Article December 31, 1984 Issue

Love in church

J. THOMAS BLACK

For centuries religious faith has inspired people to build magnificent churches. Many people today love to travel long distances and look on some of these soaring structures. However, to love the true Church requires us to travel not oceans or roads but long distances from popular beliefs to a meek understanding of pure truth. The structure one is privileged to see as a result of this journey is more grand and towering than any material building.

We are helped to love this structure, or Church, by understanding the incomparable entity that Church really is. One definition of the word "structure" as "something constructed or built," may help to enlarge our concept. If a structure is designed by an architect, it may be superb or ordinary, depending on his or her inspiration. But when the creator of the structure is God, supreme good, and it is made up of whatever He includes within Himself as reality, then this structure, or Church, will be flawless, eternal, and universal. And when its action and arrangement are seen to be spiritual—expressions of Him, divine Truth and divine Love, rather than of matter—perfect Church may be seen to express the harmony of God's action and the order and unity of all His ideas.

It is natural to feel warm affection for Church. Its beauty, design, symmetry, and so on, are perfect spiritual qualities utterly apart from and wholly beyond any form of matter. Certainly Mrs. Eddy was inspired by divine Love to see entirely past every material concept of structure as buildings or persons to grasp the whole essence of true Church, which she expresses in these few words: "Church. The structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle."^{Science and Health, p. 583.}

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