Prayer and the environment: Spiritual solutions for a healthy planet
Ron Ballard, C.S.B.
In this chat, Ron Ballard, a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science, explores how a change in the climate of our thought can help us all make a difference in purifying and restoring the planet.
Ron explains that when we think of the environment as more than just a physical construct—when we take a spiritual perspective—we learn more about its infinite, unconfined, boundless nature.
This helps us understand that resources are never scarce; that contamination is not part of God's creation; and that prayer can lead us to environmentally friendly actions.
Ron answers questions from site visitors about fear of bad weather, the influence of politics, and ways to avoid emotional reactions to environmental issues.
He also takes a moment to share some inspiring thoughts about the shootings that took place at Virginia Tech on April 16, and explains how a spiritual perspective on the issue can help us feel safe and secure.
spirituality.com host: Hello, everyone! Welcome to another spirituality.com live question and answer audio event.
Today we’re going to talk with Ron Ballard about “Prayer and the environment: spiritual solutions for a healthy planet.” Although our topic today will be about the environment and what we can do about it, we’ll also take some time at the end of the chat to talk about the rampage at Virginia Polytechnic Institute that took about 32 people’s lives and injured 15 yesterday.
But right now, let’s keep focused on the environment. Ron has been following the environment for many years, and he’s also been healing spiritually for more than 35. He’s both a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science. Ron has traveled extensively talking before groups and conferences about Christian Science. He divides his time between San Francisco, California, and Ashland, Oregon.
Ron, it’s so good to have you here. Do you have some thoughts to get us started?
Ron Ballard: Well, I sure do, and thank you for inviting me. I’ve really been looking forward to doing this. As you mentioned, we’re going to be discussing a topic today that I think is weighing more and more on people’s minds and their concerns for the future.
I want to emphasize from the start that I’m not an environmental scientist, but I have, as you’ve indicated, spent a lot of focus thinking about the environment. And one thing I’ve learned about the environment is that it’s vastly more than what we know about it.
So today, I’d like to explore that fact and realize that it’s actually a source of great hope for the future, and can calm some of the hysteria that can be all too common in the current concerns about the environment. It’s a little like that joke that Jay Leno told a couple of weeks ago about global warming when he said, “According to a new UN report, the global warming outlook is much worse than originally predicted, which is pretty bad—when they originally predicted it would destroy the planet.”
I’d like to share a few ideas about how we’re going to frame this discussion today.
spirituality.com host: Okay.
Ron: First of all, we’re going to be talking about how our prayers can bring solutions to environmental challenges. I suspect many folks might be wondering how prayer can be a practical help in this area, and maybe that wondering comes from the assumption that prayer is basically asking God to do something helpful and then waiting to see if it happens.
spirituality.com host: That’s excellent.
Ron: But you know, there’s a much more dynamic sense of prayer that involves learning and understanding how God constitutes and governs what God creates. And then, most importantly I think, about the concept of prayer, is that it impels our actions to coincide with this sense of spiritual perspective. For instance, in the Bible there’s a story about a man whose life pretty much fell apart. Lots of things began going wrong and he became really distraught. This fellow, Job, sought all sorts of input from family and friends in an effort to sort out his problems. And eventually, he turned to prayer to understand how God created and governed what He’d created. As he understood more of the divine creation, he was able to bring his actions in line with his understanding.
So that’s what I would like to focus on here today—how through this process of prayer we can bring our thoughts and actions in line with our understanding of how God, divine Spirit, creates, governs, constitutes the environment.
The second point I’d like to raise is what the nature of the environment really is. I think most people who study the environment would agree that it’s not so much a thing as a process, in that what we call our environment is constantly evolving and is highly adaptable. There are plenty of examples where humanity has had a pretty severe impact on its environment, and yet, much to our surprise and despite our predictions, it’s bounced back. Not necessarily taking the form that it once was, but taking a sustainable form, nonetheless.
Now in saying that, I want to be clear that while the fact of the environment’s adaptability is encouraging, it’s not an excuse for us doing whatever we want and just assuming that everything will work out okay. In fact, if we understand prayer as a call to action based on our understanding of spiritual perspectives, we’re going to be more careful, not less, when it comes to making sure our lives are in accord with our prayers.
You mentioned in your call for this program that this year’s Earth Day theme is a call for action on climate change, and then suggested that much could be accomplished by fostering a change in our climate of thought. One of the ideas I believe that Christian Science brings to this discussion is the ability to see our environment as actually more mental than physical.
At the basis of healing in Christian Science is the realization that the reason that healing can take place through mental means is because what we’re really dealing with in any kind of discord is a mental issue. Mary Baker Eddy, in her book on the Science of healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, explains it this way. She says, “The Christian Scientist, understanding scientifically that all is Mind, commences with mental causation, the truth of being, to destroy the error. This corrective is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system.” And I like to just think about our process of prayer as a corrective. It’s an alterative that alters the way that we think about a situation and brings it more into line with the way that God works.
