Spiritual solutions to end poverty: what Christian Science has to offer
Tony Lobl
spirituality.com host: Hello, everyone! Welcome to another spirituality.com live question and answer audio event. Our topic is “Spiritual solutions to end poverty: what Christian Science has to offer,” and our guest is Tony Lobl, a Christian Science practitioner who lives in the United Kingdom.
Tony is also District Manager of Christian Science Committees on Publication for the United Kingdom, so he works in London and will be speaking with us from there.
As some of you know, spirituality.com has been running a series on spiritual solutions to poverty, for several months, and we’ve had writers from Australia, India, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—with a few more coming this month and next, from the Philippines and Ethiopia, as well as the United States and India.
But we wanted to take some time at this stage in the series to let you ask your questions about this subject and about prayer that will lift all of us into a better place.
In a very real way, Tony encouraged this project when he contacted me last August and said, “There are several groups making a serious effort to end poverty. What are you doing about it?” That got me thinking and reading, and I learned that nearly 40 percent of the world’s population exists on one American dollar or less per day. There’s nothing like standing in the line at the grocery store seeing your final bill and realizing that it could represent the income of 35 or 52 or 86 people, depending on how much you’ve bought.
But, of course, there’s much more to dealing with poverty than just the simple transfer of dollars or pounds or whatever currency your country uses. And that’s the more that we’d like to talk about today. Tony, do you have some comments you’d like to make in order to get us started?
Tony Lobl: I’d love to. You know, I’m going right back to the time a couple of decades ago when I first found out about Christian Science and read Mary Baker Eddy’s book,Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. At that point, I wasn’t actually seeking physical healing, which Christian Science is well known for, basically because I actually didn’t have much wrong with me. I just opened the book, and I loved the spiritual ideas, and it changed my life—everything I was experiencing took on a different hue.
But the big issue to me at that time was what I would say were global affairs or world affairs. I was terrified of nuclear annihilation, and I was disturbed by poverty and overpopulation and things like that. And where Christian Science first met my need was just really giving me a sense of hope, that no matter how big the issues the world was dealing with, there could be solutions.
One thing that helped me along the way was I was reading a book called, A Century of Christian Science Healing [(Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), see pp. 217–219]. And I came across this one particular testimony. Now many of the testimonies were about people being healed of sickness and things like that, and they were all very inspiring to me—I certainly enjoyed the whole book.
But this particular testimony just met me where I needed to be met at the time with a sense of spiritual conviction and certainty. It’s written by Velma Ingraham, a Californian, who was traveling in the Near East almost 50 years ago. There were many people struggling with poverty, including young children that were begging and hoping for some help.
She did give some money, but she was trying to find in her own thoughts a deeper resolution to the issue she was struggling with, which was how could these dear people be helped.
One boy was in great need, and after she’d given him some money, her heart just went out to him. She was thinking about an idea in Science and Health which took her right back to the example of Christ Jesus, and wondering, How would Jesus deal with this? What kind of difference would it make if, instead of her being with this little boy, Jesus had been there?
And she thought about a line in Science and Health that talks about Jesus beholding “in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick.” This little boy wasn’t sick, so this had nothing to do with sickness, but she began to think about that, and the way she puts it, out of the depths of her heart she prayed, “Lord, open Thou mine eyes, that I too may see. Let there be light!”
The account goes on to say, “And suddenly there was light. There was nothing but light—the light of spiritual reality.” And she felt such a sense of this spiritual presence, this spiritual light, that she, in fact, lost consciousness of the boy for a little while, and, in fact, lost sight of him.
The next time she saw him, he had totally changed. He was taking care of himself. He was in a state where he was just totally on top of the situation to the extent where he got a job working in a home. He got a bike. His life was transformed.
There wasn’t a lot of language communication between them, so she was trying to ask him, What happened? And as he responded to that, she asked him the specific question, “Who told you … ?” And he pointed up, as if to a heavenly presence, and said, “I! I tell me.”
This story, at the time I read it, when I was very new to the ideas of Christian Science, just meant so much to me. Because as I looked out at the world with my deep concern for some of the situations that I was very aware of, as we were all very aware of then, I thought, We can do something, even if we’re not the people who go out to the frontlines of the problems, whether that be poverty or a war zone or all these different issues.
There’s never a moment when we can’t reach for the I that woman saw and that young lad saw and know that it will bring some difference, some sense of progress, somehow, somewhere. And that has helped me go forward, and just know that we can all make a contribution.
spirituality.com host: That is a terrific account of how that works, isn’t it? And when I think of all the children who are currently begging, like in Brazil and other countries, including some homeless children in the United States, I think that I is still there to help them, isn’t it?
Tony: Well, it is. In fact, going right back to the kind of situations being faced—yesterday [June 12, 2006] was the International Labour Organization’s World Day Against Child Labour. My wife and I saw a quite poignant report on the BBC News about young children in the Democratic Republic of Congo having to work from the age of five or six upwards in not very helpful and healthy conditions.
And the BBC showed these three young children. The one thing that was so wonderful, though, was, despite their conditions, the BBC brought out their individual characters and their hopes for the future. And it brought me back to that same thing I glimpsed in this healing that I shared: there’s always an individual there.
