The Cry in the Desert

Every individual character, like the individual John the Baptist, at some date must cry in the desert of earthly joy; and His voice be heard divinely and humanly. In the desolation of human understanding, divine Love hears and answers the human call for help; and the voice of Truth utters the divine verities of Being, which deliver mortals out of the depths of ignorance and vice. This is the Father’s benediction.—Miscellaneous Writings, p. 81.

He who has reached this point in human experience and passed through to the other side, into the Shekinah of Love’s “Peace, be still!” will recall with what anguish his soul’s cry fell back again and again upon itself as he sought in vain to rise to the far-off God whom ignorance and tradition had placed in the indifferent skies. How he struggled to reach upward, and how, upon each frantic effort, fell, alack! so despairingly short of the vast height he strove in thought to gain. He will recall, also, how he begged and pleaded, seeking to bring God down from that heaven which he found he could not hope to scale. Failing in this, likewise, to register his appeal upon divine attention, and worn and weary with his fruitless throes, he falls now into sullen rebellion or else into dull despair. Conscious ever, and realizing in agony that he cannot get away from consciousness; finding that he does not die, praying he may, yet fearing lest he might; the ceaseless horror of life’s mock and farce having, as it seemed, frozen its slow way to his very heart, in what hell is man! His soul cries aloud before God, “Save, or I perish!” In stress like this can a mortal find no light? Listen! What is that he hears within? “Thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee.” In the stillness of his despair, in the meekness born of weakness, there comes a thought, a memory, across his conscious night, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [Love] art there.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul [sense] in hell;” and to him, as to Moses, the “inward voice” becomes “the voice of God” (Science and Health, p. 321). “Behold, I send an Angel (spiritual intuition, p. 581) before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place [the consciousness] which I have prepared.”

“Evil is impotent to turn the righteous man from his uprightness” (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 119). Let no heart despair which has ever thought one thought of right, or done one little deed of good. It is enough. The memory of it now is as a light. It will pierce the gloom. Keep eye upon it! Look away from all else, and hear the words of Life and Love. “But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, … and do that which is LAWFUL and RIGHT, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live, … he shall save his soul alive.”

From ignorance or from wilful vice, the way lies open, God has said it through the lives of men who proved it,—men who knew. From the great burden of the world’s woe, or from his own self-begotten weight of misery, each, through love and righteousness, be these but “as a grain of mustard seed,” has exit from the abode of devils (evils), and entrance into heaven, the reign of conscious harmony. It is, at no time, so much the amplitude of our knowledge of things good, as it is our uncompromising trust in the little actualities of good, that find their saving way into the darkest and most loveless life, which achieves for us a further realization of unseen though ever-present grace, and ushers into a demonstration the things of Love and wisdom which make for our salvation.

“The divinity of the Christ was made manifest in the humanity of Jesus” (Science and Health, p. 25). “This Christ, or divinity of the man Jesus, was his divine nature, the godliness which animated him” (p. 26). “The Principle of these [his] marvellous works is Divine; but the actor was human” (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 199). Then this self-same, changeless Christ, “without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life,” this ever-present Christ, must be likewise our divinity. Hence it is that we are joint-heirs with him who spake as such. Moreover, in proportion to our holding to the enduring and the true, will this same Christ, with increasing measure, shine through our humanity, as he shone at the last, “without measure,” through him of Nazareth.

“Divinely and humanly,” as the text at our beginning hath declared, “His voice” will sound to us at some hour in our long despair. It may be over the lips of another,—human like ourselves,—but hallowed by the awakening touch of Truth, that we first shall hear the “call;” or perchance from out the depths of our own consciousness, the “still, small voice” will sound, and, crying in our wilderness, thrill us to behold the answer to our prayer, and lead us forth to God, to Love, and Life forevermore. “Whatsoever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love—be it song, sermon, or Science—blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ’s table, feeding the hungry, and giving living waters to the thirsty” (Science and Health, p. 234). Let us never forget this on our way out from sense to Soul.

The search for God in space must cease; for though the stars are His, He dwells not in any one of them. Inward and downward must we direct our quest. “Within you,” and “already,” said the dear monitor of Olivet; and he knew. There shall we find heaven, if we find it, and we shall find it, for both revelation and Science declare to heart and mind that “every knee shall bow,” and to Him “every tongue shall swear.” Man thus finding heaven, will not God speak there? Though not in man, yet in oneness with him; greater ever, but in indissoluble connection, God, as Love and Truth, must ever speak in the heaven of that right consciousness which is the identity of the ideal man. (See Miscellaneous Writings, p. 205.)

This known and realized, we shall be satisfied. This consciousness is His likeness. Awakened to it in part, mortals are satisfied in part; fully awakened, they shall be fully satisfied. This is the Father’s benediction. Says our Leader, “He is saved through Christ, Truth, who gains self-knowledge, self-control, and the kingdom of heaven within himself—within his own consciousness. Mortals must drink of the cup of their Lord and Master sufficiently to unself mortality, and destroy its erroneous claims—therefore said Jesus: ‘Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with.'” (Address at Dedication of Concord Church).

Deep within ourselves, to find ourselves;
Thence, out of our dead selves to rise,
To learn that evil ne’er has wrought
Save in belief, the which is naught;
Truth ever lives; Life never dies.