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Love fills this space

A Christian Science perspective: Fresh insights on safety and freedom from fear while traveling on the London underground a week after the terrorist attacks there in 2005.

  • By Kathy North

In 2005, I was traveling on the London underground with my son a week after the terrorist bombings had taken place there. I had been reluctant to use the underground, but I was assured that it was the only reasonable way to reach the city.

We were returning from a happy evening at a concert. The platform was packed with people, and it was stiflingly hot. Loudspeakers were warning everyone to watch their backs, and this created an air of tension. We boarded the standing-room-only train. Then the angel thought came to me – the first truth I remember learning in Sunday School as a toddler – Love fills all space. Then more thoughts came. Divine Love fills this space. There isn’t a nook or cranny where Love is not.

I recalled what I’d heard on the news after the bombings, how complete strangers had helped fellow passengers to safety and had bound up their wounds, expressing that Love. I marvelled at how all these people were continuing to travel by train, apparently undeterred by recent events and expressing that continuity of activity and persistence. In the presence of these thoughts, these expressions of the Christ, my own fears began to subside, and I felt a calmness within.

What basis is there for feeling so assured in the grip of fear or tension?

The book of Jeremiah says, “Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord” (23:24). The Bible also tells us that God is Love. From this we can reason that Love fills heaven and earth.

“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, confirms this. It states, “God is infinite, the only Life, substance, Spirit, or Soul, the only intelligence of the universe, including man” (p. 330).

Then all that really fills space is intelligent, loving activity, without fear, violence, or tension.

Isn’t it a mortal sense of life that produces the desire to destroy other lives and create fear and tension and disruption? And a mortal sense of life that produces a reaction of fear and terror?

Catching even a glimpse of Love’s ever-presence and feeling grateful for just one act of kindness can outweigh even the most terrifying scenario in our own consciousness. This activity of the Christ, of Spirit, strengthens us to go forward and meet other challenges along the way. We begin to see a little bit more of the powerlessness of evil and the all-power of good to outweigh it and destroy it.

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