Gaining Spiritual Altitude

ELIZABETH H. MARSHMAN

In order to have clear vision ahead, a pilot often needs to take his plane to a higher altitude. If he can lift the plane high enough, he inevitably will find clear atmosphere, free from all interference and obstruction.

One day, as the writer was thinking about a problem which she was endeavoring to solve, she became aware that she had been struggling mentally to overcome all the false claims of mortal mind concerning the problem, delving deeply into the maze of mortal mind's intricate involvements, and had not been using and accepting sufficient affirmations of the truth of being. The result was that she had become more and more confused, trying to make perfection out of imperfection, harmony out of discord, instead of realizing that the real remedy lay in seeing harmonious man as the one and only man there is or ever was, not needing to be healed or improved upon in any way.

She saw that her need was to gain spiritual altitude, as it were, to lift thought above the arguments and claims of discord and disease into the clear, uninterrupted, and unobstructed vision of man's status as the perfect expression of infinite Mind, divine Love, Spirit, Soul. Did not Jesus once tell his disciples, in speaking of the utter confusion and fear that would beset mortal existence (Luke 21:28), "When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh"?

Since inspiration, perception, and spiritual vision belong to Soul, God, and are reflected by man, the student saw that she needed to accept these qualities as hers, right then and there, in order to gain the necessary spiritual altitude. Then came the light! A flood of encouraging and inspiring statements from the writings of our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, came to her thought in support of the perfection of God and man.

For example, from the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 475): "Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas;" and (p. 95), "Material sense does not unfold the facts of existence; but spiritual sense lifts human consciousness into eternal Truth."

With the aid of these and other statements by our Leader, the student's thought was lifted to a higher spiritual altitude, and she saw that there are not two kinds of man, one perfect and eternal, and the other mortal, discordant, diseased, suffering, trying to be better. There is only one man, and he is the expression of all the goodness of God. The mortal counterfeit pretends to be real, and if we continue to stay down on its level, and accept its claims, we shall never be able to see the reality of things.

Instead of being concerned solely with denying the discordant arguments, she found her thought filled with the revelation of man's perfectibility. With this joyous, positive line of thinking, the claims of error were easily seen as mere sham, as make–believe, as lies about God's man which were not true then, nor had they ever been. Man's harmonious status was seen to be intact and incapable of being changed or altered.

On page 243 of Science and Health we are told that "Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God." The joyous realization of the truth acted as an immediate refutation of each argument of matter and mortal mind as it presented itself, and the student soon found the problem was entirely solved.

Through Christian Science we can use every problem in our experience as an opportunity for growth Spiritward. And we find that the lifting of thought above materiality and discord into the realm of the real has certain results in the complete obliteration of everything unlike God, good. It does not need to take time to rise to this spiritual altitude—it is a matter of accepting its ever–present possibility.

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