No, he isn’t a skydiver. Or a foreign agent. But Christian Science practitioner and teacher Scott Preller is convinced that because of the spiritual laws he’s seen proved over the years, he leads a pretty adventurous life.

Referring to his early metaphysical leanings, he says, deadpan: “I didn’t really decide for certain that I wanted to go into the healing practice until about age ten.”

He’s quick to point out that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had moments when he’s felt mentally far away from God. “But at those times, divine Science is where I’ve needed to sort it all out. And it’s always been Science that’s done it.”

In between a short stint as a West Point cadet and getting his Master of Divinity degree in biblical studies at Boston University, his undergraduate chapter at the University of Colorado is where he first put up his spiritual tent. When a new office building opened near campus, offering low introductory rates, he used the money he made from waiting tables at a local restaurant to rent a small space—and started seeing patients.

After completing his graduate study, Scott served as a Christian Science chaplain in the United States Air Force and then as a staff editor for the Journal, Sentinel, and Herald s. In 1992, he began devoting full time to the healing practice. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two children, and hardly a day passes without a walk with his dog, Tundra. His daily routine has added a new word to the family’s lexicon. Pralk. “Prayer + walk,” as in “Dad’s going on a pralk.”

The conversation with Scott that follows hones our skills in God-centered alertness and grace, and keeps relevant what Mary Baker Eddy said over 100 years ago about Christian Science: “We live in an age of Love’s divine adventure to be All-in-all” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 158). Skydiving of a sort.

Only better.

When we spoke on the phone, Scott, you mentioned a phrase from Science and Health that you’ve been working a lot with these days: “What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace . . .” (p. 4). I noticed that of the seven times Mary Baker Eddy uses the word “fervent,” six of them are in the very first chapter called “Prayer.” What’s the message here in relationship to grace?

Well, in that first chapter she makes it so clear that real prayer comes out of that deepest yearning, that soul’s hunger for God. To me, when Mary Baker Eddy says we “most need” something, that tends to open my ears. That’s something I want to pay attention to. One of the things that strikes me about that sentence is the tendency of the human mind to miss what she is actually saying there. She plainly says that we most need “the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace,” and then at the end of the sentence she assures us this growth will be “expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds.” But I think sometimes we’re tempted to read that and think, “OK, so what I most need is to be more patient and do more good deeds”—in other words, to focus on the effect of grace, the things that express grace, rather than on the pure growth in grace itself.

If it were just a matter of determination to do more of those things, we might be tempted to think we could work on generating those things humanly. But you can’t humanly decide to generate grace. What that statement is really saying is we need that hunger, that yearning, that growth in grace. We need to want to grow in grace above all else, and when that’s the focus of our heart’s desire, then those other qualities—the patience, the meekness, the love, the good deeds—just naturally flow from that.

At one point Mrs. Eddy defines grace as “the effect of God understood” (Christian Science versus Pantheism, p. 10), and so we’re realizing that what we most need is that deep yearning to understand more of God and to let that understanding govern our lives. That’s grace.

And so what we’re talking about here—this “effect of God understood”—is about as far from human effort as you can get, isn’t it? It’s transformation of thought.

Right. It just makes sense that if we understand what constitutes true being, if we gain some deeper insight into the fundamental nature of God, then it’s going to change how we live; it’s going to change the power with which we act; and perhaps most important, it’s going to stop us from thinking and acting ignorantly.

Let’s just say for a moment that you’ve gone your whole life believing that the number 2 really had the meaning of the number 3. It’s hard to conceive of just how disruptive that would make your life. You wouldn’t be able to balance a checkbook properly; your finances would be a mess. Every time you saw an exit that was two miles away on a highway, you’d be thinking “three,” and you’d miss it every time. When you played in a band, your music would be completely out of sync with the other musicians.

What I’m getting at is life would just be completely out of whack. And that’s what it feels like when we find ourselves trying to “do” Christian Science within a material sense of things. There’s no ease to it; there’s no grace to it—we’re trying to humanly, willfully, make things fit. Whereas Christian Science shows us that life from a material basis never works.

Grace is just the opposite. Grace means that when we understand God, Truth, to be actual and real, the effect is that we stop trying to treat matter as though it’s the legitimate way life works. And we stop living as though life is largely governed by matter with a little bit of Truth thrown in to keep our heads just above water. So instead, we find ourselves living with the conviction that we live within the operation of divine Principle, God, which is always consistent. And within that, there’s a grace to life.

Going back to that analogy, when we correct the misconception that 2 is 3, when we get it right, when we understand 2 really is 2, then it’s amazing how graceful everything becomes in our lives. Checkbooks suddenly balance, dancing the Texas two-step no longer feels like the three-step; there’s just a fitting together that wasn’t there before. When we refuse to lose sight of the actuality of God, we feel that “effect of God understood”; we experience the ease, the rightness, of life. And I think the “prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace” is to live and pray in a way that we never lose sight of our hunger, our yearning, to grow in our understanding of that entirely spiritual perspective of living.

