Integrity as medicine? Well, it wasn't my first thought either when I began pondering the question "What is integrity?" But it is my conclusion.

We tend to think of integrity more in terms of its expression than its essence. We think of the desirable values associated with it—honesty, sincerity, truthfulness, candor, fairness. In some people, integrity shines from within and needs no advertising; in others it appears to be tarnished or to have been traded for some kind of personal gain.

What's the source of integrity? Is it good parents and good discipline? Do we get it from teachers, spiritual counselors, or philosophers who inspire commitment to ethics and values? No one would deny that these are helpful influences. Yet we know good results don't always follow good intentions or instructions.

The ground level view

History's wars, genocides, and tyrannies certainly suggest that integrity is fragile and too easily lost under the influence of propaganda, force, fear.

Recent headlines don't offer improved prospects:

• print and broadcast journalists recently have been caught fabricating stories, people, quotations, and stealing information;

• a stream of stories suggests that in politics, business, and marriage, convictions and promises are negotiable, telling the plain truth is considered bad strategy, and consistency is, at best, inconvenient.

Don't we still hear the cry Jeremiah heard, "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" (8:22) Is there no antidote for all the elements of disintegration that trouble people's lives and relationships, the political process and professional ethics, even global stability?

Promise in meaning

There is promise in integrity's root meaning: integer, oneness, wholeness, entireness, indivisibility. These terms have their deepest meaning, their uncrumbling substance, as qualities of God, Spirit—Jeremiah's "Holy One of Israel."

To uncover mental error so that truth may be known, the Eternal asks, "Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit" (Jer. 2:11).

Could integrity be the sum of this glory? Isn't it the state of unity with the sacred, the realness of spiritual well-being, that so many are seeking today?

Wholeness ... health ... salvation. These ideas are virtually synonymous throughout the Bible. Then, integrity—in the form of one's growing understanding of God and of man's unity with immortal Life itself—must be pure medicine, the balm of wholeness.

How are the collective thought and body, called a community or a culture, to be healed? By caring enough to pray instead of react, starting from the basis of whole God, whole man and woman. By healing in our own lives the unhealed breakages, dishonesties, weaknesses, divisions. And letting the soothing oil of thanks and love flow freely.

We take this medicine through humble, daily listening to God. By seeking our permanent wholeness in Him. And by actions that break the box in which fear would confine us. This is the medicine Jesus gave and recommended.

This healing balm of conscious closeness to God comes to us through Christ, God's eternal message of our perfect status as His creation. Through Christ we steadily learn who we really are: spiritual ideas that are structured and safe in Him. Loved, kept whole, and given clear purpose by the one Father-Mother. We learn how to love our neighbor, our world, how to spread the balm undivided.

If there is a key to accessing this spiritually mental medicine, it is one's concept of God. Jeremiah warns us of a theological mistake that affects us individually and as a people, in mind, body, and spirit. That mistake is forsaking God, "the fountain of living waters," and handcrafting a poor substitute for Deity's flow of grace and truth, in the form of a "broken cistern." By virtue of its brokenness—its lack of integrity or wholeness—this cracked cistern can't long hold any water it may catch (see Jer. 2:13).

A manlike god may make more sense to the material view of things, but such a god will never give us lasting health or wholeness. As Jeremiah pointed out, it is the nature of human beings to become like that which we love and worship. Public and private morals fluctuate because notions of God and integrity are too often based on concepts that mix matter and Spirit to make man. When we accept a limited life in matter, we are also taking into our lives an inherently flawed theory and practice of integrity.

The integrity that is synonymous with spiritual identity is something wholly different. It encompasses all that we actually are in God's sight—our innate beauty and completeness. Morality, then, is not the goal, but it's vital to how we get there. It's the natural effect of discovering God as infinite Spirit and ourselves as His whole, spiritual offspring.

A pioneer's insight

Over a century ago, Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science and this magazine, gave a sermon entitled The People's Idea of God: Its Effect on Health and Christianity. She said, "Scientific discovery and the inspiration of Truth have taught me that the health and character of man become more or less perfect as his mind-models are more or less spiritual. Because God is Spirit, our thoughts must spiritualize to approach Him, and our methods grow more spiritual to accord with our thoughts."

As the title of her sermon indicates, improved thoughts have profound effects in human lives. She continues, "Religion and medicine must be dematerialized to present the right idea of Truth; then will this idea cast out error and heal the sick" (pp. 7–8).

In the text of Mrs. Eddy's principal work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the word integrity appears just twice. Yet the book helps its readers discover and demonstrate integrity in every fiber of their lives. It offers no secret formulas or hidden wisdom. It presents a Christian, spiritual practice that results in moral and physical renovation. I know these effects by experience, in small degrees.

Touched by this profound spiritual medicine, our world—heart by heart, thought by changed thought—can be made whole.