Article December 18, 1989 Issue

The love that brings freedom

Only divine Love's ocean of good can free us from matter's limitations.

Margaret E. Moore

I Watched a bee fly in through an open window, settle on an enclosed windowpane, and then fly back and forth trying unsuccessfully to find a way out, although the open window was close by. That's rather like the human race, I thought, so apt to go over and the dead-end ways of matter in seeking freedom.

Christ Jesus taught that freedom is gained by understanding God, Spirit, to be the Father of man. He spoke of God as "our Father." To catch a glimpse of what that can mean to us as we recognize Life as God, wholly good, lifts our thought to a whole new basis of living. It is a living of our spiritual, unbounded sonship that progressively frees us from material limitations and enables us to accept God as our Father—to accept Spirit as the only cause. This may seem like a long jump from the common belief that man is material. But appearances are notoriously deceptive. I have been inspired by the way George Fox, the Quaker, described the love of God: "I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness ... but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God."^{Journal of George Fox (London: Cambridge University Press, 1952; reprinted by London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, 1975), p. 19 .} Surely he was perceiving something of spiritual reality, which is invisible to material sense.

Mrs. Eddy saw the fact that reality can only be spiritual. And in the Christian Science textbook she describes man's origin as completely spiritual: "In Science man is the offspring of Spirit. The beautiful, good, and pure constitute his ancestry. His originis not, like that of mortals, in brute instinct, nor does he pass through material conditions prior to reaching intelligence. Spirit is his primitive and ultimate source of being; God is his Father, and Life is the law of his being."^{Science and Health, p. 63.}