Is there an answer to the recurrent problem of what are called natural disasters? Yes. According to the Science of Life nothing is, in fact, more unnatural than they are. These large-scale destructive occurrences of fire, flood, earthquake, plague, drought, famine, have an answer in the absolute understanding that these have no place in God's all-spiritual creation. Through Christian Science we can gain the spiritual scientific comprehension of God and His manifestation that helps forestall "natural" catastrophes.

We may ask, Aren't all material things, including the beautiful and useful ones, open to destruction by natural forces? Doesn't this mean that there is little we can do to offset disasters?

In finding solutions it's of first importance to gain a more metaphysical grasp of the world we see about us. In clarifying the issue, Mary Baker Eddy explains: "Even the human conception of beauty, grandeur, and utility is something that defies a sneer. It is more than imagination. It is next to divine beauty and the grandeur of Spirit. It lives with our earth-life, and is the subjective state of high thoughts." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 86;}

The ever-active Christ lifts and maintains high thoughts—and high thoughts are infinitely more natural than beliefs in possible disaster. The beauty and utility we find in our world and its objects are the subjective state of these thoughts. And here is an indispensable key in helping forestall disasters: We must achieve higher levels of thought, abandoning a merely physical sense of our surroundings. Then we see more clearly the reality of the things in the world about us. Scientific Christianity shows us how to do this and to begin demonstrating in our immediate world the undisturbable perfection of God's creation.

Like the Psalmist, we can acknowledge, "The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them." ^{Ps. 89:11;} Spiritual consciousness recognizes that what God has founded is indestructible. The three-dimensional world perceived by the personal sense and encompassing disasters is not the universe of Mind, Spirit. Spiritual consciousness, by its very nature, never concedes the would-be plausible arguments of the senses that man and his environment are material and liable to disaster moment by moment. As we progressively accept the divine consciousness as ours, we maintain the level of thought that expresses itself in the beauty and permanence of our apparently physical world. And we hold off the temptation to admit the vulnerability and destructibility of our home, city, countryside, farm.

And the higher our thought, the less susceptible are our crops and herds to plague and drought, and the less exposed our cities to flood and earthquake. The more divinely scientific our outlook, the less open to fire are our homes and industrial plants.

Spirituality of thought prompts us to reason from Spirit and its allness rather than from matter and its claims. Material sense may be insisting on the earthquake potential of an unstable fault line. But is even a least corner of God's creation dangerously fractured? No.

Do divine Mind's cycles of good include a seasonal menace of tornadoes? No.

Likewise, spiritually elevated thinking is not focused on the probability of a plague of pests or plant diseases following certain climatic conditions, but recognizes that the growth of Mind's ideas is impelled, nurtured, and protected by Mind.

Our taking up of the challenge to spiritually help forestall the claims of natural disaster is a significant means to better, uniquely valuable, citizenship. Those who are endeavoring to understand and live Christian Science have both the opportunity and the obligation to make a special contribution to community, nation, and humanity.

Emphatically, spiritual thought is not impractical, nor unconcerned with public apathy or official irresponsibility. On the contrary, an atmosphere of divinely scientific thinking helps promote intelligent defensive measures and public alertness. It is the best counteractor of blind optimism or neglect in the community. These attitudes, promoted by animal magnetism, are the evil-intentioned claims of the carnal mind—the very opposite of high thoughts.

So-called natural disasters in whatever form are ruled out as realities by divine law. There is no material law opposed to God's spiritual law governing every element of man and the universe. The Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mrs. Eddy, explains: "The definitions of material law, as given by natural science, represent a kingdom necessarily divided against itself, because these definitions portray law as physical, not spiritual. Therefore they contradict the divine decrees and violate the law of Love, in which nature and God are one and the natural order of heaven comes down to earth." ^{Science and Health, p. 118.}

The highest state of thought is that to which the "natural order of heaven" has come in its entirety, canceling out the reality of natural disaster in the realization of one actual plane of being, the heavenly. This real universe is not comprised of breakable objects, mortal beings, death-prone flocks and crops and other outlined three-dimensional entities but only of the disaster-free ideas of Mind.

Geoffrey J. Barratt

Behold, ... a great and strong wind ...
an earthquake ... a fire;
but the Lord was not in the fire:
and after the fire a still small voice.

I Kings 19:11, 12