Article January 7, 1985 Issue

Rightly assessing the cost

MICHAEL D. RISSLER

If one needs help pricing material goods and services, there are computer programs, financial studies, and all kinds of comparisons available. But assessing the cost or value of spiritual understanding can be a lonely endeavor. Foresight, spiritual values, wisdom, self-sacrifice, can seem so intangible. Yet without them life would have no meaning. We must sort out the spiritual hunger that is natural to men and women from the flash and swirl of technological experimentation and marketing appeals.

To separate chaff from wheat, we need to go deeply in our analysis of what the world has to offer us. There is certainly enough material innovation to keep one fully occupied in the pursuit of material objects. But does this pursuit really offer us the Christianization and spiritualization of thought that heals the world? If we passively wait for human events to point us Spiritward, we'll make little progress in understanding the spiritual and moral forces that lie beneath the surface of human events.

There is a deep spiritual and moral link between truth and the human cost of finding it. We can't overlook that cost. Mrs. Eddy speaks of the cost of Christ Jesus' self-sacrificing love. In the Christian Science textbook she writes: "Jesus endured the shame, that he might pour his dear-bought bounty into barren lives. What was his earthly reward? He was forsaken by all save John, the beloved disciple, and a few women who bowed in silent woe beneath the shadow of his cross." The next sentence in that paragraph unites Jesus' lonely vigil with our own. She continues, "The earthly price of spirituality in a material age and the great moral distance between Christianity and sensualism preclude Christian Science from finding favor with the worldly-minded." ^{Science and Health, p. 36.}

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