Article March 9, 1981 Issue

Nonsense and spiritual sense

BARBARA B. HOLLIDAY

"Nonsense!" he sharply retorted. "Such stupidity!" I thought. My boss and I were locked in conflict. Days of sporadic discussions had hardened our positions. He was obviously wrong and too stubborn to admit it. Ah, but I still could make one last effort. He always quietly pondered reasonable memos. So I gave him one. And he almost fired me on the spot. But just as his anger was reaching that zenith, something happened to my thinking.

Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health, "The corporeal senses are the only source of evil or error." She continues further on: "Outside the material sense of things, all is harmony. A wrong sense of God, man, and creation is non-sense, want of sense."^{Science and Health, p. 489.} Now, from that standpoint, no wonder my situation didn't make any sense. It was constituted of an awful lot of "non-sense": self-righteousness, self-will, basic material-mindedness! I had generously attempted to endow both my boss and myself with something that didn't exist: a mind apart from God, divine Mind, and this false mind's concomitant, material sense. Speaking of "want of sense"!

But something broke through this self-imposed barrier to intelligent communication. Just as my boss reached the high C of anger, I recoiled in astonishment at what I had done. I had identified man with the mortal, or carnal, mind and its erroneous view of things. But material sense is opposed to spiritual sense, and I should have taken Paul's counsel to the Romans to heart: "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."^{Rom. 8:6.} Certainly, carnally-minded action on my part was leading to the death of a good boss-staff relationship!