The prophet vision and the European debt crisis
The Spanish government has also launched new austerity measures that include curtailing civil servants’ bonuses, reducing unemployment benefits, and cutting back on coal subsidies. None of these measures has been popular, but an EU ultimatum requires Spain to shave 65 billion euros from the state budget within two and a half years in exchange for receiving funds for its struggling banks. Investors fear that bailing out Spain will drain crisis resources and impact Italy.
Here in Spain many are deeply concerned. The Bible verse “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18) moves my heart to pray for greater vision: a vision of the sovereign power of the one Creator, God, who has created man—all of us—in His image and likeness, possessing infinite goodness and progress; vision to discern more confidently that because this crisis is not the creation of our caring Father-Mother, God, it has no authority or staying power.
Understanding God as Mind—our only Mind—enables us to see right through false material views of unjust political, economic, and religious codes to the supreme reign of intelligence. Aligning thought with the one reality, where each of us is sustained in God’s infinite range of harmony and intelligence, reveals the powerlessness of fear.
Praying with such vision can melt the skepticism and distrust that expect disaster before a solution can be found. It’s a vision that will dissolve habits of thought and culture that resist the demand for change.
The Bible verse "Where there is no vision, the people perish" moves my heart to pray for greater vision.
God-given vision enables us to acknowledge that no matter what the material senses are saying about continuing lack in the eurozone and worldwide, nothing can separate us from God’s unassailable abundance for each of us. Abiding prayerfully in this spiritual fact can bring to light greater integrity in individuals and institutions.
The prophet Elisha lived in deep conviction of God’s power to reverse evil and its effects. When the Syrian armies came to capture Elisha in the city of Dothan, his servant desperately asked Elisha, “Oh, master, which way … are we to turn?” Unmoved by the material scene and wholly conscious of God’s supremacy, Elisha prayed, “O Lord, open his eyes and let him see.” Through this prayer, his servant was able to see God’s all-encompassing protection for them. The whole situation was resolved peacefully (see II Kings 6:15–23, New English Bible).
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy defines prophet as “a spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth” (p. 593).
Prayer that discerns divine Love’s infinite, always available goodness enables us to trust Love’s ability to remove any evidence of evil as debt, loss, or some other form. Even a glimpse of this spiritual fact helps us pray with healing conviction that leaders in the EU—and everywhere—as well as their citizens, can feel the tenderness of divine Love, Principle, basing their decisions.
Predictions that decision makers can fail to reach right decisions or that the weak will cause the downfall of others become irrelevant under God’s law of harmony, which is always apparent to the “prophet thought.”
As events move forward, God’s message to the prophet Isaiah can be a guide to our prayers in support of a more balanced economic future for the eurozone and its neighbors: “For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland” (Isaiah 43:19, The New Living Translation).
