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Finding self-completeness
Originally published in the October 8, 1970 issue of The Christian Science Monitor
Twenty-three centuries ago the Greek philosopher Socrates declared: “To need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer does he approach divinity.”
Could not the incompleteness felt by many today stem from a lack of understanding of the complete nature of God and His creation? Many consider completeness a material condition. But material circumstances change and deteriorate. How, then, can lasting completeness be found?
The Bible declares, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Psalm 23:1 Does not this indicate that because completeness is essentially a quality of God it can be experienced through understanding and accepting God's guiding goodness and love?
In full accord with the Bible teachings, Christian Science shows how consciousness of completeness can be achieved through gaining an understanding of the complete nature of God, Spirit, and of man as God's spiritual image and likeness.
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness.” Science and Health, p. 264
Christian Science explains that lack, whether in the form of disease, insecurity, or poverty, is no part of man in God's likeness. The sense of incompleteness is an illusion of material belief, which falsely identifies man as limited and mortal, separated from God, good. Christian Science shows that by refusing to accept the false material view of oneself as an incomplete mortal, and by prayerfully acknowledging the truth of man's perfection and wholeness as God's son, His spiritual reflection, one can progressively eliminate evidence of lack from his experience.
The word “health” means wholeness. Christian Science shows how anyone can maintain health by aligning his whole being—in thought and act—with God, infinite Life, divine Spirit. This spiritual alignment is attained as he increases in spiritual understanding and so attains greater wisdom, purity, and love—qualities that reflect the perfection of God, divine Love. As the Apostle Paul puts it: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.” II Cor. 3:5
That “sufficiency is of God” was clearly demonstrated by Christ Jesus in his many healing works, as when he healed the lepers, blessed the contrition of a sinful woman, restored sight to the blind, and fed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes. His healing works evidenced the spiritual fact that man as God's reflection is whole, lacking nothing.
Jesus understood and taught that God is Spirit. He did not view adverse material conditions as true and beyond God's help. The Master's spiritual understanding dispelled the beliefs of lack entertained by those around him, thus freeing them from fear. Regeneration and healing resulted.
Today, through the spiritual understanding gained in their study of Christian Science, many are “'finding all in God, good,” and are learning to acknowledge and manifest something of man's indivisible wholeness as the image of God, divine Love.