When I was a teenager, my mother passed on and my father remarried. Adjusting to this was very difficult for me, and I descended into depression. The problem was not diagnosed, as it rarely was in those days, but I struggled with a great sadness that led to reckless behavior.
Living in a large cosmopolitan city, I found many opportunities to put myself in harm’s way. Nights often found me wandering alone, and it was easy to get lost in the city and meet people who would take advantage of a lonely girl. … More often than I care to recall, I put myself in dangerous situations, basically asking, waiting, for something to happen.
Only recently have I realized, with deep gratitude, how remarkable it is that I never met with violence during those wilderness years or fell victim to any unsavory behavior. Neither was I lured into the common pitfalls of drinking, smoking, or doing drugs. I credit Christian Science for this protection, because during this period I was attending a Christian Science Sunday School.
I loved the concept of God as both Father and Mother, from whom I could never be separated.
Looking back on my first experience of the Sunday School some years earlier, I remember seeing the words in golden letters high on the wall, “God is Love.” These words were simple and immediate, and I could grasp them. Thus began a growing understanding of God as divine Love and of my own identity as a spiritual idea of Love. The God I was learning about was not wrathful or punishing, but tender and caring.
And a new understanding of man—of myself and of everyone—as God’s perfect reflection gave me hope. This was not a view of man as a condemned sinner, but as the pure and innocent child of God.
I didn’t grasp much of Science and Health at first, but when I found sentences that spoke to me, I clung to them. For example, …“To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings” (p. vii). However tenuous my grasp of Christian Science seemed at that point, it was an anchor for hope, a possible way out of the disarray and fear I felt.
With continued prayer and growth in Christian Science, the relentless despair gradually lost its grip on me, and my careless behavior stopped as well.
When I think of those wandering years now, I’m reminded of Psalm 139: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me” (verses 7–10).
From the wreckage of a ship lost at sea one night, a young sailor managed to swim to a great rock jutting out from the ocean not too far away. In the morning he was able to swim from it to the shore.
One night, as I lay in bed marveling at the unusual quietness of the evening, I began to consider some of the things I’d recently read that were gaining traction in my thought. Two that stood out were this beautiful verse from the Bible, “From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalms 61:2), and a line from Science and Health: “The three great verities of Spirit, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, – Spirit possessing all power, filling all space, constituting all Science, – contradict forever the belief that matter can be actual” (pp. 109-110). I saw that God, the divine Spirit, made us not as defective mortals, but as the spiritual expression of His limitless love.
