The recent airline disaster in the French Alps has caused many in the world to seek prayerful comfort and healing solutions in the spirit of Christly compassion, support, and brotherhood. Years ago, after a similar incident affected me personally, I needed to prayerfully work through and rise above the full gamut of emotions involved with such a tragedy. Christian Science played the leading role in bringing me real, lasting peace and a renewed sense of God as Life and Love.

One evening just before the Christmas holidays, a friend and I were watching the news on TV as breaking international coverage suddenly interrupted with live footage of fragments of a downed aircraft. We were both quietly praying to know that those aboard and their families were in spiritual reality forever enveloped in divine Love, when the phone rang. I was advised that a close family member had been on that flight and that there were no survivors. Reeling from shock and the disturbing images I had seen on the news, I struggled to rise above the sea of emotions.

Under these trying circumstances, I needed bedrock to stand on. Christian Science had just come into my life earlier that year, healing me of a physical condition that doctors had said would require surgery. I had glimpsed the fact of my divine Parent’s ever-present, infinite love, which is always cherishing, maintaining, protecting, and guiding me, His perfectly created idea. I knew this to be true for all of God’s children. Since that healing, Christian Science had become my guiding light, satisfying an inner desire to grow spiritually closer to my creator, offering a very fulfilling way to live and think.

Armed with that recent healing proof in hand, I naturally and eagerly turned to God, who is undying, infinite Love itself.

I was led to call a practitioner of Christian Science healing. After quietly listening as I told her what had happened, she most tenderly affirmed that divine Love is the only power, presence, and intelligence of the true, spiritual universe, and nothing can touch it, blow it up, or change it. Regardless of the material appearances, our Father-Mother Love’s infinite, ever-present, gentle, all-embracing love is right there with all of its children, holding us near and dear. I knew that man’s identity, including that of each passenger on the airplane, is the spiritual idea of Mind, God, made in the image and likeness of immutable, perfect Love and Life—indestructible, forever safe, and fully intact. We can never be separated for an instant from divine Love because that’s where we really live, in God.

This radiant sense of all-inclusive divine Life expanded and filled my thought. Mary Baker Eddy writes, “Spiritual living and blessedness are the only evidences, by which we can recognize true existence and feel the unspeakable peace which comes from an all-absorbing spiritual love” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 264). The effect of these truths was to dissolve the sorrow that had gripped me, and I was filled with a sense of “unspeakable peace.” The grief did not return; the healing was permanent. Subsequently, whenever I thought of my relative, it was always with reverent gratitude for God as eternal Life and with joy for the love expressed by this family member.

Moment by moment we all must choose whom we would serve. Do we serve God with all our hearts, thoughts, and actions, or allow ourselves to be held hostage by limited, worldly thought? Moses gave this choice to the Israelites on their journey to the promised land: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). I chose to keep my thought turned toward God, who is Life, Truth, and Love, three synonyms for God that I was learning more about. These declare God to be our undying Life, All-in-all.

Mrs. Eddy says, “Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God” (Science and Health, p. 243). During this time I determined to turn my thought toward eternal Life, Truth, and Love, and away from the material picture of mortality. I strove to think and act in accord with my identity as the reflection of Love—with affection, uplift, tenderness, kindness, gentleness, strength, comforting presence, hope, and forgiveness. I cherished immortal Life’s joy, vitality, and unending activity as the Principle of God’s all-perfect universe and Truth’s faithful, righteous power and justice. As I did, I saw that these synonyms are indeed “a law of annihilation” to whatever is not good and real.

Keeping my own thinking in order put me in a better position to help lift others in my family out of grief. During the holidays, I was able to maintain spiritual strength through daily study of the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson, my own prayers, and treatment from a Christian Science practitioner. This protected me from getting sucked into the ups and downs of the human drama, and enabled me to be helpful in expressing love for family and others, without trying to preach to them or convert them to Christian Science. My only job was to let the light of the Christ—the divine message that comes to us all and brings healing, as Christ Jesus demonstrated—shine through my thought, like sun through a skylight.

This was a spiritually deepening time on many fronts. Human beliefs would seem to darken our view of loved ones as here only yesterday but now gone forever, but I saw clearly that Life is eternal. I stopped trying to reconcile good and evil as at war, with an uncertain outcome, because God—infinite goodness, Mind, Life, and Love—is “of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13). Evil has no place or power to wage war against omnipresent, undying Life.

Someone once said that if I were to put on ultra-dark sunglasses and look at a perfectly white horse, that horse would seem barely visible; but actually, the horse himself wouldn’t change and would be unaffected by my clouded sense of him. In this case, I had to take off the dark sunglasses of a mortal view of man and see my relative and all the other passengers on that flight as the expression of infinite Life and Love, as God eternally knows them to be. As Mrs. Eddy writes, “Fed by Thy love divine we live, / For Love alone is Life” (Poems, p. 7). So, abandoning the false, mortal view of man was the most uplifting, joyously healing, and naturally loving thing for me to do.