When we realize that the nature of the challenge we’re facing is mental, although certainly apparent to human thought as physical, then I think we get to the heart of the issue and begin to realize that our prayers, which lead our thought into alignment with what is spiritually true and really scientifically accurate, is the basis of all change.
And the last point I’d like to raise is the relationship of individuals to the environment. From a physical perspective, one could certainly argue that the environment includes each one of us, meaning that we live in the environment. But from a spiritual perspective, we could actually argue that we include the environment, that is, that what we experience about the environment happens according to the assumptions we hold about it. And that would make the environment a great deal more subjective than a physical perspective might lead us to believe. It’s grounds for realizing that how we think of the environment has a tremendous effect on it.
If you read carefully the statements made by scientists regarding predictions of where our environment is heading, you’ll find words like might, may, if, as long as, and each of these words suggest that if our sense of relationship to the environment continues along the same vein that it is currently going, then we might very well experience certain effects. In a sense, I think, this is just intellectually honest in that the comments made assume that the maker doesn’t claim to know with absolute certainty that something will happen; only that given the best current knowledge, which I might add, is almost always based on physical perception, that there’s a certain likelihood that predicted effects will follow. So then the obvious question arises, “Well, what if we change the way we think or act? What effects will that have on what we experience?” And I believe the answer to that is, “A great deal.”
spirituality.com host: Right.
Ron: That’s why prayer becomes so important. It helps us change our perspective about the environment and see it in a more creative, spiritual light.
So, having said that, let’s take some questions.
spirituality.com host: All right. That’s a wonderful opening statement. I appreciate it so much. Bonnie from Laguna Beach, California, is asking specifically, “How can we help one another, especially our children, combat the fear that often comes with dire predictions about global warming, destructive weather, and images of destruction in our environment?”
Ron: Well, that’s a great question, Bonnie. I think the question underneath the question, really, is, How do we deal with the fear of what seems to be uncontrollable? And we can go back to what I was saying in the opening statement about prayer helping to alter our perspective. That if our perspective is the images that you referred to in your question about the predictions of dire consequences, and we hold to those kinds of images, we’re most likely to experience them. But if we can change those images, then we’re going to be experiencing those better images of thought. And where do we get those images? Well, that’s where our prayer is seeking a clear sense of how God governs and creates and constitutes what it creates. The more that we understand about the divine nature, the more we’re going to recognize how that divine nature is played out in what it creates—in our case, the environment. So the short answer to that question is, understand more about the divine nature and realize that the divine nature is always expressed in what it creates.
spirituality.com host: Let’s talk a little more about the “divine nature” from the standpoint that there are lots of things in this world that are created, including hazardous wastes, that God probably hasn’t made. What is it that you would describe the divine nature as being?
Ron: Well, that’s a really good question, and I think it’s really fundamental to our discussion today, because one view of what God creates is that God creates matter. And that question is somewhat like the current debate about creationism versus evolution, which turns out really to be two sides of the same coin—meaning that it’s an argument about who creates matter.
But what Christian Science points out is that creation needs to be understood along spiritual lines. That God didn’t create matter, that God created ideas. And that the divine nature, being Spirit, the nature of those ideas is spiritual. And then we can begin exploring a little about, what do we know the nature of God to be? Well, we know that nature to be good. We know it to be bountiful. We know it to be infinite—that it’s unconfined, unlimited. And as we begin seeing that nature played out in what it creates, that becomes the basis of realizing that there’s vastly more to the environment than what we know about it; because essentially what we know about it at this point in human history is a material perspective. It’s the reason we’re always surprised when things work out differently than we thought they were going to. We’ve got more to learn. And from a Christian Science point of view, that more to learn is not just more to learn about the physical perspective, but most importantly, more to learn about the spiritual perspective.
spirituality.com host: And isn’t the spiritual perspective based on perfection? Not trying to go from sort of totally corrupt matter and turn it into Spirit, but actually starting with Spirit?
Ron: Well, exactly. And that’s why in that quotation I read of Mary Baker Eddy’s fromScience and Health, she says that this process of prayer is an alterative. It’s not analternative, in that it’s not trying to accomplish the same thing that other approaches are trying to accomplish, it’s altering. It’s fundamentally altering the way that we look at something, so we begin seeing it from this perfect spiritual perspective.
spirituality.com host: Yes, I was struck by that when you were speaking about, Where do we begin? We don’t begin down with the contaminated matter, earth, so to speak, but rather from the spiritual standpoint and then perceive it that way.
Ron: Well, that’s right. And you know, this is about healing. If one were dealing with a physical situation with the body, you don’t begin with what the physical symptom is, you begin looking at the issue of mental causation. And Christian Science has a very long history, and a successful history, of healing based on understanding the mental nature of the discord. So I think one of the challenges with the environment is we think it’s so physical. So when we see things like the physical symptoms, we buy right into that as if it’s just physical. But it isn’t. It’s a mental manifestation. And that’s why change of thought is going to make a difference.
spirituality.com host: Thank you. Now getting back to our questions here, Arnold from San Francisco writes, “In February 2007, you wrote that ‘Earth’s purpose is to give evidence of the divine source of all earth’s identity.’ By what process do we look for examples of this divine nature of earth?”
