In God's Presence

                                      (Written by John Robert Howell)



Each of us has always existed in the eternal now as God's perfect and harmonious idea.  The extent to which this is not being realized and expressed is the extent to which sin and aggressive mental suggestions occupy thought.  Through prayer, the righteous overcome sin and its attendant demons of fear, disease, and death.

Our world today seems awash in a Pandora's box of afflictions.  Nevertheless, every inharmony we experience, see, or just hear about--whether it is sin, disease, death, hatred, war, famine, loss, or poverty--exists entirely and exclusively in the only place it can--in the rag-and-bone shop of our own personal and mortal sense of existence.  If God, good, is really omnipresent (and He is), then there is no hidey-hole for such inharmonies to lurk in, no place for such a thing as a real inharmony.

Christ Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy have shown us how to experience being in God's presence.  They admonish us to enter our (mental) closets, close the door and pray to our Father in secret.  The door, we are told, shuts out sin:  sinful sense, the physical senses, the erring senses, the material senses (Science and Health 15: 4, 7, 10, 16).  Those false senses, facets of personal sense, blind us to the everpresent God.  The door must be shut, not just pulled to, since being even slightly ajar will allow false belief, which can never perceive God, to enter.  Then prayer becomes a wrangle with error instead of a communion with God, and tussling with error can have the effect of making its claims appear more real and formidable.  In that event what was intended to be standing in God's healing and uplifting presence devolves into a kind of mad hatter's tea party. Further, it is more important that our prayer be a knowing of Truth than a denial of error.

Why must we pray in secret?  Secret is being used in the sense of unseen, private, removed from sight.  "The Student's Reference Dictionary" gives this inspired definition of secret:  "Known to God only."  Daily growth in grace will enable us to pray more effectually, but the specific steps each of us takes will of necessity be the result of individual spiritual unfoldment.  Then we shall not just read, but know, that "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High [abides] under the shadow of the Almighty."