You know, sometimes the media shows us this mass of poverty, but everyone who’s involved in that situation is an individual. And everyone can respond individually to that great I AM, the love of God. We will talk through this chat, I’m sure, about how God does meet individual needs where they are. There must be something we can each do to help support that individual out there realize their individual place in God’s plan.
spirituality.com host: That’s so helpful. And we do have a whole bunch of questions that have come too. We’ll start with Fred who’s writing from New Hampshire. He says, “Here in the US, it seems that society is driven to get more and more. The concept of being happy with what you have has been lost to the need to continuously get more and more stuff. With so much poverty in the world, aren’t we ahead to take the pragmatic step of simply giving more to the poor? How is it that prayer can make a measurable difference?”
Tony: I think one of the issues we should definitely discuss through this program is materialism, because it’s a huge challenge, and not only in America, Fred. In this country, we spent £65 billion on cars last year, which is about $120 billion. It wouldn’t take too many of those cars to alleviate some of the poverty across the globe.
But I do think that, at the end of the day, it’s not really just about the transfer of funds. One of the wonderful things about the spirituality.com series that has been going over the last few weeks is, it has been trying to focus on some of the root causes for poverty and to address those from a spiritual basis.
And I’m not alone in saying this—I’ve read several commentators who are dealing with poverty issues who just say transferring all the funds in the world that seem necessary wouldn’t actually solve the problems. We’ve got to dig deeper and uproot some of the issues that you have been addressing in the series.
spirituality.com host: It’s a change of thought that’s really needed, isn’t it?
Tony: I think we find that in our individual experience as people practicing Christian Science and, presumably, other forms of spirituality where it comes down to, How is thought going to change? And in Christian Science, it’s, How can we grasp how good God is and how good God’s creation must be in order to bring a change into our lives? So that really is what we want to support more broadly.
spirituality.com host: And that’s where Fred’s second question, “How is it that prayer can make a measurable difference?” is really the key, isn’t it? Because if you’re praying, inevitably, thought does change, even if it takes a while.
Tony: That’s right, yes. And the fact is we can all make that contribution. I don’t think there’s anyone in this Web conversation who wouldn’t also be making appropriate charitable contributions. But we can also add our prayers and not be modest about what we can achieve through prayer, especially in the unity of prayer that we can bring together.
spirituality.com host: Fred’s question has a second part, and this has a number of questions in it. He says, “As we look at the concept of poverty, is it not true that poverty is a belief that God cannot supply our needs? Society says that 40 percent of the world’s population lives on less than a dollar a day. However, surveys show that some of the happiest people in the world are also the poorest.
“Is it not true that poverty has nothing to do with money, but with the concept of supply? A lack of something doesn’t have to be a lack of our daily sustenance or needs, but can also be a lack of time or love or energy. So by raising our perception of what poverty truly is, and also by understanding that God supplies all of our needs, can we not be as the lilies of the field, taking no thought of what we shall wear or eat, but simply live our lives to their fullest, knowing that all of our needs will be met?”
Tony: Well, there are a lot of good thoughts there, aren’t there? I think if I’m getting it right, I have heard the kind of surveys Fred is referring to where I think people in Nigeria, for instance, are counted as the happiest among the nations whenever a survey is done. And people in the so-called developed world are a lot less happy, often, despite all the material possessions they have.
I think the one thing we need to be very careful about is we don’t neglect the real challenge of extreme poverty, where literally getting some food on your table every day or two is just a huge challenge.
I obviously have never been in that experience myself, but I’ve experienced times where there hasn’t been a lot of food on the table in my upbringing in a sort of upper-working-class or lower-middle-class family here in the UK—and those times were hard enough. So it’s hard to imagine how it feels to be in the kind of situations we see in the news, where it’s just on a whole other level.
But, having said that, it is a supply issue. We need to be very compassionate about the kind of challenges of supply that others are facing. And if we, through our prayers, can begin to support progress out of those challenges, then I’m sure that’s a deeply Christian thing to do, and we will all be glad to have participated in helping the world solve that problem bit by bit, step by step.
spirituality.com host: Yes, I think that it is an issue that humanly speaking seems overwhelming. But if we are willing to make the commitment, it is something that can be done. It is within the realm of possibility.
Tony: Well, it’s interesting. I was thinking about that 40 percent figure you’ve mentioned, and that Fred also mentioned. In one sense, you would think, if 40 percent of the people are living in that kind of extreme situation, then if 40 percent of the other people each took on one of those people financially, in theory, that problem could be solved. Of course, it doesn’t work like that.
But I think what we can each do, as people who believe in the power of prayer, is we can certainly embrace that 40 percent of the people—not because we’re the spiritual ones and they’re not, but because they’re as spiritual as we are. And as we unite in prayer with them to see them through God’s eyes, then it will support their individual demonstrations. Interestingly enough, I would say that they can also support our prayer in our warfare with materialism right where we are.
It’s been very interesting in the United Kingdom that we have a long history of sending missionaries out to places like Africa. But, in fact, what’s been happening recently is Africa has been sending missionaries here to the United Kingdom.
And, you know, we need it! We need that awakening from people who live so close to Spirit, to come to us and say, “Look, there’s something you might want to know about, and that’s that there’s a God that loves you, and that knowing the love of God is the most satisfying, sustaining, rewarding thing that you can experience.” And so we have missionaries coming from Africa to remind us of that. And we’re all one team working here together to help and support and uplift each other.
spirituality.com host: That’s a very helpful thought. And I think it just shows that with matter, or material objects, the absence or the abundant presence isn’t really where the answer is. It’s knowing that love of God that you were just talking about.
Tony: Well, it is. One of the things those surveys show that people do—and obviously, at the end of the day, man is not a bunch of statistics, we really are all individuals—one of the reports we’ve got back through some of the statistics is that up to a certain point having more money makes you happier, to the degree it makes you comfortable. But after that point, it doesn’t really add anything to your happiness at all.
