SENTINEL WATCH January 26, 2004 Issue

What's the good news?

By J. Thomas Black

A snow advisory for the area softly crawled across the bottom of my TV screen during a newscast. I had been looking for a topical subject for this column—for some event that called out for the Sentinel's watchful eye and the prayers of its readers. I'd already read through three daily newspapers and the same number of recent issues of Newsweek magazine. But nothing was catching my eye.

Have you noticed most of the news that gets reported is negative, heavy, repetitious? It's current, but it feels like reruns. It's more like a blaring horn than a soft snowfall. The few bright spots are exceptions. As I was watching the news that day, it struck me: Suffering and woe are not norms of human life. They are exceptions. They are called news because they depart from the majority pattern of human life. This insight reminded me of a question a friend asked years ago: "Have you ever considered the traffic accidents that never happened?" They are literally countless, of course. And that's what makes this question arresting. It overthrows a basic misperception of human thought—that woe and suffering are normal.

To remember this gently jolted me to a more balanced perspective of life. It reawakened in me a more spiritual sense of news, a holier sense of reality. I glimpsed that good is not just supreme or dominant over evil; it's all that's really going on in all of God's creation. That perspective settled in my thought as softly as a snowflake. Mary Baker Eddy's book that is the ideological backbone of this magazine, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, says succinctly, "Evil is not supreme; good is not helpless; nor are the so-called laws of matter primary, and the law of Spirit [God] secondary" (p. 207).