Our new birth, moment by moment
It was a thought-provoking chat on a cab ride to church.
The subject of spirituality came up, and it turned out my driver was an earnest believer in reincarnation. He agreed with me that life is eternal, but saw this eternality as an ongoing cycle of rebirth in changing physical forms.
I certainly respected his right to hold these views. But when the driver dropped me off at the Christian Science church, I was grateful to hear a different view of life and death. The subject of reincarnation wasn’t directly addressed in the Lesson-Sermon that day, made up of citations read from the Bible and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science. But the ideas shared explained that God is Life and All, and that death is the opposite of this allness of infinite, spiritual Life – therefore an unreality, in light of Life’s eternal reality.
The understanding that this all-spiritual Life is everyone’s sole life proved powerfully practical in Christ Jesus’ healing works and his resurrection. He embodied the Christ, the message that we’re created and sustained spiritually by ever-present, impartial Love. Christ reveals that the true governor, “in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), is God, as incapable of withholding Her enfolding embrace of us as the sun is of partially distributing its light.
Divine Soul holds us forever within itself. Belief in being a personal soul trapped in a fleshly body would invert this true view. Ultimately, though, it isn’t a body trapping us, it’s a thought that appears to do so – the misguided conviction that we’re a limited soul within a material body. And it’s this false thought from which Christ awakens us.
This awakening is described in Mrs. Eddy’s “Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896” as a new birth that redeems the body. It does this by uplifting consciousness beyond matter, which is radically different from a rebirth or reincarnation in matter.
The new birth is a spiritual birth rather than physical – achieved not by death, but in a multiplicity of moments before and after what seems to be death. It’s an ongoing shift in thought. Miscellaneous Writings says, “The new birth 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” (p. 15).
These are all mental actions that express our God-reflecting spiritual individuality, which we can get on with yielding to daily. Wonderfully, doing so leads to better human circumstances, here and now. Yet the deeper gain is the uncovering of our wholly spiritual life as God’s child or expression.
We have the opportunity each moment to further awaken to our life as God’s reflection. In doing so, limiting beliefs about existence, including the belief that soul is in body, become less convincing to us, until we realize that even the mental misperception that soul is finite cannot exist, since God does not – can never – misperceive creation and we reflect God.
Such “new birth” moments come from orienting our hearts Godward by acknowledging and grasping the divine Science of Life and Life’s creation as revealed in the Bible and Science and Health. When I was a relatively new student of this Science, I found such moments can happen any time, anywhere. Pondering spiritual truths on a crowded commuter train, I once realized with great clarity: I’ve never been born into matter; I’m not truly passing through matter; I’m not waiting to die out of matter.
Behind these bold ideas was a felt consciousness of their truth – not just for me, but for everybody. That brought a mental liberation immediately. And transformation of my life-prospects, which had been looking shaky, gradually but enduringly followed. Similar “new birth” moments have brought physical healing for myself and others.
Jesus fully demonstrated our oneness with God following his resurrection. That is, “[Jesus] rose above the physical knowledge of his disciples, and the material senses saw him no more” (Science and Health, p. 46). This was the ultimate proof that in reality we are each wholly apart from any material existence.
We are continuously spiritual. Each moment affords us the priceless opportunity for renewal by glimpsing our true, spiritual existence. Grasping what Life really is heals our bodies and regenerates our character, as Christ brings us into fuller expression of Life’s flawless harmony that is our true identity, and everyone else’s.
Adapted from an editorial published in the January 2023 issue of The Christian Science Journal.