So, again, I think we do need to support humanity’s right to have those comfort levels where they’re not scrambling for every piece of food to feed their families. But then, if you have, certainly in England, thousands, even millions, you’re not going to find a lot more happiness.
spirituality.com host: Right. Well, now we should move on to some of the other questions. And one of them is from Barry in San Francisco, who says, “As we get more mature, what is the best way to meet our financial needs when we don’t seem to save any money?”
Tony: That’s in interesting question. Mature is an interesting word, isn’t it?
spirituality.com host: Yes.
Tony: One of the concepts of maturity is spiritual maturity, which is maturing into the understanding and demonstration of our relationship to God. And I think one of the things that happens as we do that is we do begin to glimpse that there’s no situation where God cannot find an answer and reveal that answer to us and meet our need where our need is.
Interestingly enough, when I first found Christian Science, I was not regularly employed. And at that time, I wasn’t particularly looking to be regularly employed either. I was really living from day to day. And I felt quite proud about it. Then I found out about Spirit, that Spirit will meet every need, and I read some of the Bible stories, and I thought, Yep, this is a good way to live.
Then I read this amazing Christian Science Sentinel article that pointed out there are different ways of divine Mind supplying our need. And it pointed to the fact that, yes, the children of Israel in the desert got the manna day by day. They couldn’t store it. If they stored it, it went bad. They had to trust God every day for their daily supply.
But then when you got to Joseph in Egypt, he had that wonderful vision that there was going to be a period of lack. And so he had the foresight to save goods for seven years in advance, so that when the period of lack came, there actually was no lack, because he had had the inspiration, the idea, from God to save, and he had done so.
It was really humbling for me, because I realized that the real understanding of supply is not to have one particular way of addressing it or another. It’s just to be convinced that God knows how to unveil the solution that’s right for us at the time, in the situation we find ourselves.
And yes, in a human sense, it is wise to save. And I think as we pray and support the community, it wouldn’t be surprising if people do that better. But if we find we’re in a position where we haven’t done that, it’s never too late to turn to God for the inspiration and understanding of how to go forward from this moment, step by step trusting divine Love that, as Science and Health says, “… always has met and always will meet every human need.”
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. Marilyn from Maine is actually asking a question that sort of ties in with some of the things you said earlier. She says, “Do you think a feeling of worthiness plays into having a steady stream of abundant supply?”
Tony: That’s interesting. I would say that there are probably a lot of people around the world who do feel worthy, but who are still struggling with supply issues. And certainly people who are worthy of feeling worthy, because they are enormously dignified and resourceful people. But there are such huge challenges with some of the infrastructure and other issues in certain places and certain situations.
I think if the individual means feeling worthy with a clear sense of being God’s child, I’ve certainly found that reaching that recognition has lifted the clouds in my thinking and allowed me to see the way forward sometimes when there have been difficulties in issues of where provision of various things is coming from.
Certainly we all should feel worthy, because we all are the children of God. And I think the consciousness of that brings us to the recognition that there are solutions, and it will begin to open our thoughts to what those solutions are in our particular case.
spirituality.com host: I was thinking about what you said earlier, “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man ….” If the worthiness is based on that recognition of the perfect man and of our perfection under God’s care, then that would really help to open the doors, wouldn’t it?
Tony: It really would. There was a wonderful story in The Christian Science Monitor just about a week ago. It was from an article called, “India tackles child marriages” [Anuj Chopra, May 24, 2006]. And the issue was particularly young girls, but also young men, being married off against their will in their early teens. And this is the kind of issue where you can think the problem is so big and so entrenched that it’s very hard to see how you can make a difference at a distance in your prayers.
But I was really encouraged. The Monitor found this one individual, Ragini Dimle, and she was in this position where her family was trying to marry her off as a teen bride in India. And she’s now 18 years old. She’s single, she didn’t go through with the marriage. The reason was because she simply refused. And she said to her parents, “I want to study and stand on my own feet first.”
This individual had that sense of self-worth and the courage to stand up for it. The reason this inspired me was not only because her story in itself is so encouraging, but it came back to the sense that if I pray to support that inner individuality, that spiritual strength, that self-worth, in children facing this situation, I believe that that will enable some to cross the threshold where they take that kind of stand and make the difference.
If several of them do, and if many do, it can actually create that critical mass where politicians really deal with these issues and get clear about laws that outlaw this kind of thing. And so you can see how supporting the individual can support the larger issue, too.
spirituality.com host: Yes, that’s great. Susan, who’s writing from Washington state, says, “As lifelong Christian Scientists, members of our family have proved over and over that there is a divine, caring force for good acting in our experience. However, consistent financial stability has eluded us. The key word is consistent.
“We’ve had wonderful proofs of what Mrs. Eddy says, ‘Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.’ But being self-employed, there are still months when we’ve had to fight off the fear that we may not have enough work to pay the bills. It’s an ongoing spiritual struggle, it seems, to keep trusting God’s provision and supply. There are wonderful highs of inspiration and certainty, and then lows of fear and uncertainty. Please address this.”
Tony: It’s an interesting thing when one looks a little bit higher at what really constitutes reward in one’s life. What I’ve continually glimpsed for myself is that the highest reward is a sense of the spiritual presence of God, or the spiritual power of God, in our lives.
I will address the actual situation. But first, I think there’s room here to be really grateful that as a family, you’re having all these rewarding experiences. We talked about the materialism in the US and the UK and some other countries earlier, that there are people who have millions—in fact, there are people who have billions now—and that’s not to say they won’t have a spiritual experience. If they want to, it’s there for them, too.
