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Real indestructibility

A Christian Science perspective: Your true being is indestructible. Here's why.

  • By The editors of the Christian Science Sentinel

Some years back a major earthquake hit Mexico City. Amazingly, many newborns at a central hospital that collapsed survived for days beneath mountains of rubble before rescuers finally reached them (see The New York Times, Oct. 16, 1985). Without diminishing the heroic efforts of first responders, perhaps the survival of those infants hints at the strength of innocence, the power of purity.

There is something enduring, even something unerasable, about the nature of each one of us as the likeness of God, pure Mind. We are each the perfect idea of that perfect and indestructible Mind.

Think of a steel beam. It may seem indestructible. Yet the idea of that beam is even more enduring. Drop explosives on that beam and it may be obliterated, but the idea remains untouched.

Man is the indestructible idea of an imperishable God. Christ is the message from God to human consciousness. It is through Christ that God lets us know the promise of our own indestructibility. The Christian Science textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by Mary Baker Eddy, puts it simply, “Christ presents the indestructible man, whom Spirit creates, constitutes, and governs” (p. 316). The more we prayerfully acknowledge this promise, the more it overrides wrong-headed notions that we are somehow walled off from God, or denied the promise of our permanent usefulness.

Think of Christ Jesus. His foes hurled at him all the hatred in the world. This did not diminish or destroy the Father’s message of love one bit. God stays perpetually engaged with His creation, including us. He crafts and creates us. He constitutes and maintains us. He governs and protects us. None of these divine actions involves destruction. Quite the opposite. They involve our Christly indestructibility as spiritual ideas. Even now God engages with His creation through His love for us. God’s ongoing care for His entire family just does not stop, and neither do we.

The indestructible nature of your being does not have anything to do with superhero-like physicality. Rather, real indestructibility includes the spiritually substantial and enduring elements of who you truly are – indestructibly pure innocence, health, and joy, with provision and purpose. And there’s so much more.

You are forever spiritual, forever ideal, forever indestructible. That will never change.

From an editorial in the Christian Science Sentinel.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

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