Harmony is not the exception

We all can probably recall instances of harmony in our daily lives. For example, it might have been a seamless coming together of ideas when a project demanded a team effort. Or a feeling of peace and freedom after an illness or injury was healed. But is harmony an occasional coincidence, dependent on circumstances beyond our control?

Most of us have been moved at one time or another by harmony in music. It’s humbling to know that there are musical principles of harmony that all musicians have access to – but don’t originate – that enable them to produce infinite expressions of harmony.

This has helped me appreciate even more fully something I’ve learned in Christian Science: that there is a source of spiritual, permanent harmony that is totally reliable in all aspects of our lives. This source is God, and His law of harmony empowers us to overcome discord, uplifts us, brings deeper meaning to our lives, and even heals.

The Bible is filled with messages of God’s supreme power and presence – such as this one: “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me” (Isaiah 45:5). Stories in the Bible show over and over how God’s powerful goodness transforms and heals. The infinite divine nature includes pure harmony, which destroys inharmony in the same way that light destroys darkness – by revealing that it never truly had substance to begin with.

As God’s children, we’re entirely spiritual, made to reflect the Divine. Recognizing that harmony is ours because God expresses it in each of us enables us to experience it in very tangible ways. We begin to see how natural it is for us to feel the blessed harmony of God.

A few years ago I began to have aggressive pain in my hip. Because I had effectively relied on prayer as taught in Christian Science – rooted in the Bible – for years for needs of all kinds, I began to pray. My prayers affirmed that since God, the only legitimate cause, is good, He is incapable of causing pain. It simply couldn’t truly be part of me, since I was the very loved child of God, who harmoniously governs our existence.

These ideas gave me greater conviction, but the pain was still there. I began to pray with a passage in a book entitled “Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896” by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science. It references one of Jesus’ healing works, in which he cast out “a devil” – the inability to speak – from someone.

Mrs. Eddy says this about it: “It could not have been a person that our great Master cast out of another person; therefore the devil herein referred to was an impersonal evil, or whatever worketh ill. In this case it was the evil of dumbness, an error of material sense, cast out by the spiritual truth of being; namely, that speech belongs to Mind instead of matter, and the wrong power, or the lost sense, must yield to the right sense, and exist in Mind” (p. 190).

This helped me see the illegitimacy of the evil of pain, inflexibility, and restriction of movement – what the material senses were saying about my condition. The spiritual truth is that qualities of harmony and freedom have their source in the one ever-present and ever-available God. Therefore, they are unlimited, constant, and part of our true identity as God’s complete expression.

I wholly accepted this as the reality, gaining a greater consciousness of harmony as God-given and wholly apart from materiality. I felt an immediate uplift, and in the next few days, the condition just faded away.

Maybe every day doesn’t feel like a full-blown symphony. But acknowledging and honoring God as the one and only source of good, we can feel a simple but sweet harmony that flows more consistently through our days and naturally blesses everyone it touches.