Look past the headlines to God's presence

The flags are flying at half-mast and my neighbors are still talking about the shootings at Virginia Tech. And, more recently, there was the shooting at the mall in Kansas City. These events— shooting rampages, sprees of violence, and the continuing threat of terrorism—have become intolerably familiar There’s a feeling that something in society needs to change, but no one is quite sure how to control the violence that seems to happen randomly—and more frequently.

In many of my conversations with people, there’s fear and weariness in their voices but I’m also hearing a greater resolve to make a difference. This, to me, points to a way out of the destructive cycle we seem to be in.

In the fall of 2001, as most Americans and many others around the world were struggling to understand what had happened on September 11, I found solace and hope in the way people responded in the aftermath of the attack. Having spent most of our lives in New York, my husband and I both knew people who had been at the World Trade Center and had lost friends.

Yet even in the midst of tragedy, something important was coming to light. Pushing back against the darkness were acts of courage, selflessness, and unconditional kindness. We were seeing something more basic and essential than the horror: a saving truth about what we are made to be.

Mary Baker Eddy described it this way, “Truth crushed to earth springs spontaneously upward, and whispers to the breeze man’s inalienable birthright—Liberty. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ God is everywhere” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 128 ).

That God, supreme, ever-present goodness, is everywhere, was making itself apparent to us in the way people were spontaneously reaching out to each other with a sense of abundant, undaunted love. I began to see that we are all connected by a real and substantial good that is able to lift us out of tragedy and, even more important, to guide us toward a better, deeper understanding of our identity as brothers and sisters in Christ; and the awareness of God’s love and Fatherhood.

This became clearer to me a month later during a family road trip. Driving across Minnesota, with our six-year-old dozing in the back seat, we heard radio news reports about the anthrax mail attacks that followed the events of 9/11.

The thought that the country was under attack again shocked us. Even though we were in the bucolic American heartland, nothing seemed safe. To avoid waking our daughter and frightening her, we talked in low voices about strategies for protecting ourselves from things like letters that might have become tainted as they went through the postal system. We also discussed what kind of world we were raising a family in and how our children’s lives would be affected by not having the kind of security we had enjoyed when we were growing up.

It was a depressing talk, but eventually we came back to the omnipresent goodness that had touched so many people right after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We recognized the need was not for discussion but for prayer.

The first sentence in Mrs. Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures describes this way to approach life’s problems: “The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love.”

For me, prayer meant coming face to face with the qualities and values I cherish most and hold dear. It also meant remembering that these qualities have their source in God and therefore are not just with me and my family, but with everyone.

What I learned that day on the road was that prayer can bring us home to a blessed sense of God’s presence and of humanity’s unity within divine Love, and that we can become more consistent in recognizing and then acting from this spiritual truth.

As my husband and I made an effort to keep a God-centered view of things, our fear dissolved and was replaced by a desire to share God’s goodness with others. We had a beautiful weekend with the people we were visiting, and I noticed that an especially tender sense of camaraderie and joy that predominated at this time.

That experience, and similar ones, has helped me to see that no matter what the news reports may say about evil going on in the world, we need to remember that there is more going on than just the sum of material conditions. We are not condemned to be mere bystanders when horrors occur. What claims to be the product of intractable human misunderstanding or dysfunctional brain chemistry does not have the final word.

God, good, is humanity’s natural default—the real substance and intelligence of our lives. Divine Life and Love are supreme, and we, as God’s children, are inseparable from the pure goodness of His nature. As we focus on this truth that is—as the Bible says—written in our hearts, we will live and act, more truly, as His children. In this way we not just help each other to overcome fear and violence in our own lives, but progressively eliminate it for everyone, forever.

God’s ever-present goodness:

Science and Health
1:1-4

King James Bible
Jer. 31:33
Heb. 8:10
Heb. 10:16