"That ye may be a new lump"

One of the most potent terms in the English language may be the word new. Mark some product or program "new" and you immediately grab people's attention.

Yet what's called new surely isn't always.

Still, people keep reaching out, sometimes quite desperately, for what they think is new: new cars, new places to go—nowadays even new faces and bodies to be sculptured by surgery. So much of this quest for newness turns out to disappoint profoundly, delivering not newness but merely something other or different.

How can we sort it out? We don't want to be fooled but we do want to find the genuine newness, which is so refreshing and rightly valued by the human heart.

The Bible asks and answers a question that helps to put us on the right track: "Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us." ^{Eccl. 1:10 .} Actually, the writer of Ecclesiastes wasn't just being dour but was wise in his insight that much of human experience is essentially the same thing repeated in different forms. Whether you travel from Boston to Akron, Ohio, by car, train, or plane, for example, you are in the same place once you arrive. You have brought along the same "you," for better or worse. Whether I type this editorial using the latest computer program (as I am) and it is rushed into print by the latest electronic system (as it is) or whether I type it on an old upright typewriter or draft it in longhand doesn't basically affect the message itself. Valuable as the medium is, newness isn't produced by the medium but by the thought.

What we obviously most want and need is not "new" externals but changed and inspired thought. It is the externals that become so quickly familiar and so quickly old. We need freshness of spirit, new consciousness or being. But how can we possibly get it?

We can't get it, but we can find ourselves expressing it as we learn more of God as the one and only Spirit. This is no dry scholastic study nor narrow and life-denying religiosity. Those who were later termed Christians—those who first followed Christ Jesus—were certainly not dull, pious, religious types. Their lives and outlook had been radically broadened and changed by Jesus' teachings about God. The Master insisted they could and they must be born again.

To a great extent they must have felt this happening, felt themselves being shaped by everything they were learning of divine Spirit and of man as the child of this Spirit, made in the image and likeness of God, his Father. They acted like new men and women. They became what we would today call activists; they were strongly committed to and involved in this new sense of living.

Christian Science, discovered and founded by Mary Baker Eddy, makes explicit a point that is easily missed, however: looking for the refreshingly new while holding on to the old, conventional convictions about material life and circumstances is bound to lead off in the wrong direction. Either it disappoints—nothing ever seems quite as good or as fresh or special as we feel it should and could—or the search becomes more and more humanly extreme, not spiritually radical.

But to learn of divine Spirit, which pervades all life and being, which is the creator, and which is Life itself, changes our viewpoint and keeps it changed. We look toward every bit of spiritual light and goodness not as poignant, tiny points of light in a dark cosmos but as indicative of the very nature and reality of the spiritual man and universe. Paul described it this way: "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." ^{II Cor. 5:17 .} Among other things that are made new is the typical human viewpoint of seeing everything as something to be used. Instead, we begin to see that it exists for its own sake. And what we think we can do becomes far less important than what we see God doing with us and with His creation. Interestingly enough, we begin to find the truly fresh and new right in front of us. And we're able to appreciate this newness, instead of fearing it and finding it threatening, because we realize that genuine newness and goodness has its source in God. We are inevitably included in and embraced by what God is giving. We ourselves—as we are willing to be born of Spirit—have this quality of unending newness.

Mrs. Eddy writes, "He to whom 'the arm of the Lord' is revealed will believe our report, and rise into newness of life with regeneration." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 24 .} To take the reality of Spirit, God, as fully present is to follow Christ. It isn't possible to do that through words and appearances. It is a very demanding way of life. But we are changed if we live it. As Paul so graphically urges, "Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened." ^{I Cor. 5:7 .}

Who isn't more than ready to be a new—and newly leavened—"lump"?