Editorial March 30, 1974 Issue

Getting Through Crises

Geoffrey J. Barratt

A crisis is a time of supposed extra pressure from trouble. Its outcome may seem problematic. But in the reality of being neither God nor man, His flawless idea, passes through crises. The belief that error or evil can accumulate or become more burdensome is just that—a belief, and never an actual phase.

Error can never become more dense or intense, because it never came into being. God's infinitude does not come and go, allowing error to advance or retreat. As a step in hastening the end of an apparent crisis, we can acknowledge that error cannot become more threatening, more perilous, more aggressive, because it can never become more than absolutely nothing. Mary Baker Eddy states categorically: "Evil is neither quality nor quantity: it is not intelligence, a person or a principle, a man or a woman, a place or a thing, and God never made it."^{Message to The Mother Church for 1901, pp. 12-13;}

As we understand the scientific truth of Life, and that a crisis is never a reality, we can read what seems to be a crisis as an opportunity to take a more radical grasp of Truth. Thus seen, a crisis is a growth phase, not something to despair over. In surmounting crises we can move to a higher point of understanding than we've ever ascended to before.

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