Editorial November 13, 1976 Issue

Buoyancy in Spirit

Geoffrey J. Barratt

A further attempt was made recently to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. We may not know in full detail what prompts such projects. But the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew with feathers attached to him with wax, the flying machine designs of Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance, and similar events suggest that humankind has long wanted to fly and to float free.

Parallel to the wish for physical buoyancy is probably the far stronger and more common desire to be able to soar above the stresses and anxieties of daily living. Christian Science shows how we can be buoyant in Spirit by explaining how we can drop off the weights of believing we live in matter. All that material thought can offer is varying degrees of heaviness. But buoyancy of spirit can be found in God, the one Spirit.

Understanding that man is not mortal person but spiritual idea, we climb to new altitudes of outlook. Man is Spirit's free expression. There are no leaden weights for man, no intolerable loads of illness or debt. After referring to such things as wireless telegraphy and "navigation of the air," Mary Baker Eddy says that these, "in fact, all the et cetera of mortal mind pressing to the front, remind me of my early dreams of flying in airy space, buoyant with liberty and the luxury of thought let loose, rising higher and forever higher in the boundless blue." And of such dreams she says further: "The night thought, methinks, should unfold in part the facts of day, and open the prison doors and solve the blind problem of matter. The night thought should show us that even mortals can mount higher in the altitude of being. Mounting higher, mortals will cease to be mortal."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 110;}