Article August 16, 1982 Issue

Divine law reveals our unique selfhood

NORMA BAIN NORTON

When I was about ten years old, I interrupted my mother and brother at the breakfast table one day to ask, "Who am I? Why am I alive now? Why not two hundred years ago or two hundred years from now?" That moment of questioning out loud thoughts that had often puzzled me still seems vivid, even though many years have passed. I remember the sunlight pouring in through the white curtains and the depth of my desire to know.

Only much later did I understand this quiet, though conscious, quest for identity as a universal human need to know ourselves as God's children. In teen-age and college years I often enlarged the dialogue to: "Why are we here? What purpose do we serve? We can't just be a part of an elegant, accidental, tragicomic scheme of existence based on a primal cause in matter."

When Christian Science was first explained to me (my own children were teen-agers), I was drawn by the joy-filled promise of learning man's relationship to God. I had long known that God was necessary to me. Now I was learning man was necessary to God! I began to recognize, ever so tentatively, what I had always hoped for: man's inviolate relationship to God, Soul, the source of all power and beauty. I began to see that man is necessary as God's expression!

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