Ron: Well, that’s a great question, Arnold, and it’s actually one of my most favorite subjects because that process is what we might call “scientific translation.” Scientific translation in Christian Science means moving from a physical perspective to a spiritual perspective. Mary Baker Eddy defines it as the fundamental metaphysical process whereby we exchange objects of sense for ideas of divine Spirit. So how might that work? Well, for instance, if one were looking at a mountain, you could either look at that mountain and say, “Well, you know, it’s so high and it’s so wide and it’s constituted of so many minerals and it has on its body so much vegetation,” and that would be a physical perspective of that mountain.
But what if we were asked to describe the nature of that mountain as idea? Then we would have to start looking at a description that was beyond the physical. We’d have to start looking at the mental manifestation there. And we might begin seeing that mountain as evidencing the concepts of majesty or grandeur or solidity. Actually, what happens in this process of scientific translation is that the more that you’re willing to look at it closer and to see its intricacies from a mental perspective, and not just a physical one, you’ll actually begin to develop your sense of appreciation of the complexity of spiritual ideas.
One of the challenges to human thought about spiritual ideas is that they seem so esoteric. But actually, they’re very specific, and they have every bit as much distinctness and form and tangibility as the physical objects claim to have. But the way that we get to understanding it is we have to look closer and translate—move from the object of sense to the divine idea.
spirituality.com host: Aha. Martha in Virginia says—and this actually ties in with what you were just saying—“How do we address agricultural methods that use unnecessary chemicals and growth hormones for production? How can we support farmers who are trying to use earth-friendly and humane methods?” In a way, it gets back to that translating process, at least to a degree.
Ron: Yes, it sure does. And it also gets back to what you and I were talking about regarding the divine nature. Another thing to understand about the divine nature is that it doesn’t deal in conflicts. Divine nature doesn’t use something that is destructive to promote something that is harmonious. In other words, it doesn’t use evil to promote good. And so, consequently, when we find evidences in the environment of the use of certain things that are destructive on one hand but productive on the other, it’s only because we haven’t pushed that issue further. There is an answer that will include a blessing for everything concerned in that issue. Mrs. Eddy uses a phrase, “Whatever blesses one blesses all.” And that’s part of the divine nature. That divine nature can’t be a hindrance on one hand and a help on another. So if we have processes that appear to be following in that mode, it’s because we haven’t explored the depth of that process yet. If we’ll do that, if we’ll explore our methods, we’re going to find that it blesses everyone concerned.
You and I were talking a little bit before this program began about navigating between those who wish to see better ways of doing something and those that are heavily invested in older ways of doing things. And we have to recognize that the answer to these questions isn’t either/or. The answer is going to be a higher form of expression for everyone involved, and it’s going to include a blessing for everyone.
spirituality.com host: I think it’s sometimes hard for people to trust that.
Ron: Sure it is. That’s the nature of exploration. The human mind is most comfortable with what it knows, and it consequently doesn’t like to give that up.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Ron: But we need to recognize that there can be comfort in advancement and growth and exploration. There’s a story in the Bible very early on about Abraham and Lot, and they’re trying to kind of figure out who gets what. And Abraham is willing to let Lot have whatever he wants and he’s willing to go forward.
A friend of mine once explained that process as much like taking a walk with your parents. When you’re small, you don’t have the slightest idea where they’re taking you. But you do trust them. You do trust their loving nature. So even though in this process of advancement of new methods of doing things that we may not know where we’re going, originally if we’re doing it by prayer, we can trust the divine nature that it is going to lead into more beneficial ways of doing things that blesses everyone concerned.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s a lovely thought. Bonny in Riverhead, New York, says, “Many environmental problems seem to be caused by unequal distribution of resources between individuals, communities, or countries. What ideas can I work with to address this global challenge?”
Ron: Well, that’s a good one. And it gets, again, right back to how we perceive our resources. One typical definition of economy is that it’s the exploration of the division of scarce resources. And I think you can see in that definition where the fallacy is.
spirituality.com host: Yes.
Ron: That if we begin with the belief that resources are scarce then we’re going to have all sorts of competition for those resources.
On the other hand, if we can switch to the divine perspective that this divine Spirit has infinite resources, then infinite means “without limitation or boundary.” So where we begin in our prayer is awfully important. We don’t want to begin with that assumption that there are scarce resources that have to be allocated. We need to begin exploring the spiritual fact that there are infinite resources that need to be discovered. And that’s what we’re really going to find in this environmental exploration, that there are vastly more resources and capabilities in what we call the environment than what we’re aware of.
spirituality.com host: That’s a wonderful insight, because I just suddenly saw that there are lots of things we really don’t know that might be used for good that we haven’t discovered yet.
