Article February 10, 1997 Issue

Relaxed? Or at peace?

Laura Matthews

Hectic timetables, financial demands, and family responsibilities may make us cry out for a moment to relax. We may want to take off for the mountains, go for a long run, bury ourselves in television, or just go to sleep.

There are different ways to approach rest and relaxation. One is physical. Another is to look at rest in spiritual terms. The spiritual equivalent of rest would be peace. Peace has been defined as freedom from war, as an undisturbed state of mind, as a lack of conflict. But is peace merely the absence of something unpeaceful?

Peace that lasts comes from the presence of something—from God, Spirit, who fills all space. Science and Health says, "The three great verities of Spirit, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience,—Spirit possessing all power, filling all space, constituting all Science,—contradict forever the belief that matter can be actual" (pp. 109–110). With the knowledge that God is filling all space, peace becomes much more than a vacuum of physical conflict or activity. It becomes an awareness that God is all-power and that He is Love; that man, as God's idea, dwells eternally in Love's omnipresence and can know and experience only what God has created. Peace involves understanding that in truth every need is met by God, every thought is in line with God, and every action is a reflection of God.