A spiritual barometer of humanity’s progress

As Editor of the international newspaper The Christian Science Monitor, I sometimes feel I would like to illustrate Monitor stories like a comic book. Every once in a while, a sentence in the Monitor hits me so hard it seems to need a good “KAPOW!”

That happened most recently when I was reading a cover story in the weekly print Monitor. The article is about Louisiana State University’s efforts to embrace diversity—a topic that, like so many today, can be fraught with partisan overtones. Can diversity happen if it is not prioritized? And if prioritized, can it be done fairly? Many lawsuits say no, arguing that admissions need to be colorblind. Yet without efforts to increase diversity, certain communities tend to remain chronically underrepresented. 

I was treading these rather tangled mental paths when that “KAPOW!” sentence came out of the blue and knocked me cold. State flagship universities, the author wrote, are “barometers of progress.” 

This is, in many ways, an unremarkable sentence. Education is essential to progress, and state flagship universities such as LSU show how a society is doing. Duh. But I heard an echo of another thought I was familiar with: “To ascertain our progress, we must learn where our affections are placed and whom we acknowledge and obey as God.”

That was written by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Monitor and author of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, from which that passage comes (p. 239 ). Studying Christian Science has led me to the conclusion that the nature of progress is spiritual. And I was grateful for that sentence coming to thought and reminding me of it. Without this understanding, progress can often seem to be such a fickle thing, changing according to time and place, situation and culture. That, in fact, was exactly what I had been wrestling with at the beginning of the cover story. Was what I was reading about progress? And if so, progress for whom? 

Another of Mrs. Eddy’s works, Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, says that “… progress is the law of infinity” (p. 15 ). Progress, after all, can have only one endpoint, and that is perfection. In fact, from a spiritual standpoint, progress has neither beginning nor end; it is the progressive unfoldment of completeness, the growing realization that God’s entire creation is spiritual and perfect, eternally.

Perfection is what I understand God to be. God is divine Principle, Love, the spiritual substructure and superstructure of eternal Truth that defines the universe, including each of us as God’s expression. And with an ever-onward gravitational pull, God draws us all toward the full consciousness and experience of divine Truth. The way we experience this in our day-to-day lives sometimes comes with many mortal missteps along the way! But the attraction is inexorable. 

I felt this universal gravitational pull toward God, good, when I looked at the smile of the young man featured in the Monitor Weekly story, Stewart Lockett. Since the founding of Louisiana State University, students of color were at first not admitted at all, then admitted reluctantly, and then admitted in such small numbers as to make them feel like strangers in their own state school. Yet here was Mr. Lockett, a student of color, smiling at the composition of student leadership today—more diverse than at any time in the school’s history. For perhaps the first time, many in marginalized communities were feeling a pride and a belonging at LSU. And that knit them more deeply into the fabric of the whole community. What a barometer of progress this was!

Similarly, we can keep checking a spiritual barometer of human progress. We can keep asking ourselves, Where are our affections placed? Whom do we acknowledge and obey as God? The Apostle Peter said, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34 ). Another apostle, Paul, said several times that there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, that we “are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 ). This points to the real identity of all: not mortals sometimes at odds with one another, but the perfectly unique, united, spiritual expressions of God’s love.

Societies will continue to wrestle with how best to spread opportunity as fairly and widely as possible. But in its own way, LSU is taking a stand for a unity that echoes our eternal oneness in Christ, in Truth—that hints at how none should be in the slightest doubt that we are all, as Paul said, “joint-heirs” of the mercy, wisdom, and infinite care of God.

To read Mark’s Upfront Blog that accompanied the LSU article, click here.