Editorial January 8, 1977 Issue

Feeding the World's Famine

Peter J. Henniker-Heaton

Four hundred million people in the world are estimated to be suffering from acute malnutrition, some one tenth of the world population. Famine, though historically a scourge of humanity, has impelled effort and sometimes progress. But today in large areas of the earth malnutrition and the conditions fostering it appear to inhibit people from reaching the necessary lift-off point and escape velocity to rise out of these conditions. What can Christian Science bring to this situation?

Sometimes an individual is hungry or ill-fed because of personal factors—personal unemployment, lack, disease. The record of Christian Science includes many instances of such persons being healed and freed when they have grasped the spiritual facts that God, Spirit, is the only creator and that man, being wholly spiritual, is not dependent on material sustenance. Mrs. Eddy writes, "The fact is, food does not affect the absolute Life of man, and this becomes self-evident, when we learn that God is our Life."^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 388;} The greatest gift any of us can offer a hungry world is to help make available the spiritual truths whose healing and liberating power we have already experienced ourselves.

But more is required. On this the Bible is crystal-clear. Until our neighbors feel able to accept and profit by what is offered spiritually, we have a duty to help care for their immediate physical needs. Christ Jesus makes this point in his parable of the sheep and goats. Here the Son of man is represented as saying, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."^{Matt. 25:45;} The Epistle of James vigorously drives home the same point, "If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?"^{James 2:15, 16;}