Editorial December 1, 1997 Issue

Holier thoughts, better lives

Russ Gerber

The other day I got into my car to drive to work at the same early hour I usually do. Still, there was already too much traffic on the road as far as I was concerned. It looked as though we'd have cloudy, humid weather once again. My schedule that day wasn't much brighter either. I was overscheduled. A series of meetings and some looming deadlines left very little time for me to take care of some things I had put off days before. I entered the building at work and had to take a detour to get to my office. The usual route was temporarily blocked because of some construction. I grumbled to myself about the inconvenience. Once I made it to my desk, opened my briefcase, and unloaded some papers, I finally stopped long enough to gather my thoughts—actually, to examine them. I realized how unholy my thinking had been for the past hour or so.

That wasn't right. Not simply because of my employment with a church's publishing organization, but because of my relation to God. It's the same relation to God we all truly have—we're His children, His image and likeness. As I prayed, I knew that what God, the divine Mind, sees and knows of each one of us, and of the universe we live in, is purely spiritual, sacred, loved, sinless, holy. All true consciousness is holy. That's why prayer makes such an enormous difference (as it did for me that day!). It brings us into harmony with the one perfect Mind—with unbounded good itself.

An unholy state of thought is not something any of us should go along with, accepting sin and materialism as normal and necessary. From that viewpoint we would easily conclude that a bad hour, or a bad day, or a lifetime of trouble is to be expected. Everyday life may seem that way to the human mind, which usually relies heavily on the physical senses to explain existence. But those senses give us a distorted view. The correct view of existence as purely good and spiritual—as holy, coming from God—is spiritually discerned, a perspective we gain as we pray and become increasingly aware of all that God, divine Life, is.

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