But it’s certainly very easy to get distracted by the ease of having a lot of material stuff. And people can miss the blessings of those spiritual rewards that come through that deep demand to rely on God moment by moment, day by day.
So firstly, I would say to this individual, and to the whole family, don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s not just that God’s meeting your need, but God’s meeting a deeper need there, a need that we all have, which is to know God. And that is the richest experience anyone can have on this planet—to know God’s love.
Now having said that, there’s no reason that as that happens, the sense of fear should continue. It’s a bit like riding a bicycle, really, you gain less and less of a wobble, and you get more and more consistent in holding that bike upright—that fear is really the only factor that’s making that uncomfortable. God’s proved already time and time again that when you see through that fear, you find that the solution was already there.
That’s certainly what I’ve found in my experiences of getting supply in times of need. It’s getting through the fear. It’s not as if I’ve produced supply out of nothing; it’s that I’ve seen the supply that was always there.
And that’s something we should expect, something we can get more and more at ease at doing. Not that it will ever become comfortable or easy, but we can get more at ease at doing it. Again, I can only talk from my own experience, but we can see the fear and say, Hold on, I’ve seen through you before. And get more rooted in the recognition of God’s constant supply or provision.
One of the things that might be worth thinking about is how we’re taking lessons learned in our individual lives and our family lives into the broader family of man. One of the things that happens is when we get busy applying the lessons we’ve learned to humanity’s larger problems—and when I say larger, it doesn’t need to be over the other side of the world, it can be round the corner in our own city, or in the rural areas near us—we can take those lessons and care enough for our neighbors to say, These truths that I’m proving must apply to you, otherwise they wouldn’t be true because God doesn’t have favorites.
So every time we make any demonstration of provision despite the challenge it has seemed to have been at the point we make that demonstration, we’re proving a principle that applies to all humanity. And then we can apply that principle out of love. I think as we do that, it becomes even easier, perhaps, to see through our own challenges and fears.
spirituality.com host: Thank you. Ruth in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, is following up with another retirement-related question. She says, “Please address the beliefs of poverty attached to seniors or unemployed, who not only have to live on lower incomes than before they left their jobs, but often have to leave their homes and treasured belongings that remind them of people or places they loved to move to smaller places or institutions that do not feel like home.
“What can you say to help them deal with what seems to be a diminished sense of home and autonomy that sometimes comes with aging or the need to downsize or move because of job loss?”
Tony: Well, here’s one I certainly can’t address through experience. I’m afraid I’m not in that place at the present moment. My heart certainly goes out. We talked about su stenance earlier. And the things that sustain us are certainly not just money. I think this question makes that abundantly clear. It can be an attachment to a place, memories, just the familiarity with a neighborhood.
In fact, one of the wonderful articles I read recently was from someone in New Orleans, who was writing about how you don’t realize how much your neighbors mean to you until there aren’t any neighbors there any more. And from his experience in New Orleans, he realized that just the things that are happening around your home—the neighbor’s kids doing their homework, delivery vans turning up—they’re all part of your larger, broader sense of home. So that sense of having ties and seeming to have them wrested away from you against your will is certainly a tough one.
I think, interestingly enough, Mary Baker Eddy faced that herself many times, and it was in her very senior years, wasn’t it, when she had to leave—well, had to, I say—she had the inspiration to leave Pleasant View, which was the home she loved, and went to live in Chestnut Hill for the last two years of her life, which was not at all the same to her in terms of her sentimental or emotional attachment to it. And if you read the biography, I don’t think there’s a sense that Mrs. Eddy prayed about it and instantly got over it either.
But I do think as spiritual thinkers, as Christian Scientists, or as people who love the ideas of Christian Science, we are spiritual warriors at every age. And these things that come to us do always at least give us a chance to rise up in rebellion and say that we’re going to find the unconditional joy in God, in knowing God, in loving God, which really cannot be taken away from us wherever we find ourselves.
Again, as an individual willing to do that, I think you’re doing something more than just trying to make your own life more peaceful and more joyful. You’re proving a principle that’s applicable to everyone.
And if you can prove it as an individual for yourself that the unconditional love of God brings you the appropriate good to you where you are, whatever those changing circumstances include, then you’re proving that that love of God will do that for all seniors who might find themselves in that same situation in your community, in your country, and in countries everywhere.
So we always have the ability to see ourselves in the light of a prover of these great truths that God’s love outweighs all the issues that we’re dealing with.
spirituality.com host: I think the consistency of God’s presence—I know that that sounds kind of abstract—the reality of God’s presence, to whatever degree we’re able to really feel divine Love’s presence, even in the new place where things are different, and so forth, that will begin to bring a feeling of home and of order and companionship. And it may take different forms, but there are ways that all of those things will happen, because divine Love really does “meet every human need,” don’t you think?
Tony: I think we need to really be open to that, definitely, and be alert to the different ways in which God is expressing the continuity of good in new forms than those that we have perhaps been used to. It’s a little bit of an art, really, to do that, but God is expressing Himself, or Herself, to us moment by moment. Sometimes the demand is to find that in a changed form.
spirituality.com host: Yes. Harley, who’s writing from Fort Mill, South Carolina, says, “The root of poverty is based on ‘the way we think.’ What are examples of specific thoughts that create, promote, or extend poverty? And, of course, what are the practical, thought-changing solutions you have witnessed?”
