Article July 4, 2005 Issue

humility

By Rebecca Odegaard

A few years ago holograms, or "magigrams," were popular, at least in our family! If you aren't familiar with them, they're pictures that first appear to be two-dimensional, but within the picture (a design or landscape, for instance) emerges a "hidden" three-dimensional image. The eye has to pierce through the obvious picture, refocus and concentrate, in order to extract a subtler image. It was a fun family activity for a while, but eventually we lost interest in discovering a snarling tiger in what initially appeared to be a picture of leafy trees.

There is another kind of discovery that keeps our interest, though, and it's the ongoing desire to see God better. This, too, requires a shift in focus and a consecrated effort to look beyond appearances, namely, that everything is material, to a deeper truth—that all reality is actually spiritual and entirely good.

Mary Baker Eddy discovered the great truth and usefulness of this view, and named her discovery Christian Science. After years of studying Jesus' mission of healing as recorded in the Bible's New Testament, she concluded that his healing work could be learned and repeated. She discovered how the work was done, and wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which explicitly teaches how to practically follow him, imitating his healing method. She stated to the reader fairly early on in her book: "Like our Master, we must depart from material sense into the spiritual sense of being" (p. 41). A little later she offered this instruction: "We must look deep into realism instead of accepting only the outward sense of things" (p. 129).