ABOUT ONE BILLION PEOPLE LIVE IN EXTREME POVERTY (about $1 or less per day), and 1.5 billion are just above subsistence living ($2 or less). Together, they represent 40 percent of humanity. Disease, physical isolation (areas where development isn't practical, for instance), poor nutrition, lack of education, women's/human rights issues, war, ethnic rivalries, national and international bureaucracies, all play a role.

Christian Science has the capacity to cross "continent and ocean to the globe's remotest bound" (Science and Health, p. 559) and to bring healing solutions to light. With this in mind, spirituality.com is beginning a weekly series for the next few months that will address different aspects of poverty. Some articles present a more theoretical perspective; others deal very specifically with personal experiences. The writers of these segments represent many nations around the globe—the United Kingdom, Turkey, Japan, United States, Australia, the Philippines, and India, among others.

Each writer has been willing to tackle a particular root of poverty, especially one that is related in some way to his or her country, although all have broader applications. Their articles help shatter stereotypes and also bring to light the great good that can be accomplished through scientific, Christian Prayer.

What follows is the first segment in the series, written by Contributing Editor Tony Lobl, a Christian Science practitioner living in London. Subsequent segments will appear each Wednesday on spirituality.com. Look for ads in the Sentinel or visit spirituality.com for sub-n sequent articles.

Today, the world's localized needs—for relief from hunger, poverty, political unrest—are broadcast to the global human family, eliciting responsive outpourings of charity or aid and grassroots movements that can make a difference.

Outside the media spotlight, another international grassroots movement is in motion. It is a movement of spiritual activists who, like those recorded in the Bible, are proving, in their individual lives, the power of spiritual perfection to prevail over poverty.

This movement of individuals—from Africa to the Americas, from the Middle East to Asia—deserves the earnest, prayerful support of spiritual thinkers everywhere. Each individual proof of spiritual perfection that overrules poverty's seeming persistence shines a light of universal hope on the lie that humanity has to be resigned to suffering.

This is not to say that a massive outpouring of charity or international aid is unimportant. But sometimes aid isn't as helpful as one yearns for it to be, because the donor nation has demanded bureaucratic restrictions that interfere with meeting the actual need. Corrupt governments or political movements within a country can also interfere with the assistance. Unless the roots of poverty are dug up and destroyed, the conditions may reemerge or take a new form.

This is where I find prayer vital. Through prayer, we can address mental factors that lead to poverty, and bring to light inspired actions that really will make a difference.

One way to address the root causes of poverty is to take as a starting point the fact that God is the Creator of all, and has made us the beneficiaries of His/Her perfect goodness. This view may seem radically opposed to what we read about in the press or even experience "on the ground." But the times call for radical solutions, and Christian Science offers a totally different way of thinking about the world and its problems.

Human conditions are often influenced by what the Bible calls "the carnal mind"—the mortal worldview that boasts of evil's ability to inflict suffering. This false view of existence denies the divine presence and parades the imperfections of lack and distress before us as inevitable.

The Bible, on the other hand, constantly affirms the presence of perfection — from the account of God's perfect creation in the book of Genesis, through the story of Abraham's spiritual journey, and into the Gospels. In the lives of individuals, families, and communities, desperate circumstances gave way to practical evidences of that perfection.

Isaac restored wells of water that had been blocked up (see Gen. 26:17—22). As "refugees" fleeing from Egypt, the children of Israel received manna and quail to eat daily (see Ex. 16:11 15). Elijah was fed by ravens during a national drought (see I Kings 17:1—6). Jesus fed thousands of people with just a few loaves and fish in "a desert place" (see Mark 6:34—44).

These examples illustrate that the truth of perfection is active, moment by moment, and is able to bring freedom from the material conditions that make poverty seem inevitable. While it is tempting for us to feel immobilized by the sheer numbers of people struggling with poverty today, Jesus' example is a model to follow.

Jesus didn't see "mass man." That is, he understood the unique and complete relationship of each individual to God, the supplier of all needs, whether he was dealing with one individual's suffering, with ten lepers needing healing, or with thousands needing feeding.