Ron: Absolutely.
spirituality.com host: Fred in New Hampshire says, “Though the environment, to me, exists in the relative, not the spiritual, do you feel that our environment has an impact on our spirituality?”
Ron: Well, again, I think that gets to how we define the environment. The short answer to that is, “Of course. Yes. It does.” And especially if we recognize that our environment is essentially mental in nature; because then we begin to recognize that this environment is, as you pointed out in your comment, a mental climate. And it’s made up of (from a more absolute basis) the spiritual ideas that God expresses and exhibits in His creation. We can learn from the environment because we’re learning from the ideas as being God’s expressions or definitions of His own nature. It’s a little like looking at the sun. You don’t ever really see the sun. You see the effect of the sun, you see the rays, but you don’t really ever see the sun. The sun defines itself through its rays, and the divine nature is defined through its expression or its manifestation.
So one of the things over the years that has really helped me appreciate the environment more is to appreciate it as this manifestation of God’s nature. In a sense, how I treat the environment, practically speaking, is a form of worship—how I treat God, how I think of God, how I respect God. Now I’m not talking about just a physical sense of the environment. But if you use this process of scientific translation, and you move from object of sense to idea of Soul, then you engage the environment from that perspective as ideas of Soul and not objects of sense. And if those are ideas of Soul, then they’re representing Soul. So how you deal with the environment from a spiritual perspective is really, in a sense, how you’re worshiping God.
spirituality.com host: That kind of ties in with this question from Martin in North Carolina. He says, “If God is taking care of all His creation, can’t we just leave the environment in His care and not worry about our material impact?”
Ron: Yes and no. Certainly God is always taking care of what God has created. There’s nothing that we can do to change that, gratefully. That’s the spiritually scientific fact. In the human sense of things, we are either going to understand that fact and act accordingly, or we aren’t. And it’s when we don’t that we bring these problems into our own lives. It’s not that God’s bringing them into our lives, but the way that we interpret things tends to set the context for our own experience.
So we can certainly take great heart in the fact that God is maintaining the environment, and as with all prayer, when we’re willing to bring our human sense of things in line with the divine, then we’re going to experience the harmony and the wholeness and the perfection that is part of the divine nature. But if we continue to deny that divine nature and simply do things according to our own will, our own selfishness, our own self-concern, then we reap the benefits of that.
spirituality.com host: And the troubles of it, too, sometimes.
Ron: Yeah, I was using benefits as…
spirituality.com host: Ironically?
Ron: Yeah, ironically. Exactly.
spirituality.com host: Randy in Boston is asking another very helpful question, which is, “How does prayer, or love, which is my prayer, affect the weather?”
Ron: Well, our prayer regarding the weather, again, needs to start from an understanding of the divine nature. And if we start from that understanding that the divine nature is Love, and therefore it’s bringing blessing to what it creates, then we can rightfully challenge the sense that there is a destructive element to the weather.
My family had ranches in Oklahoma, and we lived in that area—or at least they lived, I visited them during the summertime—in Tornado Alley. There were many, many summers that I remember being hustled off to the cellar because of tornado warnings. And one of the things that always impressed me about those times in the cellar was that they were times for prayer. And the prayer wasn’t just, “Dear God, save us from this destruction.” The prayer was a recognition that the nature of God’s creation had to be beneficial to everyone concerned.
When you live rurally, you tend to include your neighbors a lot, and so your prayers quite naturally don’t just go for yourself, they go for everyone that’s around. And at least in the 12-15 years that I was back there, I never saw a tornado that had destructive elements to livestock or to buildings or to people in that area.
spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s wonderful. Lesley in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is asking a question that goes back a little bit to the earlier one: “But don’t we have to be practical about our planet, as well? I understand how my thinking affects my body, but I still wash it every day. I try be moderate in what I eat, and I see that I move about each day, then don’t we have to do the same for our planet? Prayer should lead us to common sense actions. Right?”
Ron: Absolutely. And that’s why I made the point in the beginning of my remarks that prayer is action. There is a common misconception that prayer is a matter of folding your hands, sitting in a chair, and hoping for good things to happen. Prayer is action. And so when we pray about a situation, we’re going to most likely first get insight, deeper understanding. And then, as I pointed out, an impulsion to do and make our actions coincident with what we’ve learned about that divine nature. Prayer is doing. And so we need to recognize that this sense of the practical isn’t outside of the realm of prayer, it’s the result of prayer. There is no prayer if one simply has a grand old time thinking about ideas and then doing nothing about it.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Ron: That’s not prayer. That’s some sort of intellectual exercise. Mrs. Eddy, in the chapter on “Prayer” in Science and Health points out that we need to make our lives attest the sincerity of our prayer.
spirituality.com host: This is an interesting question. I’m not sure where you’ll want to go with it. It’s from Rita in San Francisco: “What is your perspective of Mrs. Eddy’s statement from Science and Health, page 96?” And this is the statement: “Love will finally mark the hour of harmony, and spiritualization will follow, for Love is Spirit. Before error is wholly destroyed, there will be interruptions of the general material routine. Earth will become dreary and desolate, but summer and winter, seedtime and harvest (though in changed forms), will continue until the end,—until the final spiritualization of all things.”
