God is not a mystery

God was a mystery to me for a long time. Despite growing up attending Sunday school, I just wasn’t sure that God existed. As a five-year-old, I would squeeze my eyes shut and tell God, “I will believe in You if You show me that You exist.” But I never heard the voice or message I expected.

I could see that God was a real presence to close members of my family, who had been introduced to Christian Science in Japan during the 1920s. My father told me how his aunt had prayed for the pilot of an American aircraft that had plunged to the ground during the firebombing of Tokyo. They were struggling with buckets and blankets to extinguish the fires around their home, when she had stopped to affirm that God, Love, was caring for all, including the pilot and his family.

If God was so real to my great-aunt at such a dark time, then I wanted to know and feel God’s presence, too. In the beginning of the Bible, in the face of darkness, God declares, “Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). This seemed to me an expression of God’s desire to be known, the creator revealing Himself, Herself, through the activity of creation. In which case, I trusted, God could not continue to be a mystery to me.

Years later I did feel God’s presence definitively! It was shortly after my son was born. The birth had not taken place as I had wanted. Despite diligent prayer, I had to have a Caesarean section, and was baffled as to why my prayers had not been answered. I was also a reluctant mother and struggling with a sense of ambivalence and insecurity.

Then, in that dark hospital room, I suddenly felt an incredible presence of divine Love filling the room with light. It was unlike anything I had ever felt before, and I knew that this was God radiating love – not just for me or the baby, but for each and every person.

Nothing had changed physically, and yet everything had changed! I felt a palpable connection to God and to all humanity at that moment in a way I have never forgotten, and that has empowered my prayers and my healing practice of Christian Science in the years since.

God does make His presence known to each of us, because this self-revelation is intrinsic to God’s nature. The textbook of Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, includes the following: “Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune Person called God, – that is, the triply divine Principle, Love. They represent a trinity in unity, three in one, – the same in essence, though multiform in office: God the Father-Mother; Christ the spiritual idea of sonship; divine Science or the Holy Comforter. These three express in divine Science the threefold, essential nature of the infinite. They also indicate the divine Principle of scientific being, the intelligent relation of God to man and the universe” (pp. 331-332).

This understanding of God came to Mrs. Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, through her deep quest to understand God’s nature and her study of the Bible. Understanding this divine trinity empowered her to heal disease and relieve suffering, as Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated.

Indeed, Jesus is the man who so embodied, through his uniquely clear sense of his spiritual sonship with God, the divine nature – that is, the Christ, or Messiah – enabling him to perform the many healings we read about in the Gospels and ultimately triumph over his crucifixion. Christ is eternal, revealing to each of us our inseparability from our Father-Mother God, who created man and woman in the spiritual image of the Divine.

As we welcome this timeless Christ message, we find that healing is possible for us today. The Holy Ghost, another term for the Comforter that Jesus promised, is the present activity of the Christ in human thought, which makes tangible our relation to our divine Parent. Mrs. Eddy called this Comforter “divine Science” – a scientific method of healing that is teachable and demonstrable, as evidenced by her healing record (and the many recorded accounts of Christian Science healing, including those shared in this column). This Holy Ghost, divine Science, is at work right now bringing to humanity light, inspiration for our prayers, and healing.

We are all capable of discerning this light, which replaces a sense of mystery about God with an absolute conviction that God is forever present and constantly revealing this presence.