Article February 26, 1979 Issue

Our high resort

NAOMI RUTH WHEELER

The evidence of escape-seeking in today's pressure-prone society underscores what Henry David Thoreau concluded over a century ago—that many people lead lives of quiet desperation. In some cases that desperation is no longer even quiet. Release is often sought through drugs, sex, status symbols, and frivolous indulgences, which sooner or later lose their claim both to luster and logic.

Was anyone ever under greater pressure than Christ Jesus, to whom multitudes thronged for healing? Than he who bore alone the awesome responsibility to awaken slumbering mankind to the truth of being? Yet the Master was able to assure his followers, "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light."^{Matt. 11:30;}

No quiet desperation there! Only the ever-present strength and tremendous dominion of the Christ. Mrs. Eddy writes: "The real Christ was unconscious of matter, of sin, disease, and death, and was conscious only of God, of good, of eternal Life, and harmony. Hence the human Jesus had a resort to his higher self and relation to the Father, and there could find rest from unreal trials in the conscious reality and royalty of his being,—holding the mortal as unreal, and the divine as real."^{No and Yes, p. 36;} Jesus was always in conscious command of his life because he coped not from the standpoint of corporality but from the vantage ground of his spiritual selfhood.