Article October 10, 2011 Issue

Dance club angels

By Erin Plum

One night last spring, I returned to my college dorm room after watching a spectacular lightning display with some friends. I was about to go dancing at a club for the first time, and I had an hour to get ready. As I pondered what to do with the extra time I had on my hands, my eyes fell on the Christian Science Bible Lesson that was sitting on my desk. I hadn’t read much of the Lesson that week, so I decided it would be a good idea to study it for a while. I was feeling a little bit anxious about going clubbing in a big city late at night, so I thought maybe I would find some helpful ideas to calm my thoughts.

First I asked myself, What is my motive for doing this? There were a few obvious reasons, as well as some higher motives. I wanted to try something new and exciting, and I was looking forward to a fun night with a group of friends. I also wanted to rely on God for my safety, well-being, and joy, and I wanted to be a blessing in an environment that might not seem very “spiritual.” I expected to see drinking and smoking, and some people who would appear to rely on these things for happiness. But I knew I needed to contradict this negative expectation and replace it with what I knew to be true in Christian Science about each of us, that we are each children of God. And I had to make this mental change now, so that my thought would be on the right track before I even stepped on the dance floor.

As I looked through the Lesson, I discovered that many of the passages clearly addressed worries I had. In the following statement from Science and Health, I found reassurance that all of God’s children are linked to the one Mind, God, able to tune in to the “kingdom of heaven” right here, and therefore, in reality, they are incapable of sin or any ungodlike action: “Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind in which all the manifestations of Mind are harmonious and immortal, because sin is not there and man is found having no righteousness of his own, but in possession of ‘the mind of the Lord,’ as the Scripture says” (p. 291). I was comforted by the fact that everyone inherently possesses “the mind of the Lord,” and never lacks intelligence or wisdom.

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