How could she not like me? I was pouring on the charm. My jokes all hit the mark—everyone else was laughing. And I was being so nice! But despite my best efforts, my coworker at the art supplies store clearly despised me. In fact, the harder I tried, the less I endeared myself to her.

This reached a breaking point one day at work. I became physically uncomfortable from a skin irritation that suddenly appeared on my stomach. I excused myself to be alone, reaching out to God in prayer for relief. Used to receiving applicable and uplifting spiritual messages in thought, I was surprised by the one that flooded my consciousness on this occasion. It came as a line from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “Self-love is more opaque than a solid body.” 

To be honest, I was more than surprised. I was actually a bit miffed! There I was in need of healing, and this felt like a rebuke. But the thought came more forcefully, and I yielded to considering its meaning and relevance.

The quote is the first line in a paragraph found in Science and Health, which goes on to say: “In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,—self-will, self-justification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death” (p. 242).

As an artist, I latched on to what I could most readily relate to, “solvent.” Having regularly used a variety of solvents for mixing paint, stripping furniture, and cleaning brushes and surfaces, I knew that the better the solvent, the less human effort was required in its use. Divine Love, I saw, is the most potent solvent of all. It dissolves the very foundation of every problem, the stubborn stone of error that I like to call the “self trifecta”—self-will, self-justification, and self-love. They often can be bundled together, but even independently, they would cajole us into believing we have a selfhood apart from God. But because God, divine Love, is all-powerful, ever present, and infinitely expressed, a selfhood separate from God is impossible. In this context, “self” does not refer to the unique, worthy, spiritual individuality that we each express, but to a mortal, limited, material selfhood that is unreal and therefore apart from God.

That day in the break room, I reasoned that the problem wasn’t in my body or in someone else, but in a false sense of selfhood. Performing like a jester to get my coworker to like me was not helpful to anyone—it was actually selfish. I decided to let God, as Love itself, show me Love’s nature reflected in man’s—as my and my coworker’s true nature. I let divine Love dissolve self-will (willfully demanding affection), self-justification (justifying that I had a wonderful material personality), and self-love (mentally boasting about myself).

It wasn’t long before I was able to return to the sales floor, feeling much better physically. In humility, I continued to declare mentally that I was God’s child, not needing approval or validation from anyone else. The physical healing was complete by the end of the day. The healing with the coworker came gradually—exactly when, I’m not sure, because my focus was on loving her as God’s expression rather than on getting love. But by the time I left that job, we considered each other friends, and we honestly enjoyed each other’s company.

Because God is infinitely expressed, a selfhood separate from God is impossible.

Several years later, a relative told me how he’d been studying that passage I call the “self trifecta” from Science and Health—the one that had come to me in prayer. Though he’d read it many times before, he had misread “adamant of error” as “Adam man of error.” We laughed about it, but it was a useful anecdote. Genesis 2 contains an allegory about the mortal man named Adam. This was the depiction of a so-called mortal, flawed—subject to failure, sin, disease, and death. As the Bible says, he was comprised of dust and destined to return to dust (see Genesis 3:19). Adam symbolizes the notion of an identity, or selfhood, apart from God—this notion is mistaken, or “error.”

The word error is the first word in the definition of Adam in the Christian Science textbook (see p. 579). The word also appears in the definitions of Eve and serpent, other major characters in the allegory about mortality. And sometimes the author of Science and Health uses the words error and Adam interchangeably (see p. 545 and p. 529).

In Latin, error means “a wandering, a figurative going astray, or mistake.” Christ Jesus was the remedy for this “Adam man of error,” demonstrating for all time that man’s identity is not to be found in mortality, but in Christ—the word that describes man’s spiritual, indivisible relation to God, the substance of man’s identity and being. Elucidating Paul’s words from First Corinthians 15:22, Mrs. Eddy wrote, “ ‘As in Adam [error] all die, even so in Christ [Truth] shall all be made alive’ ” (Science and Health, p. 545). In Christ, we cannot mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, or morally deviate or wander from Truth, but live by and in Truth, forever at one with God, good. Christ Jesus showed us the way in his teachings and example.

We are presented daily with the suggestions that life is in matter, that evil has place and power, and that man is a mixture of mind and matter, spirit and dust. This mixture could be called “personality.” In my spiritual study, I occasionally replace the word error with personality. This helps clarify for me that it’s a false concept of self, of identity, that is to be overcome—and that it’s through accepting Christ, Truth, as defining my very own and others’ identity that I can overcome error. 

It’s equally important to be alert to the temptation to try to “improve” our personality. While it can be useful to learn and grow, expanding our horizons, it’s important to remember there is no perfect selfhood in matter! In the passage from Science and Health that came to me in the art store, I’d seen that the argument of selfhood in matter is the “law of sin and death.”

Thankfully, Christian Science teaches how to destroy the mortal sense that serves as “host” to sin, sickness, and death, and discover our perfect, spiritual individuality. When we attach no personality to sin, sickness, and death, we are able to challenge and destroy them, because they are not law. The dissolving of a mortal sense of self is not a loss of our individuality, but a victory—the destruction of error that brings a purified and more substantial sense of our identity as God’s child. We are free to be what we really are—God’s image and likeness.

Because a false sense of selfhood is essentially at the heart of all discord in some way, putting it off for our spiritual identity can be a challenging undertaking. But the rewards are tremendous, as stated in this promise: “This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man’s absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace” (Science and Health, p. 265). 

As I learned at the art store, when we work to dissolve “the adamant of error” with divine Love, we are free to experience a glorious life of love and healing.