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Your native 'Soul-sense'

A Christian Science perspective.

  • By George Zucker

A few years ago while on a business trip, I was stuck in traffic en route to the airport, worrying about a missed flight and aborted appointments. Stranded motorists sat on the grass beside the highway.

I watched a TV helicopter hovering high above us, wishing I could see what the traffic reporter up there was seeing. Perhaps he could see that the problem that caused the traffic jam was almost cleared and we would soon be on our way – and that’s what happened. Had I benefited from the reporter’s higher perspective, I would have saved myself needless worry.

Just as the reporter’s higher view gave him an accurate picture, we can get a loftier view of reality when we turn to our all-seeing heavenly Father. Things come into focus when we strive to see through prayer what He sees and what He knows.

Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science and founder of the Monitor, described the mental tug that says there is more to reality than what meets the eye. She called it our native “Soul-sense.” She wrote: “This Soul-sense comes to the human mind when the latter yields to the divine Mind. Such intuitions reveal whatever constitutes and perpetuates harmony, enabling one to do good, but not evil” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 85).

I find that this verse from the Bible also hints at the existence of Soul-sense: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (II Corinthians 4:18, New International Version). I take this to mean that if only the unseen world of God’s spiritual creation is eternal, then everything seen through human sense is only temporal, insubstantial. So no matter how bad or scary the mortal picture – what Mrs. Eddy called “the ghastly farce of material existence” (see p. 272) – it is not eternal.

As we strive to live a God-centered life, our innate Soul-sense will assure us that nothing unlike God truly has power or presence. God cannot be ungodly. The Christ presence, or divine message of God to humanity, shows us the way when we listen to it. Another Bible verse describes the activity of Soul-sense in this way: “[T]hine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left” (Isaiah 30:21).

Spiritual good is always at hand, deep as the ocean and near as the air we breathe. Eddy explained, “This understanding is not intellectual, is not the result of scholarly attainments; it is the reality of all things brought to light” (Science and Health, p. 505).

Our innate Soul-sense may hear the Christ presence coming as a holy whisper. We don’t need a helicopter.

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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.

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