Ron: Well, anytime you’re asked to give an explanation of what the author means, I think you do have to qualify that all you can really say is kind of what your perspective of that particular passage is, and I’m surely happy to offer that. I think that passage points, first of all, to the great process that is going on in all of our experience, and that is what she calls “the spiritualization of all things.” That if we are willing to explore the spiritual fact of all things in our lives, that exploration, and as we just talked about, the action that comes as a result of the exploration, is going to be the source of advancement in our experience. Eventually, the material sense of things is going to drop away, and what we’re going to find is, what I referred to earlier, the spiritual fact in all its form, tangibility, and distinctness. Again, emphasizing the point that at this point, human thought says spiritual ideas are vague. But what Christian Science points out is that form, outline, color, quality, quantity, are spiritual elements of thought, and we’re never going to sacrifice those. Those aren’t the things that are going to disappear. What disappears when matter disappears is finiteness, discord, inharmony, mortality, all of the things that you should probably be real happy to see go.
Now in this process of that happening, this spiritualization of all things, what occurs? Well, oftentimes, a ferment or a turmoil. As I was pointing out earlier, the human mind isn’t particularly fond of letting go of what it’s comfortable with. And when you start applying prayer to situations, oftentimes, the effect is a stirring. And the stirring is a good thing. Because it indicates that the fixedness of mortal thought is beginning to let go and it’s stirred up about it. Mary Baker Eddy calls this a mental chemicalization, and she likens it to what happens if you stir the bottom of a muddy riverbed. Well, what happens, of course, is all the silt suddenly comes to the top. Now if you didn’t know the whole process, you might say, Oh my gosh, I’d have been better off if I’d just left things alone. At least I wouldn’t have had all this murky water. But the fact of the matter is that the current of the stream will carry it off, and then what you have left is a greater sense of purity.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Ron: So in this process of prayer, if we begin seeing things get stirred up a bit, we need to recognize that this isn’t a great cause for consternation, it’s an indication that we need to continue to support the process of purification.
spirituality.com host: That’s very helpful. Ruth in Charlotte, North Carolina, says, “How do we determine our infinite resources on a practical, worldwide basis for all mankind?”
Ron: Certainly one of the ways of claiming our infinite resources is first acknowledging that they exist, and then begin being alert to the ways that they are manifesting themselves in our experience. One of the things that I help people with when they call me is when they say that they’ve got issues of supply, that their supply isn’t sufficient to meet their need. But I try to point out supply is always sufficient to meet your need. The issue isn’t that you need more supply or that you need more resources. The need is recognizing the resources that you’re not seeing, which are already at hand. And that’s what prayer helps us do. It helps us recognize what is already at hand. And frequently I use that well-known story, to many people, in the Bible about the prophet Elijah who is asked by a woman for help. She has incurred debt, and that her debtors want to take her sons away. And he asked her, “Well, what do you have in your house?” And she says, “Well, this pot of oil.” And he sends her back to cherish this pot of oil and it continues to multiply and eventually meets her need.
Well, the question, “What do you have in your house?” I think is a bit metaphorical. In essence, when we’re looking at trying to find our resources, that’s where we should begin—What do you already have in your house or in your thought or consciousness? What’s already there? And the more that you begin acknowledging and recognizing the good that’s already present, the more it will multiply.
spirituality.com host: Right. That’s very helpful. Barbara from Manhattan in New York says, “By listening to the weather reports in the winter, I find myself afraid of going out in the cold and when it’s very windy. It might appear as protection at times, but I don’t want to feel limited by the weather. What do you suggest?”
Ron: Well, one thing I would suggest is a very practical thing—if you have a copy ofScience and Health, you could look in the chapter called the Glossary under the definition of wind. And in that definition of wind, you will find a statement, “That which indicates the might of omnipotence and the movements of God’s spiritual government, encompassing all things.”
Now it has another definition which oftentimes happens in these definitions—it gives the spiritual perspective and a material perspective. And the material perspective is “Destruction; anger; mortal passions.” So one might ask, “Well, what experience would I like to have with the wind?” Probably not destruction, anger, and mortal passions. And in a sense what is being projected here about the wind is all of humanity’s concerns about what happens.
But what if we exchanged that? Again, going back to this sense of scientific translation. What if we exchanged fear and destruction for the idea of “that which indicates the might of omnipotence and the movements of God’s spiritual government”? Well, then, I’d want to be in that. I’d want to go out into that, if that’s what wind really is.
