Article October 15, 1990 Issue

When our best efforts don't get us anywhere

If life seems to be vague, indefinite, meaningless, there is a way out. The Science of Christ shows us how to break free of mental prisons.

Nancy Hormel Reinert

It is a prison. Everything is white—clothes, floors, chairs—and everything is brightly lighted. Things melt into blank space. There is nothing to distinguish one place from another and no way to tell time. There are no visible boundaries or definitions. Inmates are held in this prison by being lost, unable to describe a location or specify a time.

This is a prison that I remember from the science fiction movie THX 1138, and it has intrigued me for years—mostly because it's not unfamiliar as a mental landscape. Chronic sickness or pain, boredom, a career on a plateau—sometimes in situations like these, it's hard to tell how to get out. We want to work, to trust, to pray, but see no visible mistake to eliminate, no specific sin to correct, no obvious steps to take. We seem to be lost in spite of worthy efforts.

The Science of Christianity shows the way out of this prison of abstraction. It shows that the insights and instruction of Christ Jesus' Christianity are specific and precise for every human circumstance, and that following them heals. Christ Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Though it's obvious that the disciples thought of Jesus' life and teachings as the way—as immediate steps to be taken—later Christianity has not always been so sure. Many have read the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and been inspired and comforted, able to endure pain or trying times better, but have remained resigned to their "prisons" nevertheless. The sermon has seemed more idealistic than practical, more poetic than scientific.

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