element in an inharmonious situation. In physics it takes two material objects to produce friction, which is a kind of force that tends to stop things from moving. In the human sense of things, it takes opposing wills to cause mental friction. To prevent a paralysis of love, we can refrain from responding temperamentally to the negative behavior of others, knowing that Love is the Mind of all. We should remember that we are responsible if we feel friction, since it takes two to stir it up.

When people feel friction with their lot in life or even with the human personalities they were born with, they should recognize the foolishness of this response. Such situations can be worked out through the law of Love as it is revealed in Christian Science rather than bemoaned and supported through belief in their reality.

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