Birds have long been symbols of upward-soaring joy, freedom, buoyancy, and vibrant living. What a joyful melody comes from the western meadowlark as he sings on the wing! This hints the unlabored joy and unfettered freedom of spiritual sense and of ascending thought.

Christian Science teaches humanity how to sing on wings of joy. It corrects the false concepts of man as a joyless and discontented mortal by revealing the man of God’s creating, the spiritual man of joyous activity.

Physical sense cannot recognize the man of joyous reality. But spiritual sense is conscious of the true individuality of each one of us as it exists in divine Love, incorporeal, fearless, and sinless, controlled only by the divine will.

Learning to fly on wings of joy brought freedom to a girl who had an extreme nervous condition.

Human consciousness seems to recognize both of these senses as real until it learns through Christian Science that one, spiritual sense, is real and the other necessarily unreal. Then thought mounts upward with joy. Mrs. Eddy says in Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 (p. 267): “The bird whose right wing flutters to soar, while the left beats its way downward, falls to the earth. Both wings must be plumed for rarefied atmospheres and upward flight.”

Christ Jesus was conscious of joy as spiritual and ever present. When the disciples were allowing sorrow to mar their joy because of the gloomy experience their Master must pass through to show the way of eternal Life, Jesus promised to see them again, saying, “Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:22). Why? Because no man gave it to them; no circumstance, no human condition, no place or person, gave it to them.

Divine Love alone bestows joy. Therefore we must look for it in Spirit, not in illusive matter. As we look in the right direction for joy, we shall find it natural for the heart to soar and sing in joyous freedom even before some earth weight has fallen away.

In her book Unity of Good, Mrs. Eddy asks this question (p. 9): “What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system?” Out of her deep experience in healing sickness and overcoming sin, she gives the answer: “This: that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God. This difference wholly separates my system from all others.” By knowing the unreality of discontent, self-pity, depression, joylessness, and the like, we demonstrate the ever-presence of spiritual joy, and the body will respond to our thought.

Learning to fly on wings of joy brought freedom to a girl who had an extreme nervous condition caused, according to medical belief, by pressure on the brain at the time of birth. Two doctors had said that there was no known cure for the condition and had prescribed a sedative for the girl to take the rest of her life. One day a friend took her to the Christian Science Sunday School, and she was encouraged by the love, spontaneity, and joy expressed there.

Later a Christian Science practitioner gave her prayerful help and spent many hours in explaining to her, among other things, that her healing would appear through a change of consciousness from the material to the spiritual. Resisting the physical handicaps as if they were real and expressing joylessness had held her in bonds. She had to spiritualize her thought by admitting the joyful elements of divine Love.

When we claim joy as our spiritual heritage, it appears humanly to meet our present need.

The realization that the depressing stubbornness and moody discontent were totally unreal because not of God came gradually to the girl’s thought. She began to express to some degree the God-bestowed joy and freedom which were part of her true being. As she did so, she was able to take a position of simple requirements and later to enter the business world. Still later, when about to be married, she was told by a physician that she was entirely healed. Christian Science, applied correctly, had lifted her on spiritual wings of joy from despair to a useful and balanced life.

This Science is a friend of what appears to be mortal man, even though it denies the reality of the fleshly selfhood and its conditions. Compassion is shown by Science, not through condemnation, but in joyful insistence that material existence, with its discontent and limitations, its frustration and lack, is unreal because it is unlike Spirit, God.

As we refuse to let our thoughts be clouded by negative thinking that denies our God-given joy, false consciousness gradually yields its claim to be our mind. To the degree that we understand the allness of God and see the utter nothingness of the evidence of the material senses, we fly on fearless and unfettered wings of joy.

When we claim joy as our spiritual heritage, it appears humanly to meet our present need. The tasks which confront us, however humble, will seem unlabored and will be easily accomplished as we actively glorify God and express the divine qualities of intelligence, wisdom, joy, and inspiration.

Mrs. Eddy says (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 21), “The heavenly intent of earth’s shadows is to chasten the affections, to rebuke human consciousness and turn it gladly from a material, false sense of life and happiness, to spiritual joy and true estimate of being.”