Going to the Christian Science Sunday School as a teen-ager was a major change in my life. It wasn't something that came easily. I loved my friends at my former church, respected the pastors, and enjoyed the social interchange that was a natural part of that church's activities. Nevertheless, there was a deeper spiritual yearning that Christian Science kindled in me. As I look back I am amazed at the profound influence Science had.

That hour each week in Sunday School added tremendous moral and spiritual dimension to my life. Being with others and considering the deep, spiritual lessons of the Bible moved me greatly, though outwardly I probably looked as nonchalant as the other pupils. From my study of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, I was awaking to the very real possibility that the Christianity which I had read about in the New Testament with all its healing works could be a living reality today.

I often wondered whether those who had been raised knowing only the Christian Science Sunday School were actually aware of what they possessed. It was powerful, revolutionary, and genuinely Christian.

I don't imagine that my teachers fully realized how much that hour each week meant to me. But I know from experience, now that I've been teaching for many years in the Sunday School, that they must have been in some degree spiritual visionaries.

They weren't visionaries in the sense of ivory-tower idealists or impassioned advocates for some personal cause. But they were visionaries in the sense of their nurturing a spiritual sensitivity that lies deep within each one of us—including young people. In spite of all the sophistication and materialism that are so much a part of our culture, there is a spiritual yearning in human beings to know we are genuinely valuable and loved by God. This desire can be covered over with a lot of things, but it can't be lost, for it has spiritual and eternal origin.

Mrs. Eddy was certainly a spiritual visionary. She perceived man's unbroken relationship to God. And though the material senses generally argue that spirituality is neglected—if not irrelevant to getting ahead in the world—spiritual visionaries don't lose sight of the real meaning of man's life as the expression of God.

Isn't this at least a portion of what Christ Jesus was trying to awaken his followers to when he told them not to interfere with the children who wished to come to him? "Suffer the little children to come unto me," he said, "and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." ^{Mark 10:14.} Indeed, he cherished and nurtured the true spirituality that is self-sustaining in men and women—whether young or old!

Such wise, though often unspectacular, nurturing is the spark that ignites spiritual seekers who are preparing to see the world transformed through the revelation of God's allness and man's reflection of that divine nature. It's not, today, a revolution that is aimed at personally upsetting governments or empires, any more than that was the aim of Christ Jesus and his disciples. But it is a spiritual revolution that can in part take place around a table with a handful of students, each awaking to the reality of his or her true spiritual selfhood, which is a reflection of God, divine Life and Love.

To adult students of Christian Science this statement from Science and Health is a call to respond to a powerful spiritual fact: "Children are more tractable than adults, and learn more readily to love the simple verities that will make them happy and good.

"Jesus loved little children because of their freedom from wrong and their receptiveness of right. While age is halting between two opinions or battling with false beliefs, youth makes easy and rapid strides towards Truth." ^{Science and Health, p. 236.}

Young people often go through rough experiences. And there are times when we may wonder if children were intrinsically different in Jesus' day, or we might qualify our acceptance of that statement from Science and Health by speculating that it's limited to "young" children. But as we awake to the deep, uncompromising spirituality that lies within us, we'll find it alive and well in young people.

Kids don't fake their feelings. They tend to be sensitive, straightforward, and sincere. Spiritual visionaries will perceive in such qualities the early budding of spiritual-mindedness and do everything they can to understand and to encourage it. They will nurture spiritual-mindedness in themselves and in students with whom they have been entrusted. Such education has the capacity to actually change the world.

Michael D. Rissler