Prosperous nations can all too easily slip into the malaise of overconsumption. High production begets high consumption. It's the way modern industrialized societies tend to work. It can involve much waste, self-indulgence, and materiality.

Not that there is something intrinsically wrong with prosperity. Far from it. But whatever is destructive and materializing has its roots in mortal thought. Through exercising spiritual intelligence and alertness we can moderate the extremes and extravagances of mortal thought and replace them with spiritual realization. Spiritual realization is more truly satisfying than material consumption can ever be. It is, in a manner of speaking, a "luxury" we can all afford.

Christian Science changes the direction of our search for satisfaction from looking outward on a material world—and its experiences and objects—to looking to inner spiritual resources. The Science of Life develops our realization of God's inexhaustible resources of good, and as this occurs we are decreasingly dependent on material items and events for satisfaction. Over-consumption comes from an insistent sense of incompleteness, from believing we need something from the outside to make us happy, comfortable, and at peace.

Christ Jesus was awake to the demand to look to Spirit rather than matter for what we need. His advice is familiar: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?" ^{Matt. 6:25;} A metaphysical reason for his saying this is that Christ Jesus knew man as the infinite expression of omnipresent Spirit. Should we think only about what we eat, drink, and are dressed up in, then we have fallen into the trap of mortal thought. We're in danger of stepping onto a treadmill of material acquisitiveness, which will never bring satisfaction irrespective of how hard we work at turning the mill.

Christ Jesus' purely spiritual standpoint gave him poise and objectivity in regard to the world. He was neither depressed nor impressed by material appearances. Whether he was dining with the wealthy or mingling with the average or poor and suffering, he maintained his spiritual integrity. He kept burnished his consciousness of man's complete and full nature. It's an ideal we might well work toward—or an ideal we might well work from.

With cultivated spiritual values we will not only appreciate, perhaps, the convenience of a credit card economy. But we will at the same time be alert to its dangers and its temptation to seek instant gratification of what are sometimes just passing and trivial whims. We will be awake to unethical advertising that would stimulate and extend false appetites (and generate very crude ones, sometimes) as the preliminary to the mass feeding of those appetites. We will more quickly detect the psychological manipulation that is an element of some advertising.

While Christian Science enables us to demonstrate the divine substance of Spirit and to have our needs adequately—and even amply—met, it is not a mental system to magically produce all the things we want. Or a kind of license to print money. It is not at all like that. It helps us be less dependent on matter for well-being and health. It moderates acquisitiveness and spiritualizes our sense of satisfaction. Mary Baker Eddy gives us this passage in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "The Scriptures say: 'Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.' That which we desire and for which we ask, it is not always best for us to receive." ^{Science and Health, p. 10;}

Through Christian metaphysics we realize how mistaken it is to think even for a moment that for real happiness we have to go through life with an overflowing supermarket cart—either a literal or a metaphorical one. What should be overflowing is the deep realization of man's complete wholeness, which is native to him as God's image.

Science makes apparent that the good we need is omnipresent spiritual good. And, as God's man, we are inseparable from it. True good doesn't have to be transported from there to here— it is always with us. Genuine good is not something that's seductively packaged or irresistibly promoted. It is spiritual, the outpouring of God's undepletable love for man and of His ceaseless care for the whole universe. We help moderate Over-consumption by affirming such truths of being, and living by them as consistently as we can.

Of course, we all have some fundamental everyday needs. And it's very proper that these be satisfied. Science and Health tells us, "Christ, Truth, gives mortals temporary food and clothing until the material, transformed with the ideal, disappears, and man is clothed and fed spiritually." ^{ibid., p. 442.} When basic needs are satisfied—when we no longer are constantly distracted by the need to keep body and soul together, as the saying goes—we often feel freer to pursue spiritually significant objectives. But when our thinking is materialized and acquisitive, we cease to be masters of our natural needs and instead become their servants. Constantly chasing after the new and fashionable, struggling to keep up with the neighbors, can come from a mortal desire to placate egotism and pride.

One can have highly spiritual values without being an ascetic. Underconsumption—chronic poorness, meagerness, overall thinness of living—can be a form of materialism. These conditions might very well come from a subtle acceptance of matter as a reality, a presence that we are afraid of and merely wish to sidestep rather than grow out of spiritually. Meagerness can be as materialistic in its own way as the longing for plush living and for the indulgence of each passing whim.

In the absolute, spiritual truth of being, God creates all and satisfies all with His inexhaustible good. The knowledge of this spiritual fact helps us to live with satisfaction and amplitude, but with moderation.

Geoffrey J. Barratt