It’s a great question, because it’s a practical example of how you work with scientific translation. You move from the fears and the limitations of the objects of material sense to the ideas of Soul. And then you live in those ideas. And if you live in those ideas, you’re going to find that the natural effect of that is greater insight, clearer inspiration, new horizons of thought, and just the wonderful process of continual advancement.
spirituality.com host: Sheila is writing from the Reading Room in London in the United Kingdom. She says, “How can I live in what looks like two worlds going on at the same time—this human existence and the spiritual?” I think a lot of people have that question in one form or another.
Ron: Absolutely. And one of the great messages of Christ Jesus’ career was what we might call the coincidence of the divine with the human. In Jesus’ career that meant that right where the human Jesus appeared, right there was the presence of the Christ. In this sense of coincidence, we begin to recognize that right where there appears to be a material sense of existence, right there is really the divine reality. And if we keep focused in the divine reality, we won’t be living in a dualistic world. We’ll be living in a world full of opportunity. Mary Baker Eddy, in defining further this sense of coincidence, points out that it is the “process of divinity embracing humanity in life and its demonstration.” So our prayers help us recognize, What is the divine fact? What is the reality? And then, we’ll find that that embraces the human experience in life and its expression.
To get a little clearer sense of this concept of coincidence, one of the things, examples, or analogies that I oftentimes use is to say, “Well, if you were to go outside into your garden, and let’s say you had a white statue there. And the sun was really bright, so you put on some sunglasses, and maybe they had a blue tint to them, and you looked at your white statue, you’d see a blue statue. Do you have two statues there?” No. You have a white statue that happens to be perceived as blue. If you got tired of a blue statue, what’s your solution? Well, you need to take off your glasses. And the challenge, of course, is that to the human mind, it doesn’t realize it has on blue glasses.
spirituality.com host: Yeah. There you go.
Ron: It’s just thinking in terms of its own perspective. So it needs something to come along and say, “Hey, you’ve got on blue glasses. That’s the reason you’re seeing everything around you as blue. If you take off those glasses, you’re going to see the reality.”
spirituality.com host: Yep.
Ron: And what is that that comes along to do that? Well, in my experience, that’s been Christian Science.
spirituality.com host: Now this is an interesting question from Anna, also in New York: “If the soil, earth, has been badly damaged, depleted, and barren, would bringing in replacements from other places be called just mechanical and thus adequate for replenishment, or can it be done entirely through prayer?”
Ron: I think that that is probably a great example of what can be done by prayer. Again, if we see this problem as contaminated soil, then the natural inclination to human reasoning might be, well, bring in fresh soil. But maybe the issue isn’t the soil. Maybe the issue is contamination. And so what our prayer needs to pray about is not the soil, it’s the sense of contamination.
There was an example that’s kind of interesting along those lines about an island in the Pacific that during World War II was used as a test island for bombs.
spirituality.com host: Was that Bikini Island?
Ron: Yes. And as you probably know, originally, the assumption was, Well, we just pretty much bombed the heck out of that place, and it was totally destroyed. Not so. Today it is back again. And it goes to the point not only of the adaptability of the environment from a physical perspective, but adaptability because of the spiritual perspective. There is no idea in the divine creation that is destructible. No idea has ever become extinct. And if our human perception embraces that divine fact, we’re going to find some interesting results that perhaps we didn’t explore before.
What’s kind of interesting along that line are some of the concepts that people explore through science fiction or novels. There was a study done many years ago in the ‘70s by Stanford Research Institute, which tracked the appearance of things in human experience. And it asked various disciplines to contribute to how ideas developed in those disciplines. In one instance, someone pointed out that oftentimes the appearance of a new idea begins as a thought, as in science fiction. And we feel free to explore that thought as science fiction because we’re not required to put any limits on it. After all, it’s just science fiction.
But then what happens is that the idea begins to take root and people begin to wonder, Well, gosh, would that really be possible? And then they begin exploring it as possible. And then quite humorously, someone pointed out, once it gets funding, it becomes reality.
And you look at many of the ideas that come into human experience, and you recognize they follow pretty much that pattern. Someone begins to explore an idea and then begins to accept the possibility of its feasibility and then accepts it. We had a while back the novel of Jurassic Park.
spirituality.com host: That’s right.
Ron: Which I thought was a fascinating way of humanly explaining how you get back to dinosaurs.
spirituality.com host: Yep. Now we’ve got two questions that are here that are a little tiny bit in the political vein, but I think we might want…if we tread carefully, we might be able to provide some answers, but I’ll let you decide.
Ron: Okay.
spirituality.com host: This one is from someone called CC in Eugene, possibly Oregon: “How do you deal with the idea that there are moneyed interests that keep existing environmental solutions from getting to the general public? The Christian Science Monitordetailed an example of this with the electric car, that was withdrawn from the public that wanted it and destroyed?” Jeffrey Sachs in his book about global poverty—this is my comment—has talked about the environmental and moneyed issues that can surround these things. And I think that some of the points you’ve made earlier about divine Mind really being the one to be turning to, might be a good way to answer, but I’ll let you be the one to tell us.
