PERSPECTIVEON THE NEWS June 4, 1979 Issue

Gasoline and the question of dependence

The gasoline shortage and the accompanying frustration, hostility between drivers competing for meager supplies, charges of institutional greed and government ineptitude, raise the broad question of just where our dependence is resting. Most of us usually look to material externals for substance and too rarely rely on our inner resources of spiritual inspiration and understanding. There is a need for a spiritual revolution, for a rapid move to more spiritual values. Otherwise we will always be mastered by externals rather than directed by God. Our adopting a spiritual basis of thought, individually, is the way to improve externals. Outward experience, Christian Science shows, tends to reflect our inner sense of things.

So material conditions shouldn't be allowed—needn't be—to dictate the level of our contentment and freedom. In reality, man is not a mortal, reliant on matter; but an immortal, reliant on divine Spirit for substance, activity, being. The works of Christ Jesus illustrate this. Spirit is self-existent and self-dependent. Man is the very outcome of Spirit. He lives independent of erratic material cycles of glut and drought. He lives as the beneficiary of Spirit's cycles of good.

While most of us benefit from the fruits of modern economic and commercial organization, and of modern technology, those are not the ultimate source of whatever conveniences we may enjoy in life. We should cultivate a more constant consciousness of relying on Spirit for being, and deny that man is actually dependent on matter for freedom and substance. The result of a deepening spirituality of standpoint is not a human life of less dominion and convenience, but one in which dominion and convenience are more stable because they are the outflowing of spiritual consciousness, not the happenstances of matter.

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