On November 25, 2013, our Activities and Volunteer Coordinator, Tracy Colerider-Krugh, introduced the idea of a “Practice Club” at Broadview for our guests to pray specifically for the world, our local communities & the facility. The group meets in our Practice Room, usually every other Tuesday after lunch, and often reads an article from The Christian Science Monitor. Afterwards, they give the situation a Christian Science treatment. We keep a notebook of the notes in the Practice Room (should you ever want to stop by and peruse!).
U.S. politics have been the topic of many of our practice meetings lately, and we decided to continue our prayers on this topic this month. A participant remembered Mary Baker Eddy’s comment that she had no politics. We looked up the passage and read, “In reply to a number of requests for an expression of her political views, she has given out this statement: — I am asked, ‘What are your politics?’ I have none, in reality, other than to help support a righteous government; to love God supremely, and my neighbor as myself.” (Miscellany 276: 23-25)
How can we follow her words, which she lived by example, to help support a righteous government, love God, and our neighbor? We decided to start by expecting government to be righteous!
The December 26, 2016 Weekly Christian Science Monitor cover story “A Year of Disruption” by Peter Grier prompted us to handle the fear of disruption occurring from current changes in politics. Although, when looking at history, there appears to be cycles of politics, we need to take a wider and higher perspective. We must trust in God’s righteous government as ever-in-operation, no matter what the human circumstances present, and we are taught how to do this using the principles of Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy, the Monitor’s founder explains that the effect of putting this Science into practice “is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind” (Science and Health 162:9-11).
To yield to the harmony of divine Mind is our instruction for responding to any political disruption. Instead of alarm and fear at the signs of change and stirring within society, we need to trust more in the constancy of God’s law. This law tells us that whatever is good and necessary to the maintenance and progress of divine Love’s spiritual creation has never truly been stifled and can never be threatened. Divine Mind isn’t stagnant but is forever new, and it supplies fresh ideas for every circumstance.
Interestingly, we were led to recognize that simply a “convenient peace” isn’t the right idea, either. There can be instances where the so-called disruption is actually a step to purifying things. Mrs. Eddy refers to this change as “chemicalization.” In Science and Health, she writes,
In Isaiah we read: ‘I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things;’ but the prophet referred to divine law as stirring up the belief in evil to its utmost, when bringing it to the surface and reducing it to its common denominator, nothingness. The muddy river-bed must be stirred in order to purify the stream. In moral chemicalization, when the symptoms of evil, illusion, are aggravated, we may think in our ignorance that the Lord hath wrought an evil; but we ought to know that God’s law uncovers so-called sin and its effects, only that Truth may annihilate all sense of evil and all power to sin” (540: 5-16).
Studying this passage fortified our thought and reminded a participant of the biblical promise that if something is not from God, it won’t stand. Referring to the Pharisee, Gamaliel, who advised the Jewish council concerning the speech of the disciples of Jesus, “if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it” (Acts 5:38-39).