A magnificent reminder of beauty and joy

My first viewing of the aurora borealis was at Voyageurs National Park in the Northwoods region of Minnesota, where our family was camping. One quiet night, the sky exploded into swirling colors. Greens swept back and forth amidst pops of oranges, purples, reds.

I didn’t know what to do with all this splendor. I gasped, my eyes transfixed on the sky, and felt the colors go right through me. I ran to hug a tree, to hug my dad, wanting to feel grounded. How could everything be so quiet, so still, with this majesty of hues and textures spiraling and shimmering over me like a celestial blanket of joy?

“All nature teaches God’s love to man,” Mary Baker Eddy writes in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (p. 326). This display of light, my first experience of the northern lights, brought a glimpse of wonder, a moment to consider what is infinite, what is pure and omnipresent, and what my place is in all this. It made what I’d been learning in Christian Science Sunday School more real to me.

For instance, there’s this stunning passage in Science and Health: “Divine Science, the Word of God, saith to the darkness upon the face of error, ‘God is All-in-all,’ and the light of ever-present Love illumines the universe. Hence the eternal wonder, – that infinite space is peopled with God’s ideas, reflecting Him in countless spiritual forms” (p. 503). Not only is God’s love magnificent, God is infinite Love, and Love’s creation – including each of us – is entirely spiritual, reflecting the beauty, joy, and light of divine Spirit.

Even where there may seem to be little more than a blank or dark future, the spark of this spiritual reality can awaken thought to hope – to the realization that infinite God creates infinite ideas, thus generating infinite possibilities.

At one point recently I’d been experiencing a growing dullness in my life, a murmuring sense of mediocrity. And no amount of planning events, organizing my surroundings, willfully tackling tasks, or consuming social media could shake it. Even my prayers felt as though they were lackluster.

But then I read Monitor writer Francine Kiefer’s account, “Cold journey. Lasting joy. My trek to see the northern lights.” It brought me back to my own first experience with these lights and the lasting legacy of the spiritual insights that night had brought.

I realized that I didn’t personally need to make my life exciting, but rather needed to be still, expectant, and free of trying to outline good. (Can infinite good, whose source is God, ever be contained in an outline?)

This didn’t mean I shouldn’t take responsibility for my life. But the most empowering way to do this is to lift thought from a stressed, material basis driven by a roller coaster of human will to an outlook that looks to God. God is omnipotent and omnipresent, and life flows as a reflection of God, good. Through a prayer-fueled, enlarged acceptance of God’s light and grace, qualities such as unselfishness, kindness, progress, joy, and awe are ignited and fanned into a fuller, more spiritual experience.

And sure enough, identifying with God’s light helped me to shake off the dust of dreariness. I saw new opportunities to do good, found new inspiration in my prayers and study of Christian Science, and made surprising connections – including some opportunities that had been there all along, but that I hadn’t seen before.

Anywhere, anytime, we can experience powerful moments that open thought to the ongoing newness and infinite possibilities of good – a consciousness of life in God, and thus invulnerable to dullness, apathy, overload, any other kind of limitation. Such moments bring us, step by step, into a new birth, which Mrs. Eddy explains “is not the work of a moment. It begins with moments, and goes on with years; moments of surrender to God, of childlike trust and joyful adoption of good; moments of self-abnegation, self-consecration, heaven-born hope, and spiritual love” (“Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896,” p. 15).

We are all included in the glorious, expansive, and inclusive arc of divine Love. We are already grounded in the kingdom of heaven, eternally spiritual, whole, brilliant, and peaceful. When we take a moment for expectant prayer, we see that divine goodness, beauty, satisfaction, grace, and splendor are already here.