Ron: Okay. Well, that’s a perfect example, as far as I’m concerned, about how we deal with these issues in prayer. Unfortunately, at this point in our history, especially in this country, but also around the globe, we’ve become pretty polarized in terms of our political views and concerns, and oftentimes think that the problem is people, and specifically, the other guy.
But here’s a good example of asking, “If I’m going to deal with this from a prayerful perspective, what are the issues that I’m going to deal with?” Well, probably the reason that people might take an idea and say, I don’t want to see that idea come into reality is because of fear—fear that I’m heavily invested in another approach, and if this approach comes along, I’m going to lose what I’m staking my well-being on.
So we need in our prayer to provide a recognition that there is a win-win solution here. That the divine nature, as we were talking about before, doesn’t use conflicting methods to accomplish its purposes. That the advancement of an idea has to bless everyone concerned. So what would happen if we, through our prayer, healed the issue of fear? Well, I think the natural effect of that would be a willingness to explore new things in the recognition that in that exploration, everyone’s going to be blessed. So the important thing about prayer in these situations is, don’t go to where mortal reasoning would like you to go in terms of what the problem is. Use your spiritual insight to understand what really is at the root of this resistance. And then give the prayer to the false belief.
spirituality.com host: Well, that’s great. I want to tell our listeners that we’re going to do one more environmental question, and then we’re going to switch over to the Virginia Tech issue. But we will probably run a little bit overtime. So if you want to hear the rest of the chat, you could just come back later on.
But in the meanwhile, let’s go to Lory in Alaska, who has a related question to the one you’ve just answered: “It appears that we’re dealing with diametrically opposed views about what is happening in our environment, even though the belief in eventual disaster is getting the most attention. The emotionalism surrounding this issue makes me very uncomfortable and skeptical. You have already offered some good ideas about how to pray about it. Would you like to address the issue of quelling the emotionalism in order to be sure you are on the right track?”
Ron: Oh, sure. And that’s a really important point—is that it’s difficult to pray if you’re caught up in the emotion. So Jesus’ suggestion about prayer was to enter into the closet, and to pray to the Father which is in secret, and God will reward you openly. And the closet we can assume means into the sanctuary of your quiet thought. That’s where prayer really needs to begin, is shutting out all of the emotionalism. Well, how do we do that? Well, one thing that we need to do is make sure that we’re not rehearsing it. More and more, I talk to people who are getting frustrated and angry with what they see going on in the world around them. And there can be some good reasons for that. But if we’re going to resolve the issue prayerfully, we first have to enter into the closet. We have to enter into that sanctuary of earnest longings which wants to hear what God has to say. And the way that we hear this divine intelligence is we shut the clamor of emotionalism and political posturing—all of the elements that would try to keep us focused in other directions.
I think one of the great contributions that we can make at this point in time to the mental climate of our society is helping it enter into the closet. We can make sure that we’re not contributing to the mental and emotional hysteria.
spirituality.com host: I think that’s a really good point, because so often it’s easy to get caught up in things and forget that that’s not where the answers are going to lie.
Ron: Well, that’s right. And we wouldn’t do the same thing if it had to do with our health. I mean, most of us recognize there’s no advantage to arguing about the dire things that are going to happen to us. We would just quite naturally begin turning away from that as recognizing that we don’t want to have those things being self-fulfilled prophecies. But for some reason or other, when it comes to political issues, we’re willing to get right in there in that pool and splash around.
spirituality.com host: That’s a very good insight. That’s very helpful. Now Ron, a lot of people who are listening will be familiar with the tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech and the person who went there and shot many people, and the heartbreak that people are feeling, and the unsafety in schools in general. There seems to be a lot of violence at schools and people feel undefended and unprotected. And I wondered if you had any thoughts you’d like to share with us since so many people are thinking about this.
Ron: Well, yes, I certainly do. I’ve got several thoughts about that. First of all, I think kind of the primary effort of our prayers is always to go out to those who are suffering in these situations, who may have lost sons or daughters, husbands or wives or friends, in this situation—and to recognize that there is a divine Love that is always present to meet people’s needs. I know that a lot of people have asked me over the years when situations like this happen, “Well, if God is Love, how come this occurred?” And it’s a little like having the sun up there and then having it shadowed by clouds. We could ask, “Well, if there really is a sun, how come it’s not shining here?” Well, it is shining. The divine nature is constant. This divine Love is constant. In the human realm, sometimes there are clouds that come that would try to obscure that. But the sun doesn’t have any knowledge of the clouds. It’s simply doing its thing constantly and consistently. And this divine Love is doing its thing constantly and consistently.
