The wellspring of God’s economy … and ours

Scott Preller | from the Christian Science Sentinel

God’s wellspring of care for us is tangible even in an economic downturn.

“Worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” “Corruption and greed on Wall Street threaten to bring down US economy.” “American collapse panics global markets.” When the day starts with headlines like those, it wouldn’t be unnatural to wish you could climb back into bed and pull the covers over your head, hoping that it will all just go away, or that perhaps the “experts” will figure it all out.

We tend to talk about the economy as though it were some giant entity with a life of its own. But even financial experts recognize that the economy’s behavior is affected by how individuals are feeling and acting. If people are collectively going about their business with a sense of confidence, worth, and enterprise, it tends to behave well. If people allow themselves to catch a contagion of fear and distrust, panic sets in and the economy comes to a screeching halt.

Of course, a mere human determination to remain upbeat no matter what happens can lead to an ephemeral bubble that is easily popped. Something more is definitely needed.

Christian Science explains that good has a spiritual basis.

That’s where individuals with spiritual insight and trust have a great deal to offer. It isn’t that they’ve figured out a way to “beat the house” by using prayer to get money. Rather, they’re coming to realize, and prove to some degree, that the happiness and security people mistakenly associate with money can only be experienced in a lasting way by learning to know God as the source of all that is genuinely good. Christian Science explains that good has a spiritual basis. It isn’t something we have in robust times and are deprived of during economic downturns.

Goodness is a quality of being that God maintains in and for His children—including you and me. It’s as reliable as God is, because God is unchanging good. Prayer isn’t about begging God for things we wish we had. Rather, prayer is coming to have faith, then trust, then understanding, in the ever-presence of divine good, to the point that it operates as a law in our lives.

Many accounts of how God met human needs appear in the Bible. People without any apparent resources were able to pay off creditors; taxes were paid with money found in a fish’s mouth; more than once, several thousand people were fed with a few fish and some loaves of bread (and with food left over). Read these accounts, and you might naturally conclude that, unless these examples were too preposterous to believe, there definitely had to have been a law or force for good in operation that was completely outside the material conventions of supply and demand.

There’s nothing preposterous about God’s law of spiritual abundance.

Christian Science encourages us to explore what happens when we’re willing to consider God as the only source of good, an overflowing supply of spiritual substance that brings peace, satisfaction, and an ability to generously engage in life. Then, as the result of our sincere endeavors to live by trusting in God’s care, we begin to have some of these Bible-like experiences of our own—and we find there’s nothing preposterous about God’s law.

If we take a scientific look at Jesus’ ministry and teaching, the evidence tells us that he so felt and understood this law of abundant spiritual good that he was more conscious and certain of it than people today are conscious of things like houses, bank accounts, pensions, and status. No wonder Jesus assured his disciples, “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him” (Matt. 6:8). And he followed this assurance by giving them the Lord’s Prayer, which affirms God’s supremacy and constant care.

A couple of years after my wife and I were married, we bought our first house. During the next three years, we put a great deal of time and money into fixing it up and making it a home we loved. But when a career change meant we needed to sell our house to move to the other side of the country, we were shocked to find that it was now worth 20 percent less than we’d paid for it, because of an economic downturn. In fact, two different real estate agents told us they wouldn’t even list the house unless we could pay several thousand dollars to make up the difference between what they felt it would sell for and what we still owed on it—money we simply didn’t have. We decided to put a “for sale by owner” sign in the front yard, and held a couple of open houses. But mainly, we prayed.

We were praying to realize that the spiritual qualities of home—beauty, grace, usefulness—that we’d so appreciated in this house would be seen and valued by others, and that they’d meet someone else’s need as they had for us. But we quickly realized that the real challenge was the feeling that we were victims of forces outside our control.

Were we going to just go along with the idea of being so much economic roadkill?

The daily, almost hourly, reports of ever-worsening economic conditions made us feel as if we were being pulled into a current of fear that was paralyzing us. The real question was, were we going to just go along with the idea of being so much economic roadkill, or were we going to move forward with a determination to think and live from the basis of God’s abundant love for us?

Hymn 224 in the Christian Science Hymnal became a kind of round-the-clock companion to me. Whenever I felt afraid or sensed mounting pressure as time went on and nothing seemed to change, I would take mental refuge in the message of this hymn, sometimes singing it right out loud wherever I was. It begins:

O Lord, I would delight in Thee,
And on Thy care depend;

To Thee in every trouble flee,
My best, my ever Friend.

(John Ryland)

The hymn goes on to talk of God as the source of all good, wherever good is found. Phrases such as “When all material streams are dried, / Thy fullness is the same” and “He that has made my heaven secure, / Will here all good provide” brought enormous comfort and reassurance during this time.

We persisted in giving the weight of our thought and confidence to God’s goodness.

It often felt as if we were waging a great contest to see which would prevail: the terror of uncertainty and lack of resources, or my wife’s and my conviction of God’s ability to sustain us with His grace. We persisted in giving the weight of our thought and confidence to God’s goodness, and refused to let any sense of panic influence us. We knew our substance was given of God, and we could no more be cut off from having what we needed than we could be cut off from Him.

Finally, with just a few days to go before we had to be at our new location, and without so much as a nibble on the house, we decided to take the “for sale” sign down and rent the house. On the very day we were to sign the rental papers, in a scene that I still would have a hard time believing if I hadn’t been there, the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, a woman I’d never seen before told me her name and said, “I’d like to buy your house.” Even though we’d taken down the sign several days before, this woman had fallen in love with our neighborhood in her search for a home. A family up the street had told her that our house had been for sale. Papers were signed in record time, and everyone’s needs were abundantly met.

We were enormously grateful, not because we felt we’d “dodged a bullet” but rather because we felt we’d been shown something of the depths of God’s wellspring of care. This experience had involved a great deal of spiritual commitment, of prayerfully disciplining thought to reject the belief of helplessness, and to accept and steadfastly affirm the operation of God’s law of good. In other words, our prayer wasn’t one of incessantly begging God for the situation to change, like the child who wouldn’t stop asking for a pony. Rather, we were learning to accept and rely on the evidence of spiritual reality.

I felt I’d gained some understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s description of prayer: “Prayer is the utilization of the love wherewith He loves us. Prayer begets an awakened desire to be and do good. It makes new and scientific discoveries of God, of His goodness and power. It shows us more clearly than we saw before, what we already have and are; and most of all, it shows us what God is” (No and Yes, p. 39).

A spiritual basis of living replaces the helpless feeling that comes from watching one’s wealth being whipped around by market forces beyond anybody’s control. It rests on confidence in a spiritual source of goodness and substance that is entirely under divine control. This source is beyond the reach of any market forces.

Now is the time to be investing in gratitude and a calm trust in good. It’s the time to be valuing honesty, ethics, and love for one’s neighbor. And because we get these qualities from an understanding of God, and not mere human optimism, we can trust that they provide the moral and permanent underpinnings to the world’s economy that are so much needed.

Scott Preller is a teacher and practitioner of Christian Science in Andover, Massachusetts.