Reports of vulnerability are stacking up with every news cycle.

• There are concerns about the potential use of "dirty bombs" or other weapons of strategic disorientation by terrorist cells.

• Nuclear weapons are at the disposal of Pakistan and India, which together hold one-sixth of the world's population. They have fought three conventional wars in the past halfcentury and skirmish almost daily over disputed territory.

• Some so-called rogue states are said to possess nuclear and biological weapons capabilities, and there's open discussion among Western democracies about practicing foreign policy by first strike.

These and more subtle fears of random violence cause some people to seek refuge in a remote place, like the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where, as we ready this issue for production, forest fires continue to threaten the homes of solitude seekers.

It is the Sentinel's position that there is a deeper solution to the issue of vulnerability—a spiritual solution.

A safe place does indeed exist—a place to live, to raise families, to build communities. Our collective exploration of this place is still very much a work in process, however. Quite honestly, it's a work barely begun. This kind of refuge isn't a geographical location but a universal mental and spiritual "new home" for humanity. Millions are seeking this home; many just don't know what to call it or how to live there even if they've had a taste of its existence—the reality of spiritual existence and the laws of love that govern life in God's actual, good creation.

If this refuge is spiritual—and therefore of Spirit, of the infinite—then it's not a place for a chosen few to hide from what poet e. e. cummings called that "busy monster, manunkind." His poem begins with a plea to pity the monster we appear to have become, but his closing lines offer a surprising and hopeful twist: He points the reader to "a good universe next door" and says, "let's go."

What if "next door" isn't some kind of parallel universe but instead a change of mindset? A change from seeing life as basically material and inherently flawed and risky, to approaching life as spiritual? A life in which spirituality isn't just a personal comfort zone but the rule of all relationships? Even more to the point, how might it change the way we act, right now?

So, although the desire for self-preservation runs pretty deep, this isn't the time to start building 21st-century versions of 1950s bomb shelters. No, it's a time to go out into our workplaces, our communities—and through prayer, into the whole world—and live more openly the love that's within us. There are innumerable way to act more spiritually. Here are four to start your list.

• Make the healing of injured relationships a priority.

• Seek out, talk with, listen to, befriend, those unlike yourself.

• Take that simple rule that appears in virtually every religion's sacred texts—in the Bible it's the Golden Rule—and actually do to others what you would want them to do to you.

• Search sourcebooks for the laws of spiritual being and how these laws can be practiced. (It won't surprise you that we recommend the Bible, as well as Mary Baker Eddy's field guide for experiential spirituality, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.)

Mary Baker Eddy spent 40 years refining and clarifying the ideas in Science and Health. These ideas now have had more than 125 years of fieldtesting in people's lives, with healing effects spanning the whole human condition. We believe that the fact of being explained in the book point to the real "good universe," the one safe place to go—the understanding of the God who unconditionally loves all of us.

Every day more readers are finding true, by experience, Mrs. Eddy's own estimation of Science and Health: that it is "transforming the universe."