During my first year of college, I took a required course in humanities. In a lecture on Plato, the professor pointed to two chairs in front of the classroom. One chair was in good condition, and the other had a broken leg.

The professor pointed to the one with a broken leg and said that this is not what we envision when we think about a chair. Instead, we picture a whole chair standing on four legs. He then explained that, according to Plato, the reality of this chair is the idea of it and not a physical form. 

This lesson reminded me of something I had heard several months prior to this class. I had started dating a young man whose parents were Christian Scientists. I had thought that their religious beliefs were strange. But this class lecture reminded me of something they had said about God’s creation being spiritual and not material and about being one with God’s law of harmony and perfection. When I thought about God’s law, I thought about it as being like the law of gravity, which we cannot see, although we feel its effects.