You are your neighbor

A friend describes a cartoon she saw: A robber, holding up a bank, passes an empty pouch across the counter, and instructs the teller: “Don’t give me too much. I’m not good with money.”

She laughingly reports that this reminded her so much of herself that she had it taped to her office wall for years.

We can all probably relate to some aspect of it’s-so-me thinking—saying “guilty” to human frailties (large and small) that we’ve become so familiar with that they feel like part of us. But Christian Science identifies us in an entirely different way. Not divided into “two”—a spiritual self and that other one that “has all the issues”—but in Mary Baker Eddy’s words, as “an active portion of one stupendous whole” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 165 ).

Identifying with wholeness—as a reflection of God, one Mind—has lasting and far-reaching blessings, as evidenced by the legacy of Mrs. Eddy’s healing work. The touchstone to her discovery of Christian Science was the Bible, grounded in the teachings of Jesus and the Christ activity that he recognized and demonstrated. In several places in her writings, Mrs. Eddy echoes the Master’s leading, “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39 ), and frames it as an essential “demand” of Christian Science in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 467 ).

Mary Baker Eddy echoes the Master’s leading, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” and frames it as an essential “demand” of Christian Science.

This demand is an opportunity for us to realize how essential the inter-connectedness—the oneness—of “thy neighbour” and “thyself” really is. Because, how can we authentically see the entirely spiritual identity of our neighbor if we’re harboring a laundry list of complaints against ourselves? And conversely, how can we love ourselves, truly cherish what we are as God’s unerring, spotless idea, if we are classifying others—friends, family, colleagues, and even specific nations—as less than this intact, irreversible idea?

Upholding Jesus’ guidance, “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him” (Matthew 5:25 ), Mary Baker Eddy advised us to not struggle with a lie, but instead to “dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate …”—and that we have “divine authority” to do so (Science and Health, p. 390 ).

Dismissing the lie doesn’t mean we attempt the impossible task of seeing human perfection. Nor does it make us ostriches with our heads stuck in the sand. What it does is shake the sand from our eyes—our limited thought—liberating and lifting us to an entirely new viewpoint. From this viewpoint, we see the man of God’s creating, the spiritual perfection that is divinely ours.

It is here that the light of Truth is allowed to shine forth. The one, intelligent Mind embracing us—and our neighbor—in spiritually sustained wholeness, where recrimination, judgment, and disappointment find no place. And what do you know? This light reveals itself as healing, in practical terms that we can understand.

In this way, we behold the majesty that Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy pointed us to—the glorious love God has for man.