Article July 7, 1980 Issue

The "still small voice" at political conventions

GEORGE MONEYHUN

The forthcoming national political conventions in the United States are certain to provide a colorful and exciting mixture of tradition, politics, and modern telecommunications. However, anyone who has ever attended a national party get-together, or watched on television, knows that the substantive work of convention delegates, choosing candidates and agreeing on a party platform, frequently gets lost in rhetoric, conflict, and mass confusion. To some, this may seem a disturbing way for a national party to choose its leaders and decide its stands on the major issues confronting the nation.

But the chaos and divisiveness that so often surface at conventions are in sharp contrast to the way God governs man and the universe. In spiritual reality, man reflects God's government. Divine Mind is always in control. Principle's ideas are never out of order, never in conflict, never trying to outmaneuver one another in the name of some special interest or "cause." In fact, in Science and Health Mrs. Eddy points out: "There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause."^{Science and Health, p. 207;}

To the extent we recognize and demonstrate individually that the good in human government is a reflection of God's government, we help to support a just and effective functioning of the electoral process—or the legislative process, for that matter— preventing it from being undermined or pulled asunder by divisive tuggings of narrowly focused interest groups and factions. As we learn to reject material sense testimony for the spiritual facts of being as revealed in Christian Science, we will better understand where true government resides: not in many limited mortal minds warring against one another but in the one infinite Mind. "The 'divine ear' is not an auditory nerve," writes Mrs. Eddy. "It is the all-hearing and all-knowing Mind, to whom each need of man is always known and by whom it will be supplied."^{ibid., p. 7;}