Going home. A sense of comfort, protection, belonging, of warmth, understanding, and ease, comes to most people just thinking about going home. It is to feel nearer the solution of pressing problems, to find release from tensions, to enjoy being wanted, to be oneself.

Even if we don't have a home of our own, we can still feel at home. Mrs. Eddy shows how this is possible. The last line of the twenty-third Psalm as she gives it in Science and Health reads, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house [the consciousness] of [love] for ever."Science and Health, p. 578; Home is the consciousness of Love, God. Then is there ever any valid reason why we can't feel at home? Does it matter where we are if we're dwelling in the consciousness of divine Love?

Many students of Christian Science, the Science of Christ, or Truth, have used the spiritual sense of being to find comfort and understanding while away from home. The limitless concept of home as the consciousness of Love can give them a sense of ease wherever they are.

Seen this way, home isn't something we go to but something we bring out. The conviction of really being at home comes from within, not without. This concept is powerfully expressed in Mrs. Eddy's words, "Pilgrim on earth, thy home is heaven; stranger, thou art the guest of God." p. 254; If we feel like pilgrims or strangers where we are now, then we can let the heaven of God's presence permeate our thinking. We can vigorously remind ourselves that Love is omnipresent. How needlessly wrong it is to feel strange! We can feel at home wherever we are.

Sometimes people who have been on long trips or been confined somewhere because of illness are obsessed with the idea of going home. Their mental state is subject to their locality. This should be reversed. Our locality, wherever it is, can become home to us if we mentally embrace it in a spiritual sense of God's perfect, real creation. Letting home come from within makes it possible for us to maintain an uninterrupted consciousness of Love's harmony and beauty, universally reflected in all the true manifestations of its being. A change of attitude reverses the sad habit of looking to place and person rather than to our outlook to feel at home.

We can look out from the consciousness of Love, not forward to it. We are capable of this, for man is Love's expression. This is the true, spiritual concept of man, and it can become the only concept we have of ourselves and others everywhere. Man is at home in the perfection of God's spiritual universe. The false concept of coming or going in a material, discordant universe can't make us feel like pilgrims or strangers if we identify ourselves as the real and only man Love creates.

It is possible to begin our every day by feeling at home. It is possible to sustain that feeling by understanding why we are at home. This will take us a long way toward offsetting the tension and animosity that breed human problems. We are not apt to take offense or give it if we feel secure, beloved, and at home in Love. We don't react fearfully, we don't need tranquilizers or stimulants, if divine comfort and understanding are real and tangible to us.

To dwell in the consciousness of Love is to be so sure of goodness—absolute, complete, lasting, indivisible, irresistible goodness—that suggestions of evil can't break through the protective walls of this heavenly state.

"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty."Ps. 91:1. The consciousness of Love is secret only to corporeal sense, which is not capable of recognizing spiritual reality. Almighty, omnipresent Love is man's real and only dwelling place. We have the royal right to say at any given moment, "I am home," and to feel the joy and calm of this present truth.