Tony: I had a look through the articles that are already featured in this series on spirituality.com. And I made a little list of some of the things that the series has highlighted by the fact that individual writers have addressed these.
They include fatalism, a lack of purpose, ignorance, sensualism, prejudice and discrimination, dishonesty, superstition, cultures of blame, racism, cultures of dependency, neglect of initiative or obstacles to initiative, inadequate educational opportunities, or a climate of indifference from community leaders. And those are just some of the issues that have come up. I know there will be more over the coming weeks.
So there are lots of mental issues worthy of attention. And I think we can do that in two ways: one is, We can be very self-aware of our own thinking and how that might need improvement. I can look at that list and see a few I can do better on.
Then we can look at the world thought generally and think, How can we support the world to diminish these qualities which seem to result in poverty, and even in extreme poverty? I think we can make a difference, and I think that’s why, if people haven’t yet read the series, it would be good to take those articles and take each of the issues and bring a healing thought to those specific issues.
One of the examples, for instance, is Subhash Malhotra’s article on poverty in India [“Poverty in India—human causes, inspired solutions”]. He talks about human causes and inspired solutions. He’s talking about the fact that even when people manage to find jobs and have an income, one of the issues they have to deal with in India—and I’ve seen this in Africa, too—is the need to have a big wedding or to have a big funeral.
So even people who are earning suddenly find their resources drained to the point of impoverishment, because they have to have these public displays. Now on one level, that’s a cultural issue, but on other levels, there are mental factors there which I think we can support from a Christian perspective.
Not to say that Christian culture should overtake any other culture, but Christian ideas—prayerful, healing ideas—can help thought take on new focuses and new priorities, because there really are issues there. And again, Subhash does address these in his article, and I would recommend anyone should read that.
spirituality.com host: Yes, that is a very good one. And I think your ideas are very helpful. Tom, in Los Angeles, in California, is cutting to the chase and asking, “How do you stop thinking about money when you are struggling with lack of supply?”
Tony: Well, I have had that experience—again, not to any extreme levels. But it’s the hardest thing. It is just incredibly hard. It’s exactly what one is wrestling with. And getting beyond the idea of money—it is really the material belief of existence as opposed to a spiritual sense of our existence in relationship to God, and a spiritual sense of confidence and the consciousness that moment by moment what we will need will come to us from God. But it is something we can take on—I think it will be individual to everyone exactly how they do wrestle with that and win the victory.
In the occasions in my past when I had that kind of issue, really one of the key aspects that came to me was the sense of faith. And I know in Christian Science, we often give faith a bad name, as if, well, we don’t do faith, we do spiritual understanding. And spiritual understanding is where we want to get to. But Mrs. Eddy gives a lot of positive feedback to faith. Ultimately, it’s the steppingstone to where we want to be mentally, metaphysically. Often it is the crucial steppingstone that helps us get there.
I am thinking of an experience I had where I just didn’t seem to have the money to take a trip I needed to take to get to a wedding of my best friend, which was an ocean away. And there were several steps along the way, too many to go into here. But right up till leaving the night before, I didn’t have enough funds.
It was that sense of faith, that confidence that God would come through. And God did. But only enough that I could get to my friend’s wedding, not that I could get back home, too. So I literally traveled abroad not knowing how I would get back.
But again, God came through. And it wasn’t a blind faith. It was a sense that somehow the provision that is in place for everyone would be in place for me if I was doing what I was meant to be doing, which I was utterly convinced was the case in attending my friend’s wedding. And I was very grateful for that experience, because it rewarded that sense of faith with the wonderful proof that God does deliver.
And as I said, that for me was an individual experience that was very, very motivating and moving. But other people are going through a lot more challenging cases of needing to trust that faith to bring in the next month’s bills or, in some parts of the world, just the next day’s food.
But at the end of the day, there is a principle we’re proving, and that is that God really is the divine Parent of this whole human family. And I do feel that as we prove this in our own experience just as we’re proving, for example, that two plus two equals four, someone somewhere has to prove that 200,000 plus 200,000 equals 400,000.
It is harder to have that faith and that conviction under those more severe circumstances, but at back of it, the same principle that does apply. And if we care enough to pray to support our fellow man in those situations, then we’re surely helping their individual capacity to make that demonstration, that proof.
spirituality.com host: This next question is one you sort of answered in your introduction. The person hasn’t told us where they’re from or who they are, but it seemed like a relevant question: “I live in a major metropolitan area where we see people begging on street corners every day. What can we do to help above and beyond the spare-change approach to giving?” And I think that sort of harkens back to your story about the woman in Egypt.
Tony: Yes. The one thing that I’d say is it’s helpful to be very honest about this challenge, because I think those of us who have a sufficiency in our daily lives are challenged with knowing what is the best way to respond when someone’s asking for money in that way. I’ve certainly had the awful experience where I’ve given someone money in the street out of a sense of compassion, and ten minutes later, I saw them with a bottle of alcohol in their hands.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Tony: And so, my giving, as such, wasn’t necessarily as compassionate as I thought it had been, because it wasn’t producing a positive result.
But I had another experience—I remember these experiences were quite close. I got an underground train here in London and there was this homeless man—a sort of stereotypical homeless man—with problems that were very pronounced. But he was also being really rowdy—he was swearing, he was threatening—to the point where people began to move away from him and even move to the next carriage of the underground train because they were concerned about what he might do next.
