Rudolf Nureyev, who revolutionized ballet dancing for males, said that, growing up in the Soviet Union, he knew that no one was going to help him. In a PBS program broadcast August 29, he said he realized that “nobody’s going to . . . take me by the hand . . . . I had to do it all myself.”

It’s easy to understand Nureyev’s attitude. Sometimes it really does seem that we’re entirely on our own. The fact is, however, that there’s always powerful help—divine help—right at hand.

“. . . I am with thee, saith the Lord, to save thee,” we read in Jeremiah (30:11). And Christ Jesus said, “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:20). These are assurances that God and the Christ are always with us to help us, no matter what our situation. And Jesus proved that they are assurances we can rely on. Jesus understood God’s nature, his own nature (and the nature of the rest of us too) as God’s spiritual expression, and the Christ, which Mary Baker Eddy defines at one point in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 332), as “the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness.” By healing the sick, raising the dead, and solving all sorts of other problems through entirely spiritual means, Jesus showed that effective divine help is always available to all of us.

How do we access this help? Through love for God and man and through humility and meekness. These allow us to break out of the standard human ways of thinking—limited ways of looking at things which tend not to take God’s presence and power fully into account, if they take them into account at all. The humility to set such thought processes aside lets us hear the Christ, that divine presence speaking to human consciousness. It tells us that we’re actually spiritual, God’s spiritual expression. As such, we express the Mind that is God. We can understand whatever we need to understand to do good and help ourselves and others. With this divine help, we can overcome the obstacles that limited viewpoints would say can’t be overcome.

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe” (Prov. 18:9). Understanding God’s nature (name), we can align ourselves with it and be safe—have whatever we need to do good. “. . . divine Love [God] is an ever-present help; and if you wait, never doubting, you will have all you need every moment,” Mrs. Eddy writes (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 307). We’re not left to our own devices to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps; divine aid is always present to help and heal.

May we all help ourselves to it!

Link
The New Yorker — "Out of the East"