It's an almost standard human trait to seek good, though most of us have our own notion of what good is.
From a spiritual point of view, true, pure good equals God. "God is natural good," Science and Health says, "and is represented only by the idea of goodness; while evil should be regarded as unnatural, because it is opposed to the nature of Spirit, God." Science and Health, p. 119.
We might experience God's goodness in an emerging feeling of peace and well-being. Increasingly accepting such good as natural, we struggle less to grasp it as though it were outside the realm of the usual and we'd be lucky just to get a small piece of it. We're also not so surprised when a little good, or a lot of it, comes along.
How can we find this good, and shake off what seems "ungood"? By coming to see that God, who is Spirit, is all good and that there is no platform for seeing outside Spirit. Spirit knows and expresses its own essential nature in infinite detail. And as the image of Spirit, we reflect that knowing. To our native spiritual sense, then, nothing could be more natural than the allness of God. Or more unnatural than anything less than that allness, notwithstanding the evils that seem so solid.
Here's a signpost that helps us realize the positive reality: "As vapor melts before the sun, so evil would vanish before the reality of good. One must hide the other. How important, then, to choose good as the reality! Man is tributary to God, Spirit, and to nothing else. God's being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss." Ibid., 480-481. Each of us can choose good as the true and substantial, regardless of our circumstance.
We don't have to quest perpetually after good. It always exists—and it is all that exists.
God's nature is wonderfully insistent. We couldn't keep it out of our life even if we wanted to—and that would be quite a foolish objective! But maybe it would be almost as foolish to drift along through life with a lean, miserable, mean sense of well-being—measured out by the spoonful rather than the bucketful, so to speak. God's character is so omnipresent, so real, that even people who appear to be unworthy are blessed by it.
On the other hand, an out-of-breath struggle to gain betterments can be a symptom of greed. And greed is a raw admission of incompleteness, an admission that something needful is missing—an impossible situation in God's allness. Our best aim is not to accumulate as much good as we can but to think about it in a large, even unlimited, way.
Gratitude helps us recognize good as already established. It opens our thought to God as Life itself, as the originator of everything worthwhile. It enables us to stifle the suggestion that anything of substance is lacking in our life, which is provably a lie. We don't have to quest perpetually after good. It always exists—and it is all that exists. God and His goodness are permanent, and permanently realizable.
There was an interesting newspaper report a couple of years ago about people who are always panting after material good or goods. It included this finding: ". . . researchers have been amassing an impressive body of data suggesting that satisfaction simply is not for sale. Not only does having more things prove to be unfulfilling, but people for whom affluence is a priority in life tend to experience an unusual degree of anxiety and depression as well as a lower overall level of well-being." "In Pursuit of Affluence, at a High Price." The New York Times, February 2, 1999. So much for setting up a materialistic concept of worth and value, then chasing it. It turns out to be something of a delusion. Emphatically, however, none of this story is true about the outcome of God, which is the real self of us all.
Jesus lived a life of good so categorically. How? Mrs. Eddy comments: "It was the consummate naturalness of Truth in the mind of Jesus, that made his healing easy and instantaneous. Jesus regarded good as the normal state of man, and evil as the abnormal; holiness, life, and health as the better representatives of God than sin, disease, and death." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 200.
In spiritually scientific logic, we prove step by step what's timelessly true about God and His creation. In other words, inevitably and unfailingly we get to where we really are already. And where are we already? In the realm of unending perfection. Our spiritual destination is always a "now" condition. That's the promise of God and the fact of present reality. The supposed mentality that knows nothing about good is termed mortal mind in Christian Science. It has no logic, no rationale, no past, present, or tomorrow. So mortal mind has no power to delay spiritual benefits. Realizing this has practical consequences in our life, elevating and enriching it with all that we really need.
What does the future hold, spiritually judged? Only the beneficent and worthwhile. A growing conviction of this lightens anxiety about tomorrow—about retirement, for instance; about how we will manage our funds and our time. Anxiety about the future may involve an upcoming exam or a job interview. We can start today to keep our career all good, knowing that there is no other genuine career than one showing the omnipresence of good. As the Psalmist promises, "No good thing will he [God] withhold from them that walk uprightly." Ps. 84: 11. No good will God withhold from them who consistently think rightly, spiritually.
We couldn't keep God's nature out of our life even if we wanted to.
What does the past hold from a spiritually scientific point of view? Only the God-derived, nothing else. We can release the resentments and regrets, drop the recollection of mistakes made earlier in life that dim today and deaden our spirits—and get a life! Nothing is to be gained by ruminating on the dream of living in matter. Or grumping about how we might have played something differently years ago. Any bad that seems to have happened in days long gone is the dream of life in godless and goodless matter. And we can diminish and eliminate that bad, and its fall-out in the present, by knowing that it is a dream, and by letting the power of the Christ stir us awake from it.
Nostalgic longing for the past is fruitless. It implies that something benevolent that was, now isn't. Nothing truly good can be lost. Understanding this in Science, we can recover something of the desirable we believe has melted into the past—recover it maybe in another, improved form.
Here's an important trap to avoid in aiming to enjoy good: getting entangled with speculating about what form it might take—wondering, for instance, if the good God gives us will take the form of more money. Or new friends. Or living in a nicer place. Such concerns are too much of the human mind. Divine Love will see to it that blessings take the form most suitable for us at any particular time. And we never really know ourselves what that form is. If we have good—and we always do have it, plentifully—why question what form it may take?
Pure good is never truly personal. We sometimes want it to be personal, though. Why? Because we believe this is the only way it can be concrete, the only way we can feel and experience divine purpose. But such personal insistence would get in the way of the natural development of good.
The human mind is all too easily hood-winked by appearances. A main challenge in helping ourselves or others is not to fall for the appearance that something worthwhile has gone away, disappeared. The problem—be it an ailment, a lack of funds, an upsetting argument—might appear unquestionably real, convincingly unhealable, solidly concrete, definitely present. But it is not. And the admission that it is not, based on the certainty that God is unfailing and unflagging good, will help endlessly.
After all, a hypnotized human mind is not our Mind, and it's not telling us the truth about ourselves. God is our Mind—Truth itself. He is never absent, and neither is His goodness. That is natural, provable divine law.
(Geoffrey Barratt is a contributing editor.)
