Our freedom to be God-guided

A key freedom that we can always claim for ourselves is a divine rather than a human right. It is our right to listen for God’s direction, hear it, heed it, and be blessed and bless others by doing so. As articles published in this column so often illustrate, such divine guidance is a crucial steppingstone to solving problems. That’s true on a personal level as well as on a broader level of helping our neighbors locally and across the globe.

Our right to be God-guided cannot be legislated, for or against, nor can street protests prevent or prompt it. It is taking an individual stand for the freedom to be what we already spiritually are – God’s likeness, the expression of divine Mind – in the face of the tendency of the human mind to forget this God-given liberty.

Inspired ideas come to light when prayer stirs the dormancy of dull thinking or stills waves of willfulness. Listening for the true, spiritual idea of what we are and being animated by it lead to freeing and healing outcomes, as Jesus so fruitfully proved.

This spiritual idea is God’s impartation of Himself, the healing Christ conveying what’s divinely true. Christ impels both inspired words and timely silence; outlines loving action and restrains impulsiveness; brings to light the divine Mind’s governance and exposes the falsity of every claim of another, lesser mind able to take the reins from God.

Openness to the Christ message of what is spiritual and true is crucial to experiencing our God-bestowed freedom. It can seem hard to spot the difference between divinely grounded persistence and forceful personal opinion or between the mighty meekness of accepting that we are God’s reflection, and the human mind’s erroneous and fettering self-deprecation.

The Bible offers helpful guidance via Jesus’ parable of a field that he likens to the kingdom of heaven, in which tares (weeds) are maliciously planted alongside good seed (see Matthew 13:24-30). When the servants want to pull out the bad plants, the owner of the field counsels patience so that clarity can emerge as to which plants are which. Then the weeds can be decisively disposed of and the wheat fully garnered.

Seeing this story through the lens of Christian Science shines a light on it. We can see the field that contains tares and wheat as representing human consciousness. This is where our wholly harmonious spirituality that manifests Mind seems to mix and mingle with discordant matter-based perceptions and impulses. We can wait patiently as Christ, divine Truth, at work in human consciousness, enables us to clearly distinguish the former from the latter and perceive the field – consciousness – as it truly is, the kingdom of heaven.

This heavenly kingdom is identified in a spiritually inspired definition in the Christian Science textbook as “the reign of harmony in divine Science; the realm of unerring, eternal, and omnipotent Mind; the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 590).

Our true consciousness, then, has no “weeds.” It is independent of temporal, unreal, mutable, imperfect, inharmonious, and self-destructive thoughts and full of eternal, real, immutable, perfect, harmonious, and self-existent thoughts. Science and Health says of “these opposite qualities” that they 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” (p. 300).

We each have the inherent capacity as God’s loved child to realize God’s presence and everyone’s true likeness to Him in this way and to distinguish the wheat from the tares. This separation, bringing to light our true divine nature, pierces materially clouded thought. Then we discern the wise guidance that is always coming to us from Mind, God, freeing us from the misguidance of the human mind, so that we can better help others experience that same freedom.

Adapted from an editorial published in the July 3, 2023, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.