I was praying. I can’t remember where I’d been, but I know I was in a good, prayerful mood. And so I looked at this man with that idea we were talking about earlier, How can I see God’s perfect man? Or more accurately, How can I not see God’s perfect man if I really believe that God is the Creator? So I felt a sense of confidence that I should go up and sit right next to this guy and start talking with him.
I did that, and the moment I started talking with him, he calmed down. He still was a bit out of it, and the conversation wasn’t a hundred percent clear, but it was calm. And I just said to him, “What’s your name?” And he answered back, and he said his name was David. And I started talking to him a bit more, and he said, “Who’s your God?” And I said to him, “I worship the Christian Science God.” Mrs. Eddy does use that phrase once inScience and Health, “the Christian Science God.” And that seemed to end the conversation. I got off the tube train.
About two weeks later, I was serving in a Christian Science Reading Room, which was on a major street, and I was sitting there praying. There was no one else in the room at that time. A Christian Science Reading Room is where people can find out about Christian Science. They can buy Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, or other Christian Science literature.
And this man came in, holding a beer can and smoking a cigarette. And my first thought was, There’s a man there holding a beer can and a cigarette. And then I looked more carefully, and it was this guy who I’d been sitting on the tube with. And I looked at him with love in my heart. And I said, “David!” and welcomed him in.
We sat talking, and I think it was that week or the week before that the Sentinel, the sister publication of spirituality.com, had had a Sentinel focused on overcoming alcoholism. This individual, after our conversation, was so open to it, that he took thatSentinel and just went away, again, totally calm, totally happy.
I haven’t seen him since, so I can’t tell you what the outcome is. But I can tell you, for me, it was a very holy, spiritual experience, because it brought me back to the need in every case to see the individual, and not lose sight of that. It’s so easy to see “a homeless man” or “a poor person” or all these labels we give people. But there’s always an individual there, and that individual, if we’re willing to look clearly enough, is the child of God.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s terrific, Tony. Just terrific. This is from Andem in Atlanta, Georgia: “How can one guard against having to face poverty in the future while still in college?”
Tony: Oh, that’s been a big issue over here recently, because we’ve introduced the need for student loans. And that’s something our students here are facing.
I think, again, the issues will be individual, obviously. But I have a dear friend, who, as a student, took a lot of funding through credit cards. And he came out the other end spending all his money on maintaining the debt. A very noble individual, and he was determined not to go into bankruptcy, and has managed to do that and prove it step by step through his commitment to Christian Science and to the understanding of his relationship to God.
What this individual is asking today basically is, How can I not get into that situation in the first place? Again, it’s not something I’ve individually had to contend with as a student. When I went through university, I had the great privilege of a government that paid your fees and even gave you a grant to live on. So while there were issues of having to get funds to have a comfortable time, there were not the kinds of issues faced now with huge loans.
But I do feel from my experience that every suggestion of the need to go into debt has an answer. My wife and I have a mortgage, and I think it took me a while to realize—this was way before I was married—that a mortgage is an intelligent idea that someone had so that people who previously couldn’t afford houses could actually have their own home. And someone somewhere had that idea, and it’s a good idea.
So loans for a student study are obviously, I would say, in the same vein— that someone had an idea that it’s good that everyone, regardless of their background, should be able to go forward into an education. Obviously the issue needing to be faced is how do you meet the need at the other end?
One of the great experiences I had was with debt, actually. And again, this was before I was married. I was facing—I don’t need to go into details—but basically, there was a debt hanging over my head, and I was determined to meet the issue through prayer, through understanding how God would help me in that situation.
And what came to me—I remember I was walking home one day as I was praying about this—was, Would it be enough if God supplied me with a check out of the blue for enough to cover the debt, and I was OK? And I realized it wouldn’t be enough because there are still millions, if not billions, of people who are in debt, and I wouldn’t have proved anything in the larger picture as to their freedom, as well as my own. I needed to find a way to prove that God meets this need.
So it occurred to me to look through Science and Health, by Mrs. Eddy, and the Bible to see what they say about debt, and to think spiritually about the subject and what it really means. I’m sad to say I had a very lazy time of this, because I opened on the Lord’s Prayer and got to the line that says, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
And I stopped there, because—I studied mathematics at university—I thought, There’s a mathematical equation there: It says, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
I’m not a Bible scholar, so it may be that if you read this in the Greek, or anything, what I’m going to say isn’t as accurate as I would like it to be. But reading the King James Version of the Bible, I saw, There’s a mathematical equation. If I forgive my debtors, I will find that my debts will be forgiven.
But, I thought, I don’t have anyone who owes me anything. I’m the one who owes others. But as I explored my thought more clearly, I saw I did have a sense of other people being indebted to me—family, friends, other people I’d helped, even, perhaps, David, the man I just mentioned, the homeless man. I had a sense that I’d done them good, and they owed me something for that. That wasn’t a conscious sense—I wasn’t going around thinking that. But when I explored my thought, there was recognition there.
I thought, No, all good comes from God, the only source of good. No one ever owes me anything or ever will. To the degree I’ve been able to do any good, the debt is to God, just like my own individual debts for the good in my life are to God. And with that, I got really clear that no one anywhere ever owed me anything.
Immediately after that, I got work. At the time I was a freelance worker, and I was experiencing all those fears of, Where would the next penny come from? and things like that. I got a series of different jobs from different sources that were just wonderful the way they came forth, cleared the debt, and I was able to go forward with important projects that I needed to do.
So in terms of taking on the concept of debt—which is, I think, what this individual will have to deal with spiritually—do take on the spiritual aspects of it and what it means to you. Maybe go to the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and the Bible. Think about not only debt, but generosity and abundance, and what we can give. I’m thinking now of that line, actually, about always having sufficiency to do all things. “And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.”
