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True entitlement for all / The Christian Science Journal
2/24/14, 5:46 PM
True entitlement for all
By Barbara Cook Spencer
From the November 2013 issue of The Christian Science Journal
There’s something within human consciousness that causes people to feel entitled to all that is good—no strings attached. In the
very small world of royalty, individuals born into wealth and position are simply legally entitled by birthright to receive, rather
than to earn, their wealth and position. But for the larger part of humanity, the perception of what we are—and are not—entitled
to, continues to cause great dissension in the world.
The fact is, the global conflict over legitimate entitlement won’t be permanently solved until true entitlement—the spiritual idea
and higher law of entitlement—is understood and brought to bear on the human condition. That “something” within human
consciousness that causes us to feel a natural entitlement to good is the Christ, speaking to us of our true status as the offspring,
or reflection, of divine Love. And because our indestructible oneness with this Love—our coexistence with Love—is the
changeless law of our real being, we are legitimately, everlastingly entitled to all genuine good.
The coexistence of God and man is an eternal and totally mutual dependency. In other words, neither God nor man exists, or
can exist, without the other. Explaining this point, Mary Baker Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, Science and
Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Separated from man, who expresses Soul, Spirit would be a nonentity; man, divorced from
Spirit, would lose his entity. But there is, there can be, no such division, for man is coexistent with God” (pp. 477–478).
What a remarkable fact—that God, the one Ego, would be a nonentity without His expression of Himself; and that man would
have no existence without God, Spirit. In fact, because God is the Mind and Life of all creation, and because all creation is made
up of ideas dwelling within this Mind, if Mind were to suddenly disappear, the whole creation—man and the universe—would
disappear at that moment! That’s the spiritual, true conception of coexistence, where God and man, Principle and idea, cause
and effect, is one—not two. Man’s substance is literally the very substance of infinite Spirit.
As the understanding dawns that we are, at this moment, nothing less than the spiritual sons and daughters of our FatherMother God, we realize that we are, in the highest spiritual sense, royalty. This is the true birthright that entitles all of us—not
merely a chosen few—to infinite good, to receive God’s love as a free gift, not something we have to earn by the sweat of our
brow. “Man is not made to till the soil,” Science and Health explains. “His birthright is dominion, not subjection” (pp. 517–518).
But don’t we have to do anything at all? Yes, we do. We have to use all the expressions of God’s love for us—not work for, but
joyously and energetically work with, the talents, attributes, qualities, and capacities with which Love endows us. What’s more,
God never gives such gifts without providing an overflow of opportunities to utilize them. In particular, we are to utilize the love
that is the forever-flowing currency of divine Love—to practice that love, to “be” that love, in order to see it multiply in endless
useful ways.
http://journal.christianscience.com/issues/2013/11/131-11/true-entitlement-for-all
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Yet there’s still something else we have to do. In order to accept the reality of our divinely royal status as Love’s spiritual
offspring—and the entitlement that goes with it—we must turn decisively away from that which is unreal: the sinful, limited
concept of man as mortal and material. This point is clarified in strong words from our textbook: “In divine Science,” it states,
“the material man is shut out from the presence of God” (p. 543).
Clearly, a material man with a private life and mind separate from God—a mere suppositional inversion of the real, spiritual
man—is not coexistent with God and has no divine entitlement. This man, instead of being wholly dependent on God, believes
he is wholly dependent on himself and others for every need; dependent on others to be created, and dependent on himself and
others to be fed, clothed, employed, supplied with inspiration, and healed.
Christ Jesus’ virgin birth, silencing every material law of generation, illustrated the most fundamental fact of man’s present
coexistence with, and total dependence on, God: that God alone creates man. And Jesus’ mighty healing works proved that
mankind is actually fed, clothed, employed, inspired, and healed through spiritual means alone. Jesus exposed the error of mind
and life in matter and taught the dire consequences of believing and indulging in it.
Perhaps we could say that the beloved parable of the prodigal son (see Luke 15:11–32) is a perfect example of our Master’s
seminal teaching on the coexistence of man with his divine Principle, Love, and our need to understand the cost of turning away
from this primal relationship—of shutting ourselves out from the presence of God.
As the parable begins, we read, “A certain man had two sons.” The younger son asked for his portion of the inheritance and—
believing he had a mind and will of his own—promptly went off and “wasted his substance with riotous living.”
It is interesting to note that this younger boy, for all his faults, did understand what he deserved as a son and heir. He said, when
he decided to leave home, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.” Jesus taught, “Ask, and it shall be given you”
(Matthew 7:7). So in one sense you could say the prodigal was on the right track. He wasn’t afraid to ask. He also didn’t seem to
think he would be denied that for which he asked.
But materialism, animal magnetism, caused him to misinterpret his sonship. He didn’t understand that in order to continue to
experience good, he had to “stay home,” so to speak, because the continuity of our individuality—our ability to continue to
receive that to which divine sonship entitles us—is found only in our coexistence with God, our perpetual reflection of
overflowing infinite good. The prodigal was about to learn that, without this recognition, he was always subject to limitation,
lack, and loss.