So then one might ask, “Okay, so how can we better see the evidence of this divine Love in our lives, so that things like this don’t occur?” Well, one of the things that we can do is to challenge the things in our lives that aren’t loving, and refuse to go there; refuse to be fascinated by them, refuse to support them, refuse to give any credibility to them. And I think one of those issues is violence. If we want to see in our experience the consistent nature of divine Love, then as a society, we need to take up our mental arms against violence. And practical ways we can do that? We can stop watching evidence of it over and over and over and over and over on TV, or supporting movies. Eventually, we have to recognize that any approach that uses violence in an effort to accomplish good ends is, in essence, simply supporting violence, which is contrary to the expression of divine Love. And you know, in human action, you’ve always got to do what’s nearest right under the circumstance, but we can certainly begin to say in our lives, Enough of this. Enough of this glorification of violence.
There’s a passage in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about the naturalness of Truth. And she says, “If thought is startled at the strong claim of Science for the supremacy of God, or Truth, and doubts the supremacy of good, ought we not, contrariwise, to be astounded at the vigorous claims of evil and doubt them, and no longer think it natural to love sin and unnatural to forsake it,–no longer imagine evil to be ever-present and good absent?” It’s a rhetorical question. The answer to that is, absolutely! We should no longer think it natural to love elements of sin that are portrayed in our society and unnatural to forsake them.
spirituality.com host: Well, you know, I read a book about a man who did some terrorist acts during the civil rights period, blowing up churches and things like that, and one thing that was really interesting to me was that he was very filled with hate and he was ascribing to a religious sect that preached hate, and so he had a lot of reinforcement you might say. But he was eventually caught and ended up in prison. And somewhere along the line there, a spiritual sense of God and of Jesus came into his experience, and he reached a point where those hateful thoughts and those pamphlets and things that he had been reading no longer spoke to him, and he turned his life around and became a minister, really devoted to, in a sense, undoing what he had done.
And I think one of the things that our prayers about violence can also include is—I don’t know quite how to put this—the thought of anyone who is driven by violence, that violence not only doesn’t have an appeal for us individually, but that it can’t rest on troubled thought and stir people to engage in acts that really don’t bless them or anybody.
Ron: Right. You know, in my article about the environment and global warming in The Christian Science Journal, one of the things that I pointed out about healing is Mrs. Eddy’s concept that it’s helpful to deal with the “exciting, the remote, and the predisposing cause” of difficulties. Well, the exciting cause may be, in this particular instance, an individual’s anger or hurt about what was done to him, and to lashing out in that way.
But if you keep following this issue back, I think that you eventually have to deal with the predisposing cause. And the predisposing cause, I think, of things like this is almost always theological—false theological. The predisposing cause is the belief that if God is omnipotent, meaning all-power, then God must be a God of good and evil; because good exists in human experience and evil exists in human experience, and therefore, if God knows everything and is all-powerful, then God must be the source of both. And our prayers need to go to the enlightenment that God is not a God of good and evil. A couple of lone voices in the Old Testament were brave enough to say, “God is of purer eyes than to behold evil.” And that was pretty brave, because it was pretty contrary to the religious opinion of the time.
spirituality.com host: Right.
Ron: And then, of course, in the Bible and the New Testament, you have a full explanation of why a God of love doesn’t use evil. But as long as we’re willing to believe that God is a God of good and evil, then we might very well buy into the idea that we can use evil, because it’s divinely sanctioned. So we need to knock the footing out from that fundamental claim, that predisposing belief, that God is a God of good and evil.
Ron: Yep. That’s very helpful. And Ron, we’re really at the end of our time now, and I wondered if you had any summary thoughts you wanted to offer?
Ron: Well, given the way that our discussion has gone—a couple of points that I would summarize: First of all, that when we’re dealing with the environment, we’re dealing with vastly more than what the physical perception knows about it, and that we shouldn’t be taken in by just the physical perception about our environment. If we’re willing to explore what the spiritual perspective of our environment is, we’re going to learn more about its infinite nature. And the way each one of us can do that, is to begin utilizing the process of scientific translation, of moving from objects of sense to the ideas of Soul—and to enjoy those ideas of Soul in all of their tangibility and intricacy, their form, outline, color, quality, and quantity, as being spiritual characteristics. Explore your environment from its mental nature. You’ll learn more about it, you’ll appreciate more its adaptability, and it will be a great source of inspiration when seen spiritually about God’s nature.
spirituality.com host: Thanks, Ron. That was just wonderful. And for those of you who would like to read Ron’s article about global warming, it’s in the April 2007 issue of The Christian Science Journal. In addition to his article, you can read more about a spiritual approach to the environment in the March 26, 2007 issue of the Christian Science Sentinel, whose cover story is, “A Bright Tomorrow,” and this week’s issue is called, “Living Waters for Dry Lands,” which addresses the concerns about water issues that many people are already experiencing.
You can obtain these and other magazines in any Christian Science Reading Room, or if there isn’t a Reading Room in your community, please call Customer Service at 617-450-2790. But don’t hesitate to check out your local Christian Science Reading Room. There are really good people there with lots of interesting things to show you.
Thank you so much for joining us today, for your care about the environment, and for all your good questions, and especially for your prayers.
Citations used in this chat
Science and Health
King James Bible