Tied up in that is the sense that if your motive is to bless and to help and to serve, then you will find you have all the sufficiency you need to go forward and do that.
spirituality.com host: Well, I think also, Mrs. Eddy talks about being “grateful for the good already received.” I’ve read a number of articles in the religious magazines produced by The Christian Science Publishing Society where people have been grateful, for example, that they can pay a particular bill—like, maybe, they have five bills and they only have enough money to pay for one, and they’ve been grateful for the ability to pay that one. And that has led, sometimes in very unexpected ways, to the ability to pay other bills or to meet other needs.
There’s a hymn in the Christian Science Hymnal that says, “Our gratitude is riches, / Complaint is poverty …” [Vivian Burnett, No. 249]. I have found that to be a very, very helpful thought over the years.
Tony: It is. And I think most people listening in will have found in their experience—I certainly have—that gratitude is always a motor to move us forward. And we can start with gratitude for what’s very visible and then reach up to a higher gratitude for the “infinite Unseen,” as Mrs. Eddy calls God at one point [Unity of Good, p. 7].
spirituality.com host: Yes.
Tony: But it all moves us forward in the right direction.
spirituality.com host: Right. We’ve been sort of answering the question of Uwe, in Germany, who says, “Well, I would not say that I am really poor. There are a lot of people who have much less than I. But as an artist, I always live at the minimum. I’m 40 already, and getting more and more frustrated about my financial situation. Some days, like today, I wake up in the morning, and I’m just in a panic about my situation.”
I think one of the things you’ve been bringing out is the consistency that the more that we can get ourselves mentally on an even keel where we are feeling God’s presence and are trusting in God’s direction, the more stability we experience. Would you like to comment further?
Tony: My heart goes out to an artist. Artists are a very vital part of our lives, and we need artists. We don’t often value them to the degree that we perhaps value other things. But I think one of the important things is we should expect that we can increasingly find a sense of consistency.
One of the reasons we can expect that is God does not really want our thought to be distracted all the time by our immediate needs. And so, as we get closer to God and look outward with love to others, wanting to meet others’ needs, we can expect more and more consistency in having what we need so that we’re not distracted.
So that’s one thing I feel increasingly I have found. And the other thing is to make sure in our own thinking that we’re keeping a very open mind to God’s direction about the whole scope of what we’re meant to be doing. There’s testimony I remember in which a family was struggling with supply issues.
And they were about to sell something beautiful that they owned when the individual remembered that God supplies everything, including beauty, in our lives, so it couldn’t be right that they would have to sell something beautiful in order to eat and meet the bills. And when they took that stand, one of the two in the couple found work, and that work enabled them to not sell the beautiful thing that they had thought of selling.
That situation shows that we can expect the complete idea in our lives of provision, including the things that are a bit more ephemeral, like beauty.
But I think it goes the other way. We need to be open to the fact that our lives are perhaps meant to be more expansive than we sometimes allow them to be. And certainly to be an artist is wonderful, to be a businessman is wonderful—we can be all those things.
But if we’re spiritually inclined, then that’s got to be number one. And my own experience has been, Boy, if I’m putting Spirit first in my life, God opens up doors that I never expected to either want to go through or to have to go through. But when it’s God opening up that door and you go through it, you find that something that you maybe didn’t think was so important actually has as much importance, seen through the right spiritual lens.
And so I would recommend keeping a real open thought to God’s wide, expansive possibilities for you as an individual, because that’s been my answer to me over the years.
spirituality.com host: You know, as you were talking, I thought of a quotation fromScience and Health, which is, “Soul has infinite resources with which to bless mankind, and happiness would be more readily attained and more secure in our keeping if sought in Soul.”
But the reason I’ve thought of it was because of this individual being an artist, and Soul is so often associated with beauty and so forth, and that idea of Soul having “infinite resources with which to bless” us. Often when you look at your paycheck, or whatever, you’re saying, Well, I don’t have infinite resources. And it’s important to maybe shift the perspective to the divine perspective from time to time.
Tony: I’m glad you brought that up. Let me read the exact statement. “Soul has infinite resources with which to bless mankind, and happiness would be more readily attained and would be more secure in our keeping, if sought in Soul.”
If everyone listening to this conversation could really go away with the commitment to grasp something more of God’s infinite resources, and then see how that applies to those problem areas we see about on the news or read about in the newspapers or that we meet round the corner in our own cities or in the rural areas in our countries—whoever we are, wherever we are—if those resources are infinite, there is enough to go round.
And there’s an awakening we can all be a part of to help humanity get more of the understanding and the proof of the infinite nature of those resources. And that challenges so many of the issues that seem to be a problem, like competitiveness, like government corruption. Many of the things that seem to be such a problem are based on a sense of the finite nature of resources, whether it be water in the Middle East, or whether it be oil issues between China and America.
If we begin to grasp the infinite resources available, then we’re going to open up channels. And those channels will express themselves in very practical ways, as you pointed out earlier.
I’m convinced as we take these issues and pray, you know, the nongovernment organizations will have better ideas. The governments and the leaders will find that they have the political will to make the right choices. The individual on the ground in those places where there are such challenging circumstances will have ideas.
There was another great article in the Monitor about a new, I think, irrigation system in Africa that one individual thought of and put into practice, which is giving a whole community water in ways that didn’t seem available before [see Mike Pflanz, “Principal helps village feed itself,” April 18, 2006].
