Keeping crime in check
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
On the morning of April 25, 1996, I was in a taxi driving along the River Thames in London. I was on my way to a meeting, but the traffic was slow so my thought wandered as we inched along. As I surveyed the river, I suddenly found myself wondering why a certain terrorist organization, operating then in the United Kingdom, had never planted a bomb under a London bridge. That could cause a great deal of chaos, I remember thinking. But just as soon as this thought hit me, I realized it was an utterly evil line of thinking! And it wasn’t natural to me at all.
As a Christian Scientist, my spiritual study has taught me to discern between good and evil—to hold on to good, God, in my thought as the only reality and power. And likewise, to reject whatever opposes God’s all-goodness. So instead of continuing this idle contemplation, I began to vigorously dismiss it with prayer.
As the reflection of God, divine Mind, I understood that my identity embraced purity, moral courage, and goodness. And I knew this wasn’t just a true spiritual fact for me—it was true for all mankind. So, in essence, I could only identify the individuals and community around me with these higher concepts. Since morbid contemplations couldn’t develop, linger, or take up residence in divine Mind, they couldn’t occupy my thought either—however fascinating they might seem to be.
The next morning in my hotel room, I turned on the television news and was chastened by what I heard. A bomb had been placed under London’s Hammersmith Bridge early that morning but had failed to detonate correctly. I was humbled and deeply grateful for the specific prayerful thoughts I’d had about this very situation the day before. To me, my prayers weren’t a coincidence. I saw how very important it had been for me to refute those destructive thoughts that had come to me—and to see their unreality in the face of God’s infinite power.
This compelled me to think more about how vital it is to consistently take an active role in praying for our world. Mary Baker Eddy recognized the need for this prayer when she said, “…those who discern Christian Science will hold crime in check. They will aid in the ejection of error. They will maintain law and order, and cheerfully await the certainty of ultimate perfection.”
The fact is, each of us has the ability to keep crime in check by first keeping guard over our own thoughts. This means we can be increasingly thoughtful and vigilant about how we’re characterizing others and ourselves. Are we keeping our thoughts in line with God’s ideal? Or are we letting limitations get the better of us? These limitations may begin with thoughts that say a good or bad person is shaped by genetic predisposition, family upbringing, or a variety of other external influences. Spiritual consciousness doesn’t start from this premise. Rather, it begins with God’s view of His creation as entirely spiritual and good. That’s the view that aids in eradicating violence, terror, or any other crime.
On my taxi drive the day before, I’d been praying to maintain a conscious sense of God, expressed in an orderly, harmonious, loving creation. By praying about and insisting on the real nature of myself and my neighbors as divinely attracted to good, you could say I was striving to uphold the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy stated what the power of Truth accomplishes when she said, “Truth has no consciousness of error. Love has no sense of hatred. Life has no partnership with death. Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God.”
The human mind makes things look impossible, assigns blame, and then masquerades as a seemingly innocuous thought that leads us to think it’s our own. But even when there appears to be absolutely no human solution to a problem or no one willing to tackle it—with God, there’s always a creative way out.
I always remind myself that it’s not me, but the infallible laws of Christian Science that handle every case. As Mrs. Eddy wrote: “The power of Christian Science and divine Love is omnipotent. It is indeed adequate to unclasp the hold and to destroy disease, sin, and death.”
It doesn’t have to take a catastrophic event to bring God’s government into focus. With consistent effort in our daily lives, prayer will reveal the ultimate goodness of God and man. Then we won’t be caught up in the tide of human reasoning that says crime is inevitable. Instead we’ll be ably prepared to help keep crime in check, making good the natural norm across the world.
Conquering mortal mind:
Science and Health
96:31
243:25
412:13
King James Bible
Ex. 20:16