Editorial October 17, 2016 Issue

Cared for by God in His kingdom

Lyle Young

In 1956 the Argentine author Julio Cortázar wrote a short story that has become a classic—“La noche de la boca arriba” (“The Night Face Up”). In it (spoiler alert!) a man is hospitalized after a motorcycle accident and while recovering has a series of dreams in which he finds himself in a different time and place. After the dreams become more intense, he wrestles to wake from one of them but discovers that he can’t do that because the dream is the actual reality while the experience in the hospital is the dream. The story, like much of the literature of the Latin American Boom period from about the late ’50s to the ’70s, causes readers to question assumptions about the world around them, showing that thought and consciousness shape experience more than external factors such as time and space.

Of course, on the surface, the question of when and where we are seems simple enough. We’re born, we have some good times, we have some bad times, and then, eventually, the person dies. But Mary Baker Eddy, a penetratingly keen observer of human thought and experience, saw that while the human person seems to be experiencing the ebbs and flows of human existence, the true individual as God’s image and likeness is unchangingly alive, harmonious, and safe in the presence of God, divine Love. Further, she saw that as we come to know ourselves to be God’s spiritual likeness, we undergo the transformation of character that Jesus called being born again (see John 3:3). This happens through spiritual growth, purification, and leaving behind material concepts. The result of this change of base from the flesh, or matter, to Spirit is gradually finding oneself not in another dimension but in the only dimension, in the holy presence of one infinite Love.

The practical care that flows from this reality doesn’t involve a series of physical actions that respond to physical needs. Rather, this care consists of God feeding us mentally with ideas and thoughts from Him. He gives us inspiration and ideas that so touch and uplift our hearts that they heal our bodies.

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Bible Lens—October 17–23, 2016