There are so many ways that breakthroughs can come on the ground. But I really do believe that it takes the commitment of spiritual thinkers all around the world—Christian Scientists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims—everyone can lift their thoughts to a higher consciousness to where these infinite resources are and what a difference it will make as we see them, glimpse them, and bring them out.
spirituality.com host: That’s so helpful. Now this one is a little bit more nitty-gritty. We’re just about out of time, but I’m going to take this one last question because it touches on the issue of womanhood. In the issues of poverty, one of the issues is womanhood, especially in less-developed countries. This is from an American, but, nevertheless, it might enable us to address that aspect of things. The writer is named Elle, and she’s writing from Iowa. She says, “How can a wife think about demonstrating her individual supply when it appears a ‘husband’—a channel for her supply—has a different, and sometimes conflicting, demonstration of his own to make?”
Even in African countries, and in some others, there can be a dichotomy between the responsibilities of men and women that is quite stark.
Tony: We recently had an article in a newspaper here called The Voice, which features the African community and Caribbean community in the United Kingdom. The article was called, “Women’s liberation: key to ending child misery,” and it talked about the need to free up women to be independent in their control of the supply they have.
It’s a huge issue, and interestingly enough, without going into too much detail, it was a five-part series on those kinds of issues around the world that led me to my commitment to Christian Science. I was already committed to reading Science and Health and reading the Bible, and putting the ideas into practice. But I read this series about the problems women were finding all over the world, and I just felt, agonized. It was a very expressive series in The Christian Science Monitor, very in-depth.
I took a step back, a mental step back and I thought, Well, what’s my role in this to make a difference here? I realized that, yep, on the ground there’s a huge difference between women’s issues and men’s issues, but at a metaphysical, spiritual level, my understanding in Christian Science is with each the reflection of Father-Mother God, so that each one of us spiritually is the male and female of God’s creating in one.
What occurred to me, looking at this attack on womanhood, was to ask myself, Is there a deeper attack going on here that we need to be alert to and aware of. And is that what the Bible calls the carnal mind, or everything that is opposite to God, everything that would claim to undermine God—would it be saying that it can keep down the qualities of womanhood in men and women, in all humanity, and would it be saying that because, really, the qualities of womanhood are the clearest expression of God as Love, which is the healing power in our lives, in the world?
I kept praying about that, and I thought, I need to give consent in my own thoughts to the fact that God’s mother-love, God’s motherhood, and its reflection in mankind, in all of us, cannot be obstructed or paralyzed or hampered or hindered or kept back.
I thought that was an important prayer, and that it was a universal, global prayer—that suddenly, as I was praying it, I thought, Well, what about me? Am I expressing the mother-love qualities in my life?
What are those qualities? One of them I saw was that wonderful quality of commitment, I mean, commitment of the mother to the child in a family where everything is as it should be is just a beautiful thing. I thought, Am I suppressing that mother-love reflection in me and refusing to be committed, which I was, certainly, to joining church and being a part of that commitment to taking the movement of Christian Science forward.
I realized I needed to change. I needed to say, I’m not going to be fooled. I’m going to make that commitment. I’m going to go forward, and to serve in any capacity I can. And that was on the basis of realizing the need to not let the qualities of mother-love, motherhood, or womanhood be kept down in me individually and in the world universally.
There is a huge need, whether it be in an individual relationship, or whether it be in community or global issues, for womanhood to emerge, and to bring not only the freedom to women, but to bring the freedom to us all that will come from that.
But that really needs to come on a spiritual basis. It will have practical results, it has to have practical results, but obviously if it’s purely a political movement or it’s purely a social movement, then it can go up wrong avenues as well as right avenues. But if it’s in a spiritual growth of humanhood into the full embrace of the motherhood that is reflected from God, then we’ll be led in the right directions.
spirituality.com host: That is so helpful. And I think you have done a terrific job of summarizing what we’ve tried to convey here today. You’ve come back again and again to the idea of the individual, that it’s not a mass—whether it’s a mass of women or a mass of poor people or however you want to describe it—each individual has their own place in God’s care. And just as you saw, suddenly, that the thing you were praying about applied to you and brought you to a different level of commitment, each individual has that capacity.
Those of us who maybe have a better economic situation aren’t just praying for a mass. It’s really the individuals that are around the world, each of them being inspired to find new ways to move forward, wouldn’t you say?
Tony: Well, funnily enough—I know you and I didn’t discuss this before, but it’s as if you were reading my summary. So you’ve done wonderfully well there.
I think there are two aspects of individuality that really have stood. One is, as you say, to really know that every mass problem out there is made up of individuals, each of whose lives is crucial, each of whom is precious in the eyes of God, and, rightly, is precious in our own eyes too.
The other aspect of individuality that is so key to where we go next in dealing with this issue as spiritual thinkers is to never lose sight of our own individual capacity to make a difference. Mary Baker Eddy in her writings, in several places, quotes a saying that was actually originally from Wendell Phillips, the reformer abolitionist. And Wendell Phillips said, “One on God’s side is a majority.”
Any one of us can be that one. It takes a moment of conviction that God is there, caring for His children. But I feel that we can all do that. We can all do more of that. Taking the time, making the effort to change our thoughts as we take in the news, as we take in what we see, as we take in what our own experiences are telling us, we can be that one on God’s side that can be a majority, and can begin to make a dent on some of these bigger issues.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s so great. And Tony, you’ve just been wonderful to be with us, and to answer these questions. And of course, we’re grateful to everyone who participated.
Citations used in this chat
Science and Health
King James Bible