Our Perfect Ability

I've been reading this week's Christian Science Bible Lesson about "Reality," and one phrase from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures has really stuck out. It comes in the final citation - ""In this divinely united spiritual consciousness, there is no impediment to eternal bliss, -- to the perfectibility of God's creation."

Perfectibility. That word stuck out to me. To me this means one is capable of being perfect. Nice, but "God's creation" isn't just capable of being perfect - it is perfect. To be capable means there is some relativity there - one may improve to it (like there is room to be less than perfect). But we can establish from the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible that the creation is already perfect - it didn't attain to it, it just was.

So I've been working with the word "perfectibility" from Mrs. Eddy as actually meaning two words - perfect ability. What is perfect ability "in God's creation"? This has taken me a while, but here is an idea that has come to me.




Let's look at how "ability" is defined. To have "ability" is to be capable or to have the power or capacity to do something. Ability is power. God - and his creation - have all-power, thus all-ability. And this ability, or power, is all good - again, as established in the first chapter of Genesis, where everything God had created was declared "very good."

So perfect ability equals perfect power. Perfect means "pure." Pure power. How is power pure? When we know that God is good, and is all-power, then pure, infinite power is pure, infinite good. There is no evil, no negativity, no "bad" power.

So the perfectibility of God's creation actually refers to the "perfect ability" - pure power - of God's creation. To understand God as our Father-Mother - the "divinely united spiritual consciousness" mentioned in the Bible Lesson citation, which refers to the masculine and feminine qualities, or natures, of God and his creation united in one identity - allows us the freedom to understand and to experience the pure ability, the pure, infinite power of good contained in us - the children of God, His creation.