Editorial December 20, 1993 Issue

Invincible joy

Mary Metzner Trammell

There's a kind of joy that just won't quit. It's stronger than the most devastating of mortal sorrows. Stronger than family turbulence, political oppression, financial disaster, sickness, or even death. People who have this kind of joy can look even tragic circumstances in the face and say, "I believe there's something vastly more real and more powerful than all of this. And that something is God."

A Christian Science practitioner I know caught her first vision of this kind of joy when she was praying for a very unhappy teenager (let's call him George) a few years ago. George had been fighting a lot with his parents. He felt they were unreasonable and out of touch with "the real world." Besides that, they'd taken his car away from him as a disciplinary measure, even though he had paid for it himself. Worst of all, he'd been waking up in the middle of the night with chest pains and other sensations that really scared him. So he decided it was time to pray—and to ask a practitioner to pray along with him.

At first, frankly, the practitioner wasn't sure where to begin in praying for him. It seemed so many things were going wrong. So she prayed for a few minutes about how to pray. Suddenly, she felt sure that her Father-Mother God had already given her the spiritual understanding to meet the demands of this situation—or George would never have felt impelled to ask her to help. Then she opened Mrs. Eddy's book Miscellaneous Writings to the page she'd been reading when George called her. Here's what she found: "Joy is self-sustained; goodness and blessedness are one: suffering is self-inflicted, and good is the master of evil" (p. 209).