Article April 12, 1982 Issue

One of a series of articles by people who have in recent years become Christian Scientists. They explain how they became interested in Christian Science, what convinced them of its utility and truth, and how its teachings have changed their lives.

Letter from a student activist of the sixties

ELAINE H. NATALE

On a spring afternoon more than ten years ago, I stood at a third-floor classroom window, watching the chaotic scene below. National Guardsmen in riot control gear were struggling with hundreds of student demonstrators. I recognized some of my students, undergraduates whom I was supposed to be teaching that very hour.

Standing there at the window was almost like watching a scene on the evening news. I had seen it often enough to know it by heart. The seven years of my college life seemed to have been played against the background of the evening news reports of war in Vietnam and Cambodia, and of the antiwar demonstrations at home. But this wasn't television. My present campus had been torn apart and disrupted for a long time, struggling with moral as well as political problems. I remember just standing there crying— a combination of fatigue, frustration, and the effect of the tear gas blowing into the room.

I wanted so to do something to help. I'd always been a "doer" by nature. Activism was utterly indispensable, I felt, if you believed in a cause. You either gave yourself to what you believed or you didn't. And if you didn't, you apparently didn't believe in much, or you were a hypocrite, or you were just plain selfish.

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