Article April 5, 1969 Issue

"Each separate ray"

HELEN ROTERMUND

Do you sometimes wonder why your way seems dark and fruitless? Do depression, doubt, and discouragement seem to hold you in hopeless bondage? Such negative and gloomy thinking not only indicates an absence of light and inspiration but acceptance into thought of mistaken views of existence. Perhaps it is time to look into our thinking and honestly analyze what goes on there. We must acknowledge that our experience is the result of our thinking and that to change our experience we must first change our thoughts.

In order to do this, we must come to understand the scientific relation of God to man. In an interview included in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, Mrs. Eddy is quoted as declaring, "If we say that the sun stands for God, then all his rays collectively stand for Christ, and each separate ray for men and women."^{My., p. 344;} Each man and woman in his or her true, spiritual identity as a reflection of God, divine Love, always has had and always will have the joyous and glorious purpose of expressing God, of radiating the divine effulgence of individual selfhood, as it is found in Christ. Not a single one is unnecessary, unneeded, unwanted, or left out.

When we regard man as a physical personality and permit suggestions of imperfection and defectiveness to dominate our thinking, are we not blocking out the expression of "each separate ray"? As an opaque curtain, when drawn, obscures the light entering a room, so our entertaining false concepts of anyone renders our thinking impervious to the rays of spiritual light. The individual being actually never ceases to function any more than does a sunbeam that a cloud obscures.

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