Our everyday reply to this question might include a number, a street, a suburb. But there is a spiritual, metaphysical reply, and it has healing and freeing results, and it helps us build a happier sense of family.

Where we live is determined by God. It is the consequence of His infinitude. In the sense that Deity is without beginning and end, there is nowhere for man to be but in Spirit. Material thought, however, would represent man as finite, confined to a corporeal personality, which in turn is contained by buildings and vehicles and ultimately by the physical universe itself; and this universe— no matter how vast, according to the astronomer's judgment—is essentially finite, according to spiritually scientific definition.

As we grow in the understanding that man is infinite Spirit's idea and that man lives in Spirit because there is nowhere else for him to be, we live more concordantly, whether we're married or single, whether we identify ourselves primarily as parent or child. Moreover, we gain more and more mastery of the mesmeric belief that man is encased in a corporeal body subject to disease and suffering and, sooner or later, dissolution.

It's a strong, encouraging point in Christian Science that man as God's idea is incapable of mistaking his nature and place. Mary Baker Eddy writes: "In Him we live, move, and have being. Man's origin and existence being in Him, man is the ultimatum of perfection, and by no means the medium of imperfection. Immortal man is the eternal idea of Truth, that cannot lapse into a mortal belief or error concerning himself and his origin: he cannot get out of the focal distance of infinity." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p.79;}

Such affirmations may seem startling, ungraspable. They challenge us, certainly, to ponder them. They demand we reason them out. They insist on demonstration. And we can prove them in stabler and happier home and family life, in steady health, whatever the challenges facing us.

That which is spiritually true has practical consequences. What can we expect, for instance, from understanding we don't live in matter-bodies? What we refer to as a physical body more readily does what we need it to do, and it operates more efficiently, as we grasp why it is substanceless, an illusive picture in mortal thought. More health and wider freedom accompany our growing sense that we live in God.

The physical body is the world's sense of identity, over which we are gaining more and more dominion by admitting our real identity to be incorporeal. We can have that body where we need to have it with somewhat more ease. We can engage in necessary traveling—as commuters, as salesmen, as a family moving to a new area—with less fatigue and more enjoyment. Mrs. Eddy explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Divest yourself of the thought that there can be substance in matter, and the movements and transitions now possible for mortal mind will be found to be equally possible for the body." ^{Science and Health, p.90;}

The question of our place of residence is often asked in this sometimes bureaucratic world. In addition to giving the kind of answer expected by the official or the form, we can make this an opening to silently affirm the scientific truth of what and where we are—spiritual ideas always alive and at home in Life. Hence we are always divinely governed, never controlled or pushed around by matter or material thought.

Neither disease, nor senility, nor accident—themselves arguments of material sense related to the claim that a matter-body is our home—can threaten us as the living ideas of immortal Life. We will never move out of outlined physicality or be pushed out, for in our true being we are never there. Mrs. Eddy affirms, "The doctrine that man's harmony is governed by physical conditions all his earthly days, and that he is then thrust out of his own body by the operation of matter,—even the doctrine of the superiority of matter over Mind,—is fading out." ^{ibid., p.150;}

Proving, as Christ Jesus did, that we actually live in Spirit challenges us to move our thought from material to spiritual premises. Spiritual truth is not abstract but concrete, for it is established, validated, perpetuated by divine Truth, or God; and Truth is All. Nothing can be more concrete, real, and substantial than that which is All. Even a limited sense of divine metaphysical facts can have a dynamic outcome. It can produce a great surge in the number of spiritual insights we enjoy and hasten the "fading out" of the claims of physical identity. These insights are the building blocks with which we can construct more useful lives, more satisfying homes, more healing churches.

Where do we live? Let's regularly acknowledge we are Life's ideas, abiding in Life, subject to Life alone. This will help us shed the illusion of being at home in matter and introduce us to the joy and liberation of the Life divine. "Surely the righteous shall give thanks unto thy name: the upright shall dwell in thy presence," ^{Ps. 140:13.} the Psalmist exclaimed.

Geoffrey J. Barratt