When I was a teen-ager just becoming interested in photography, a neighbor of mine offered to become a mentor. One summer afternoon I rushed out of the house after a thundershower to capture the unusually bright, full arc of a rainbow on film. My neighbor was there, too. We began to compare camera settings. I was surprised his were so different from what I would have expected, so I asked him what kind of film he was using. "Well," he said after an embarrassed pause, "I'm using black and white." Unlike the sophisticated camera buff who might have planned it that way, he just forgot!

At the present time much of the world is approaching spiritual values and spiritual reality from the standpoint of the neighbor with his black-and-white film. The result may be difficult to distinguish from the general gray of a material sense of existence!

As Dag Hammarskjöld, the great Swedish statesman and an early Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote in his book Markings: "God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." ^{Markings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 56 .}

If we've become saturated with the sad knowledge of mortal existence and take this to be our only measure of God and reality, we have little likelihood of seeing the radiance of spiritual things. Spiritual reality, however, remains fully present and operative, and it is we who need a different approach in order to become aware of it. When the heart is ready, the spirit of the Christ opens thought to perceive and receive what is already there.

Mary Baker Eddy, who made the spiritual discovery known as Christian Science, describes the nature of worldly thinking that would exclude spiritual perception when she writes, "False realistic views sap the Science of Principle and idea; they make Deity unreal and inconceivable, either as mind or matter; but Truth comes to the rescue of reason and immortality, and unfolds the real nature of God and the universe to the spiritual sense, which beareth witness of things spiritual, and not material." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 218.}

False realism often presents itself as the first and only choice in human situations until we've learned to turn to divine Truth and its power to show an entirely different possibility. Then we begin to comprehend the difference between supposed realism—based on a human appraisal of circumstances—and spiritual reality. We learn to look to a deeper realism—the realism of God's omnipresent goodness.

This was a lesson learned by young parents who were Christian Scientists. They were confronted with the illness called croup in their children. When it first appeared, there was considerable alarm, but the prayer they had learned to trust—the prayer that chooses to affirm God's active, present reality and the consequent unreality of whatever is unlike Him—brought marked relief from the condition without any medication or other material measures.

Nevertheless the condition recurred, and each time false realism would suggest apprehension and a long difficult night. In each instance the definite turning of thought Godward would finally bring again the warm, healing sense of His care, and physical relief would follow shortly. But not until the problem became a crisis with one child late one night did the change of thought that led to complete healing occur.

At that point a "realistic" appraisal of the situation was such that there could be no temporizing and gradual regaining of spiritual assurance. What was needed was the immediate consciousness of God's holding of man and all His creation in perfection—and evidence of it in human experience.

So the parents had to stop thinking in terms of a so-called realistic appraisal of the symptoms based on the physical appearance and turn wholeheartedly to God as real and present in every conceivable way. They did, and they became aware of divine Love's presence taking away fear and dissolving the oppression of sickness. The symptoms subsided and the child breathed normally. He was healed, and slept through the night peacefully. The illness never returned.

The parents drew lessons from the experience that were helpful in bringing about further healings for themselves and others. One of these lessons was that any trust in the realism of the discord which the material senses present prolongs discord. In fact, such trust is the basic source of the discord, and the great need is for increased understanding that God, Spirit, not matter, constitutes reality in every circumstance. Mrs. Eddy comments in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the book she wrote to share her spiritual discovery, "We must look deep into realism instead of accepting only the outward sense of things." ^{Science and Health, p. 129.}

As Dag Hammarskjold and many other spiritually-minded men and women have intuited, God is not found by looking in the wrong direction. He is not to be found in a material sense of existence, nor is He the creator of a material world and its evils. He is found in spiritual sense. The Bible speaks of authentic spiritual experience in this way, "This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." ^{I John 1:5.}

We can stop supposing that matter and evil must be real and that they must be God's creation. Christian Science breaks the hold of this hypnotic supposition, showing that to accept evil as real or as emanating from God is a mistake.

God is the source of the radiance and wonder we sometimes glimpse in human experience. Therefore we cannot know more of God by beginning with what even ordinary human intelligence would concur was wholly incompatible with an infinitely good God, who alone is the measure of reality.

"Science," Mrs. Eddy writes, "is the prism of Truth, which divides its rays and brings out the hues of Deity." ^{Retrospection and Introspection, p. 35.} Looking directly into this radiant and total good, not into human thought which has become unexpectant and gray, we will find God. And seeing Him more clearly, we will know and see more vividly His creation in all its bright spectrum, substance, and goodness. Such reality supplants merely human views and brings divine healing into human experience.

ALLISON W. PHINNEY, JR.