“How many of you have someone you love in your life?” asked the speaker at a talk I attended. She made it clear that could mean anyone: a sister or brother; colleagues or friends; a spouse or a child.

Virtually all those present in the packed auditorium raised their hands.

She added, “And how many of you love yourself as much as you love that person?”

The discrepancy was striking. Only a dozen hands went back up.

My heart went out to those not raising their hands. I knew from experience how it felt to have a nagging inner voice always finding fault.

But that night, my hand was raised. My introduction to Christian Science some time before had led to the eventual silencing of that constant inner critic. As I studied the Bible and the correlative writings of Mary Baker Eddy, I grasped that we are so much more than the often-mixed-up, material character we get used to seeing ourselves as. I learned that we are, at root, God’s sons and daughters, and He loves each of us unwaveringly.

That doesn’t mean we’re free to do whatever we like. Growing clearer about our divine nature brings to light thinking and behavior that don’t express our inherent goodness as God’s children, and inspires us to change them. But it’s God’s ceaseless care impelling this. As I came to appreciate the liberating impact of heeding this correcting love of God, I saw how very different that was from sharp self-criticism. The Bible urges us to “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), and I saw how that nonstop nagging came from a mind that was not in Christ Jesus—a mind that wasn’t the divine Mind, God, that Jesus so obediently expressed. I realized I had the God-given right to stop listening to a litany of self-condemning complaints, and instead listen meekly in prayer for thoughts that came with a sense of peace and joy that assured me their source was Mind. These thoughts from God taught me to love myself on the same basis they taught me to love everyone else—through lifting thought beyond a material analysis of self-worth to a spiritual sense of how precious we all are as God’s creation.

There’s Bible poetry that beautifully captures this inherent, spiritual worth. The Psalmist sings to God, “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalms 139:14).

We are each a marvelous work of our flawless creator, deriving all that we are directly from God’s nature. The divine Mind never sees material personalities of varying value but loves us as its spiritual ideas. And that love of God for all His children is rightly reflected by all God’s children loving one another, including each of us loving ourselves as God loves us.

Declaring, yielding to, and sticking with the truth of our God-given worth prepares us to be ready and willing to actively engage with, and love, others.

In practice, it’s not always easy to yield a human conception of ourselves to this true consciousness of our inviolable worth. Mary Baker Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures says, “Material belief is slow to acknowledge what the spiritual fact implies” (p. 20). But a resisting human nature is never our reality. It’s a mistaken, material sense of ourselves that we can increasingly understand isn’t true as we grasp that we are solely those marvelous works of God.

The study and practice of Christian Science provides many aids to achieving this, including weekly Bible Lessons from the Christian Science Quarterly, consulting the pastor—the Bible and Science and Health—and daily prayer for ourselves.

In relation to the latter, I’ve found a description of how Mrs. Eddy started her day particularly insightful. Calvin Hill, an early worker in the Christian Science movement, recalled her as saying, “The first thing I do in the morning when I awake is to declare I shall have no other mind before divine Mind, and become fully conscious of this, and adhere to it throughout the entire day; then the evil cannot touch me” (We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, Volume I, p. 353).

To me, this is a powerful example of how we can pray to experience immunity to any evil influence—whenever we pray, and whatever aspect of God we might focus on. Mentally or verbally declaring what’s spiritually true is a vital steppingstone, but prayer is more than that. We need to ponder the reality of what we have declared until our thought shifts and we feel the sweet assurance of God’s reality and our indissoluble, sacred worth. This overrules the tendency to measure ourselves and others materially rather than spiritually, and empowers us to stick to that understanding “throughout the entire day.” 

Sometimes an alternative voice of self-centeredness might convince us we don’t deserve to take the prayer time required to attain such Christly clarity of thought. But that’s a false aspersion we can rebel against, because we’re always worthy of the space it takes to assert and feel God’s grace, and because doing so is unselfish. Declaring, yielding to, and sticking with the truth of our God-given worth prepares us to be ready and willing to actively engage with, and love, others.

In truth, we can also rebel against the very notion of an alternative voice to God’s. To Christ Jesus, who best manifested and articulated God’s love, any inner communications that didn’t evidence God, good, as their source were from “a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44)—were unreal and unable to communicate anything. All was the one Mind embracing its reflections in Love. On that basis, Jesus showed us how to say “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39) to all that stresses us. He literally stilled a storm at sea with those words—in addition to healing physical and mental illness, overcoming severe lack, and inspiring character reformation.

Such restoration to human freedom is the natural outcome of turning to God to learn of our true value and finding that we are always totally loved.

Tony Lobl
Associate Editor