The Mothering Intelligence of God
SOMETIMES it seems as though everywhere you look there's a need for more and better mothering. Recently, I found myself wondering if anyone was up to the task! Who or what is it that provides the mothering--the nurturing--we urgently need in every area of experience? It has to be more than human foresight, hindsight, good intentions, even family affection, I reasoned. These are not big enough to do the universal job needed. But God, omnipresent Mind, is big enough.
Then in a flash I saw that intelligence--not gender--is the source of mothering, of bringing forth and nurturing all that is good. It takes intelligence to build a house, to furnish and maintain it; intelligence to run a business, govern a city. In short, it takes intelligence to do anything useful and good. I had thought of people doing these things with God in the background. Now I saw Mind in the foreground, as the real doer, expressing itself to and through individuals as intelligence.
Christ Jesus taught and lived the love of God that makes it so natural for nurturing to be inherent in Christianity. Jesus' thought was open to divine Mind, which he fully reflected. His life and works show us, not the condemnation of man, but the condemnation of evil.
In her invigorating book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, describes intelligence as a quality of God, divine Mind. She writes, ``It is the primal and eternal quality of infinite Mind, of the triune Principle,--Life, Truth, and Love,--named God'' (p. 469). Genuine intelligence nurtures and enriches all of creation.
Mrs. Eddy proved for herself and others that God-given intelligence is available today, as it was in Jesus' time, to nurture us and to cast out of human thought whatever is unlike good. This healing, nurturing intelligence conforms to God's law. God's law is not like a light switch that we turn on or off. Being spiritual fact, God's law is always ``on,'' operating impartially, universally. It is operating right now for you, just as the principle of mathematics is always operating whether we acknowledge it or not.
Even if you doubt that there is a God or that God is knowable, God's law is still operating. I have a friend who calls herself an agnostic. She lives in an area where troublemakers are, she tells me, a daily irritation. Recently I sent her an article from this column. Two weeks later she wrote that she had read the article twice, and on occasion had incorporated its ideas when dealing with troublemakers. She gave an example of how she had handled a situation in the suggested fashion--instead of chewing the youngster out and promising him a knot on the head, as she would previously have done. It worked, she felt, as he has not repeated the offense. What took place? She was willing to change the way she thought about ``troublemakers.'' She rejected her old way of returning tit for tat--it hadn't worked. Next, she opened her thought to God's intelligence, and was led not to react to trouble and perpetuate it, but to respond creatively to stop it. God's mothering intelligence--for her and the boy--was shown in a restoration of harmony.
Jesus taught that reflecting God's intelligence is natural, uncomplicated. He said, Matthew's Gospel tells us, ``Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you'' (7:7). The mothering intelligence you yearn for may come as quiet intuition; it may come through a friend or through an article or direct from God; but it will come. And it works to nurture and heal all involved in a situation.
