Article September 29, 1973 Issue

"It's only a picture"

JAY HOLMES

When my daughter was a small child, we sometimes watched motion pictures being made in the local studios. One evening while we were seeing a motion picture in the theater, a sequence showed a child weeping over his dead dog. I noticed that my daughter was crying, and I said to her, "It's only a picture. You know that the director is telling the boy what to do and the trainer has told the dog to play dead and the camera is right there photographing the scene." My daughter whimpered, "Don't tell me. You're spoiling it for me!"

Sometimes when we are tempted with the picture of sin, disease, and death, we resist the call of Christian Science to look away from the picture and see what God knows about the situation. Self-pity, self-justification, and self-righteousness often cling to the false concept of man and try to perpetuate the Adam-dream of life and intelligence in matter. We do not seem to be able to separate ourselves from the role of sufferer or victim. Science demands that we turn away from the picture show of the Adam-dream and see what is divinely true.

Until mortal mind, or the dream of life in matter, is educated out of itself through the teachings of Christian Science, it is the author, producer, and director of a self-written script depicting mortal man as the star acting out the part of either a victim or a victor, of being unfortunate or fortunate, of being sick or poor or the outcome of heredity.

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