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A world in turmoil or bloom?

A Christian Science perspective.

  • By Elizabeth Mata

The voice of the people couldn’t be silenced. As a Monitor editorial put it, “Humanity’s natural desire for honest and fair society was in full bloom this year. Perhaps 2012 can be a time for replanting and watering that desire in even more countries.”

Even as some countries are still on the verge of toppling governments and others are building governments from scratch, how important are our prayers that put sincere desires under the control and guidance of God. This can have a healing impact of solidifying and expanding them into greater development of good wherever needed.

The Bible is filled with wise counsel about how to put right desires – private as well as universal – under God’s care. The Psalmist wrote: “Depend upon the Lord, and he will grant you your heart’s desire. Commit your life to the Lord; trust in him and he will act. He will make your righteousness shine clear as the day and the justice of your cause like the sun at noon” (Psalms 37:3-6, New English Bible).

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science and established the Monitor, found comfort and guidance in the Bible. She wrote on the first page of her groundbreaking book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds.” Whether or not all those who desire honest and fair society see desire as prayer, it is – and the power of God is the foundation for all right desire as it is for all prayer.

One place to start prayerfully planting and watering the desire for equitable and principled communities and societies is by knowing that it really is God, our only Creator, who plants right desires in our hearts and therefore will care for them. For this reason, we can trust our desires to God. Indeed, as God is our Father and Mother, the only source of our being, and man – each one of us – is God’s image and likeness, we can feel the conviction of the power and presence of God to continue developing the good we inherently possess.

Something else that Mrs. Eddy wrote has helped me understand how close our desires for progress and transparency in all human affairs are to God’s care. She said: “The vox populi, through the providence of God, promotes and impels all true reform; and, at the best time, will redress wrongs and rectify injustice. Tyranny can thrive but feebly under our Government. God reigns, and will ‘turn and overturn’ until right is found supreme” (“Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896,” p. 80).

We can pray to know without a doubt that all right desires coming through the voice of the people are under the care of divine Love, and that Love is watering thought with fresh ideas and inspiration, guiding and designating the steps that need to be taken at the correct moment by governing officials as well as those in grass-roots organizations. 

How grateful we can be for the blooming across the globe. The recognition and honoring of honesty and justice wherever they are help us all go forward. These pure impulses partake of the intelligence of God as the only Mind and are Truth’s certainty. It is divine Love in action.

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Mark Sappenfield
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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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