So when everything was spent, when every effort to look to others as the source of help had failed, when he felt desperately alone
and unloved, he “came to himself.” He realized, in great humility and repentance, that he needed to return home to his father’s
house. But his first glimpse of the great truth of his “royal” relationship with divine Love—his coexistence with God—included
servitude. He was preparing a speech for his father in which he was planning to say, with great humility, “Make me as one of thy
hired servants.” But interestingly, Jesus depicted him as leaving out that part of the speech when he got home. Perhaps the
younger son still had to realize the entire significance of being back in the father’s house—full restoration to sonship when sin
had been destroyed and lessons learned.
But when he saw his father and felt his father’s arms around him, he saw again what he was entitled to as a dearly-loved son.
And he was given not just bare-bones necessities, but showered with that which represented abundance and beauty as well: the
best robe, a ring, shoes, and a special dinner, accompanied by “music and dancing.”
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The elder son had an intriguing problem of his own. He did stay home, as the parable indicates. But was he really in possession
of what that meant? Instead of recognizing that being with the Father, God, meant that good was his as a natural entitlement
that he could claim as a son and heir, he was thinking he had to earn his way like a servant. He said to his father angrily, “Lo,
these many years do I serve thee … yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends.”
One might indeed wonder why this son didn’t ever ask for a party. He was petulantly asking to be treated as a son, yet he was
thinking of himself as a servant. St. Paul writes, “Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of
God through Christ” (Galatians 4:7). And as our Master reminds us, “The servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son
abideth ever” (John 8:35).
The son, the heir of God, is entitled to all good from God, the only source of good. And that’s essentially what the father told his
elder son when he said, with such motherliness, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” We belong to God, and
God belongs to us. What an awe-inspiring declaration of spiritual coexistence! It isn’t egotism to accept our spiritual selfhood
and our entitlement to all the good that goes with that selfhood. It is simply reality. It is simply the truth that man, reflecting
infinite substance, is entitled to his royal—spiritual—inheritance.
Both the prodigal and, later, his older brother had, each in his own way, denied his spiritual identity with its constant relation
with the Father, divine Love. But what is so thought provoking is that the elder son, at the end of the parable, still hasn’t come
into the house—into the demonstration of that coexistence with Love that entitled him to infinite good.
But how could he come into the consciousness of his oneness with Love while entertaining the sinful, mortal thinking that is
completely separate from Love: self-righteousness, selfishness, self-love, pride, jealousy, ingratitude, anger, self-justification,
self-will, resentment, an unforgiving heart, and the materialistic belief that man competes for love and substance? The belief
that made him want to be loved more than his brother, instead of basking in the joy of his brother’s homecoming and the
comfort of his father’s all-inclusive love.
Unlike the younger son, who moved in the parable from a state of depravity to a healthy sense of morality—the effect of the pure
Christ, Truth, touching human consciousness—the elder son hasn’t yet seen and repented of his sins, perhaps because the form
of sin he represents isn’t generally recognized as sin, namely, a personal sense of good separate from God. The elder brother had
no sense of his need to repent because he appeared to himself to be so humanly good. He needed to see that he, too, like his
prodigal brother, had separated himself from God, the only source of good, and had to submit to the scientific demands of
coexistence with Love in order to claim his inheritance.
But why did Jesus depict the older son as he did? Why did he draw him as unrepentant, as not being healed? We can’t know for
sure, of course. But my own sense is that in all of Jesus’ experience as we know it through the Gospels, those particular sins are
shown to be the most unyielding, the most challenging to heal. Science and Health even identifies some of them as “the adamant
of error” (p. 242).
Our Master indicated to the Pharisees, priests, and elders on more than one occasion that the publicans and harlots would enter
God’s kingdom before they would, implying that the latter humbly recognized their sinfulness and their need to repent, while
the former, in the opacity of their self-righteousness, saw no need to repent. And without true humility, without the
renunciation of a selfhood—good or bad—apart from Spirit, and the acceptance of our selfhood as the individualized
manifestation of Spirit, there is no demonstration of coexistence with God. And no ability to receive our true entitlement as
heirs of God.
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In Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, Mrs. Eddy describes our entitlement this way: “God gives you His spiritual ideas, and in
turn, they give you daily supplies.” A bit further on she declares: “What a glorious inheritance is given to us through the
understanding of omnipresent Love! More we cannot ask: more we do not want: more we cannot have” (p. 307). Receiving this
inheritance requires the conscious, step-by-step demonstration of coexistence with our divine Principle, Love. But as we
willingly, humbly, come into the house—into the patient demonstration of spiritual love—even the most adamant forms of sin
will dissolve in the warmth of that Love, and we will hear the Father saying to us, too, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I
have is thine.”
Barbara Cook Spencer is a Christian Science practitioner in Brookline, Massachusetts.
© 2014 The Christian Science Publishing Society. For sharing and reprint info: http://jsh.christianscience.com/permissions
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