"Perfection underlies reality," Mary Baker Eddy explained in Science and Health. Without perfection, nothing is wholly real. All things will continue to disappear, until perfection appears and reality is reached" (p. 353). In God's plan for humanity, it is perfection, not imperfection, that is inevitable. The underlying truth of perfection is always urging itself upon each one of God's children, whoever they are, whatever they are facing.

Harmony and unimpeded action are divinely inherent in any situation and are pressing themselves upon the human thoughts, hearts, and lives of everyone involved. To accept perfection as inevitable and real is to forward the annihilation of imperfect human circumstances which, temporarily, might seem to have the upper hand.

Among those imperfections is an unfeeling bureaucracy that impedes progress. It tends to treat people as a mass of faceless statistics and reduce individual citizens to helplessness. Anyone who has ever run up against a bureaucracy knows how dispiriting that can be. But we don't need to let that kind of thinking hold the upper hand.

A friend of mine proved this in a simple way. Back when Britain's gas industry was nationalized, she spent weeks without gas heating when her boiler malfunctioned during a winter cold spell. She had tried to get assistance but with no success. Frustrated, she finally sat down to write a curt letter of complaint to the gas company.

Then a spiritual insight stopped her in her tracks. She explains: "It occurred to me that all the time this had been going on, I had not turned to God or prayed about the situation. I'd had so many proofs of the power and omnipotence of God that at first I felt ashamed that I had not turned to Him in this case. I tore up the letter and realized with complete conviction that God knew nothing about the sequence of events that had caused all this frustration. He only knew about His own perfection, and this was all that I, or anyone else connected with this incident, could, or should, be aware of." This was a period of focused prayer that affirmed the reality of perfection and her right to expect its influence on her experience.

Through this glimpse of life's underlying spiritual perfection, my friend lost all concern for the as-yet-unresolved situation. That very afternoon, employees from the gas company turned up at her house, unannounced, and fixed the problem. Her boiler has worked perfectly in the many years since.

In the bigger scheme of things, in countries where overzealous bureaucracy can hinder families and communities from breaking free of poverty, many unsung heroes are making similar proofs of present perfection. African friends of mine have told me how their prayers have supported them in standing firm in dealing with the state, particularly in relation to their individual legal rights and obtaining visas, which in these areas can be extremely difficult to secure.

In a rebuke to all obstacles, including over-officious bureaucracy, the Bible, conveying the voice of Spirit, God, says, "I will work, and who can hinder it?" (Isa.43:13, American Standard Version). Petty or paralyzing officialdom suggests itself to be more powerful than God, able to prevent the free-flowing action of the divine intelligence and its reflection in man (that is, in all men and women). Those caught up in such circumstances can unravel that red tape by understanding that no such God-countering force exists to put barriers between good ideas and their implementation. And the prayers of those who aren't caught up in red tape are just as valuable. They can support freedom for those wrestling with this enemy of progress, just as we can unite in prayerfully taking on other root causes of poverty, including the ones addressed by other writers in this series.

Writing directly out of her own experience—which included the reversal of her decline into poverty—Mary Baker Eddy observed "that an acknowledgment of the perfection of the infinite Unseen confers a power nothing else can" (Unity of Good, p. 7). Whether we are in the midst of poverty ourselves or observers of distant hardships that tug at our heartstrings, we can acknowledge the infinite Unseen and everyone's ability to recognize and respond to it.

Such spiritual recognition of the divine influence, or Christ, inevitably chips away at the root causes of human hardship by exposing them as God-defying claims that must progressively fall before self-revealing perfection. God's all-power is the ultimate deterrent to poverty's continuance, and through this power, we will progressively shake off the false fetters of failed economies, flawed government, and competition for finite resources.

Each of us, no matter where we are in the world, can overcome, or help others overcome, the burden of poverty. In the boundless perfection of the infinite Unseen, none of us is overwhelmed by the numbers of people in need—nor is it necessary, in practice, for us to be overcome by the lack of resources that we may feel. Instead, we can allow the Christ, which Jesus so perfectly expressed, to operate in our individual lives, transforming them one at a time, and thus bringing light to the whole world. CSS