The tares and the wheat—and my begonias
Things are not always what they appear to be. Spiritual vision helps us distinguish between the real and the counterfeit in life.
The lesson is not new; in fact it is very old and one probably most Christians have pondered before in Christ Jesus' parable of the tares and the wheat. But the lesson became crystal clear to me one bright morning in the light of what I have learned in Christian Science.
I had been fooled for weeks into protecting that weed, but the masquerade was over and I pulled it out by the roots.
For several weeks I had been caring for some newly planted begonias. One plant had been growing leaves strangely different from the others. But as it seemed to be growing at the same rate as the others, and I hadn't seen these big fuzzy leaves growing wild anywhere else in the garden, I assumed it was another variety of begonia and thought nothing of it. I continued to water and care for it just like the others. Then one morning I noticed that the big fuzzy leaves were beginning to dominate and push to one side the smaller stems and flowers that I had thought were one and the same plant. It was immediately clear that these were two different plants with no connection whatsoever. The big fuzzy plant was a weed growing up through the center of the begonia. It had probably been there when I brought the plant from the nursery.
The instant I realized it was a weed, the masquerade was over, and I pulled it out by the roots. It came out easily, and once it was gone, I could see that the little begonia it had seemed to be part of was exactly like the other begonias in my garden. I had been fooled for weeks into protecting that weed, and yet the moment I realized what it was, I disposed of it at once.
I stood for a while, thinking of how closely that weed resembles error in our thinking. Error is a term used in Christian Science to mean anything unlike divine Spirit, God, or good. It is an imposition that would appear to disrupt harmony. I learned several lessons about error that day.
1. Once error is seen for what it is, a lie, it can no longer fool us and is powerless to perpetuate itself.
2. Error can only exist in our consciousness as long as we nurture and protect it by believing it is real.
3. By gaining a clearer sense of the nature of the spiritual, perfect man and universe, we can detect the impostor and see that the error cannot possibly be part of what's real, even as I finally could see that the growing weed was not part of the begonia.
4. Error never becomes part of Truth or adulterates it in any way. It is always separate, never mingling with Truth in the least, just as the weed was never part of the begonia, even though for a time it passed itself off as such.
5. As error grows and asserts itself, it only ensures its own exposure as a lie and thus its own destruction. Once we know it is a lie, an illusion, we can root it out of thought and remove it from our experience. Of course the weed trying to push out the begonia wasn't an "illusion," but the deceptive appearance held a useful lesson for me about the nature of error.
When we're faced with error of some sort, whether sickness or sin, how encouraging it is to know that through prayer the light of Truth will eventually dawn in our thought and reveal error's absolute unreality. In reality, error can't grow, nor can it exist in the allness of God. It only claims to exist by perpetuating the lie that there can be an absence of Truth. As we constantly affirm and hold to the true picture of man made in God's image, we will come to see and know that any inharmony or abnormality is no part of man and therefore can be uprooted and destroyed.
In the parable of the tares and the wheat, the servants ask if they should gather up the newly discovered tares. The householder answers: "Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn." Matt. 13:29, 30.
But let us also remember these words of Jesus: "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." John 4:35.
The time is now to lift up our eyes, our consciousness, to the true spiritual creation and see clearly that error can have no part in God's allness. Mrs. Eddy tells us how to go about this great work in her book Science and Health. She writes: "The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Science separates the wheat from the tares, through the realization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting the divine likeness." Science and Health, p. 300.
This harvest goes on moment by moment as we weed those lies of fear, inharmony, sin, disease, and death from our thought through the realization of spiritual truth. And what a glorious harvest it is. Aren't we privileged to be a part of it?
