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Finding Christmas within
Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor’s Christian Science Perspective column December 18, 2023.
It was a few days before Christmas , and I was in a long line at a grocery store waiting to check out. There were groans and sighs of impatience and shuffling of feet. The atmosphere felt far from Christmas-like! I turned my thought away from what I was seeing to God. Through my understanding of Christian Science I knew God could lift me up to see His presence right in the midst of all the discontent and annoyance. So I closed my eyes and sent up a heartfelt prayer, “Father, show me Your presence.” Just then, a stillness enveloped me and I felt a surge of love in my heart.
When I opened my eyes, the whole scene had transformed. Where I had before seen complaining and irritation, now I saw neighbors greeting each other with hugs, a mom playing patty-cake with her baby, and a young man graciously lifting a heavy bundle for an elderly woman. The activity now testified to the presence of God, good, right then and there.
So what had taken place? This was a modest but very sweet example of the sort of transformation spoken of in Mary Baker Eddy’s seminal work Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Referring to God as Mind, it says: “Advancing spiritual steps in the teeming universe of Mind lead on to spiritual spheres and exalted beings. To material sense, this divine universe is dim and distant, gray in the sombre hues of twilight; but anon the veil is lifted, and the scene shifts into light” (p. 513).
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