Paul K. Wavro, C.S.B., of
Jacksonville, Florida
Member of the Board of Lectureship of The Mother
Church,
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts
Scientific reliance upon God abundantly meets every human need.
So stated Paul K. Wavro of Jacksonville, Florida for a large audience in the First Church of Christ, Scientist, auditorium, 1835 Mott avenue, last Friday.
Wavro said that everyone can find through prayer the answer to his need for health, happiness, activity, and supply.
"The Love that is God," he said, "includes everyone — no one is ever shut out from God's love. Just as we can all experience the warmth of sunshine if we go into it, so we may enjoy the love of God and His blessings if we open our thought to this ever-present love."
An authorized Christian Science teacher and practitioner, Wavro is on nationwide tour as a member of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship.
Expectancy is an important part of prayer, Wavro stated. Christ Jesus brought home to his followers that the result of their prayers would be in proportion to their understanding and expectancy.
"There is a story told," he continued, "about a prayer meeting held in a church in a small midwestern community. Crops were drying up and the land was parched from lack of rain. The minister of the church called a meeting to pray for rain. Yet, when all the congregation was assembled, only one small girl had come with an umbrella — with the expectancy of answered prayer."
To emphasize the practical effectiveness of such expectancy, he told of a woman who came up to him after a lecture some time ago to report a healing of deafness.
"She had not been able to hear sounds for about five years," he related. "Mortal sense had suggested to her that it would be foolish to attend the lecture. She had prayed earnestly seeking God's guidance in the matter and was led to attend. She came with a great need, but also with hope and expectancy of good. After a short time, she found she was hearing occasional words and phrases. Then, she joyously related that she had been able to hear the entire last half of the lecture. She had regained her sense of hearing."
He also described how prayer solved other problems including the need for harmony.
"We never solve a problem by eliminating persons, moving to other places or running away from it, for we always take our thinking with us," he declared. "We solve problems in human relationships by changing mortal concepts for spiritual ideas. This is the key to happiness and harmony."
Effective prayer as understood in Christian Science, he said, is the spiritual conviction of the operation of God's law.
Such prayer is not just turning thought to God in times of desperation, he explained. "It is the constant daily endeavor to live in accord with His demands — the conscious sense of being at one with God and all that He represents."
Salvation from want, woe, disease, inharmony and lack is gained through spiritual understanding of the true nature of God and man, he stated.
"Man's need is never for more materiality, but greater spirituality. Christian Science does not teach us how to demonstrate matter or material conditions. It brings to us an understanding of God, Spirit, Life. Through this understanding we learn the spiritual and eternal nature of all real being, and how to claim it in our experience."
Wavro called upon his audience to see activity as spiritual, expressing love, joy, and honesty.
"Let us watch the abundance of good that begins to flow into our experience as we are rightly employed, expressing God. Let us replace concepts of sickness and discord with spiritual ideas of health, substance, real being."
In closing his address, he quoted the following from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science: "God gives you His spiritual ideas, and in turn, they give you daily supplies. Never ask for to-morrow: it is enough that divine Love is an ever-present help; and if you wait, never doubting, you will have all you need every moment." (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 307).
[Delivered Oct. 1, 1965, at First Church of Christ, Scientist, Far Rockaway, New York, and published in The Wave of Rockaway Beach, Oct. 7, 1965. The title was supplied from other shorter summaries of the lecture.]