The scene was idyllic. Cool breeze, majestic view—the only thing wrong was the incessant clanging in the background, which got louder and louder the more I tried to tune it out . . . until I couldn’t tune it out anymore and woke up. I never did like that alarm clock!

Studying Christian Science can feel like an awakening. But although waking up from a sleeping dream may or may not be a welcome experience, when we wake to the presence of God, Love, caring for us and supplying every need, we always feel glad. 

The awakening itself, however, isn’t always comfortable. As a friend once commented, he sometimes feels scolded when he reads the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. 

If we feel that the Bible or Mrs. Eddy’s writings are speaking sharply to us, it’s helpful to remember that they aren’t actually condemning us. Instead, we can think of them as alarm clocks awakening us to our pure and good individuality and destroying anything about us that is unlike God, good. The Bible says, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16). And Mrs. Eddy puts it in these words: “The real man cannot depart from holiness, nor can God, by whom man is evolved, engender the capacity or freedom to sin” (Science and Health, p. 475). 

But what about those passages that alert us to corrections we need to make—for example, sins we need to overcome? The two sentences immediately following the above assurance read: “A mortal sinner is not God’s man. Mortals are the counterfeits of immortals.” How do we know which one accurately describes us—God’s creation or a mortal sinner?

When we wake to the presence of God, Love, caring for us and supplying every need, we always feel glad.

The good news is, we aren’t being asked to choose which one we are. There is, in reality, only one choice. We can be only what we actually are: God’s beloved child, sinless and perfect. The first description given above, God’s child, tells us what is true. So, why not end there? Because few of us really believe we’re spiritual and perfect or always feel God’s loving presence. But Mrs. Eddy’s purpose in describing a mortal, subject to sin and sickness, isn’t to pin that picture on us and then condemn us for it. There’s only one reason to point out a lie: so it can be seen as a lie, disbelieved, and thereby destroyed in the light of what is true.

Robert Peel, a biographer of Mrs. Eddy, noted that she sometimes spoke very sharply to correct an error in the thought or action of her students. Peel wrote, “. . . she expected them to understand that its purpose was not to fasten a fault on them but to expose it as something foreign to their real nature” (Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, p. 319).

Instead of resenting the condemnation of an error in our thought or action, we can welcome it. It actually frees us! If a friend woke us out of a bad dream we were having, wouldn’t we be grateful?

Perhaps the problem is that too often it doesn’t feel like a dream. Perhaps sin and sickness feel as if they are part of us—feel more real than the truth of who we are. That’s when we need to remember that Christ, the divine idea of God that comes to destroy error, is always speaking to us, in just the way we can hear. Christ reminds us that if we seem to fall, we don’t have to stay on the ground. We can identify that which caused us to stumble, see it as foreign to our true nature as God’s offspring, and leave it behind as we move forward in freedom.

Of course, identifying a lie as a lie doesn’t give us permission to indulge it on the grounds that the sin we commit isn’t real and therefore doesn’t matter. That would be voluntarily adopting the error and thus the penalties that come with it, adopting both the sin and its consequences. Rather, pointing out the lie frees us to see ourselves as we are, forever separate from it because we are eternally one with God, who is Life and Spirit.

I once let a friend down very badly. She readily forgave me, but I had a hard time forgiving myself. When severe flu-like symptoms also appeared, I prayed to see my true freedom, but just seemed to get sicker. Suddenly I realized that despite praying for healing, I wasn’t seeing myself as worthy of healing. I was condemning myself for being a neglectful, forgetful mortal. But that description of me was just as false as the flu was. I needed to recognize both as lies and therefore no part of me. Instead of being sick or sinful, I had the dominion to express both health and right action. When I awoke the next morning, I was completely free of the flu symptoms, as well as both the guilt and the fear that I might fail in that way again.

The truth is that we are forever Love’s beloved children. The Bible and Science and Health assure us of that. They also alert us to the lies that we’re sick and sinful. These books speak strongly against those lies in order to shake us awake. Sooner or later they’ll succeed in doing so. Ultimately, we have no choice but to awaken to our true, Godlike selfhood. Why not embrace this truth now?

Lisa Rennie Sytsma, Associate Editor