One of the various definitions of grace in the dictionary is “the unearned favor of God.” What do you think about that?

Well, I think grace is unearned in the sense that humanly we didn’t come up with it. In Christian theology there’s no greater evidence of grace as “unearned favor” than the appearing of Jesus in human history. Mortals didn’t generate or earn a savior—they were given one. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). And in that sense, the traditional way of thinking of grace as God’s unmerited gift is very legitimate in that it shows us the unchanging nature of God’s love.

The gift is that the true idea of infinite Love—or the Christ—is always here and always speaking to human consciousness. It isn’t something where we say, “OK, I’m this horrible, flawed person, and maybe once I get to the 14th degree of understanding in Christian Science, then I’ll deserve the Christ.” We didn’t destroy the Christ by our sins, and we can’t generate it by our human efforts. It simply is. It’s like Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, and the elder son having to learn from his father, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). That’s grace.

As we explore “the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace,” it makes me think that we often slip into having a fervent desire for Christian Science to make our lives better.

Exactly. It’s a not-so-subtle temptation that we all have to watch for—to think that we’re going to improve a material outlook on human existence. That just ends up adding a dream of Christian Science on top of the dream of life in matter.

Is there any difference between the “watching” you just mentioned and the “yearning” you were talking about earlier?

My sense of it is that with yearning, you know you want something. You’ve identified it as good, and you want more of it in your conscious experience. Watching, on the other hand, is an ability to discern what is already spiritually real and present in our experience—along with an ability to know whether something that’s trying to gain entrance into our thought or experience is worthy of being allowed in or not.

It’s like a soldier on guard duty at night, defending his unit’s encampment. He needs to be very aware of what the dimly lit landscape should look like—the shrubs and rocks that really belong there—and combine that with an ability to keep out enemies who are trying to approach and gain entrance by camouflaging themselves as bushes. The point is, an enemy that’s trying to sneak up on us doesn’t show up wearing a neon sign that says, “I’m trouble.” When he shows up, he tries to blend in and make it look like he belongs.

So when an ungodlike thought comes along, such as “I’m sick” or “I just don’t know enough to be healed,” we need to be watchful and sound the alarm. And it’s important to know that the sentry at his post isn’t to blame for enemies showing up—he’s only at fault if he doesn’t recognize them and lets them in.

The wise men who followed the star to Jesus’ birth knew which stars normally belonged in the sky, so they were able to recognize the star of Bethlehem when it appeared. And they had to combine that with an ability to know whether this new star’s appearing was something to give no attention to—or something good to be welcomed and followed. The wise men knew to follow the star, but their watchfulness also equipped them to recognize the evil motive behind Herod’s request to tell him where the Christ-child was.

And then remember, the depth of this idea of watching gets really reinforced by Jesus at the end of his ministry before his crucifixion, in the garden of Gethsemane. That was a dark place to be mentally. And for Jesus it must have been so tempting to feel like all was lost—to feel that hate had won out and that all of his teaching of truth had been rejected. And yet there Jesus is, watching—holding guard over Truth, Life, and Love—refusing to give in to the belief that evil is real and more powerful than good, and encouraging his disciples to do the same. In that moment, the Bible describes him as sweating blood, which is a human anguish almost inconceivable.

One of the things that so strikes me about this watching is that as daunting as it seemed for the disciples to be able to rouse themselves out of their sleep—their mental fog—Jesus was trying to show them it was possible for them to do it. It wasn’t a case of Jesus’ being vulnerable and in over his head, so to speak, unless the disciples pitched in and helped out.

The resurrection certainly proved Jesus was up to the watch. So it was a case of the disciples needing to wake up to their own ability to realize the supremacy of good and the presence of Christ—no matter how dark the situation appeared. So Jesus’ question, “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” (Matt. 26:40) was in some respects a teaching moment. Jesus was encouraging them to wake up to their capacity to watch—to recognize the infinity of good and to refuse to allow evil to enter and overwhelm their thought.

The wise men who were led to Jesus’ birth kept their watch. The disciples hadn’t quite yet grown into an ability to keep theirs. And every day we each must face the question of whether we’re keeping ours.

So then how do we begin to broaden our sense of prayer?

By breaking the mental mold of thinking that prayer is something we’re trying to construct just right so that God will stamp His seal of approval on the end prayer-product—and give us what we want. I can’t think of anything duller and more boring than the notion of a practitioner as someone who just mechanically takes on one problem after another by mentally putting together metaphysical statements within a prescribed order. That’s not being a practitioner of Christian Science healing. That’s a prayer processor. That’s the human mind thinking it can “do” Spirit, and it always just ends up “doing” more of the human mind.

On the other hand, if Christian Science is right that God, divine Mind, is really infinite, then prayer itself, if it’s genuine, needs to be thought of more in terms of something God is giving us. Prayer is thought, and if Mind is the only source of real consciousness, then the genuine ideas of prayer and the impetus to think those ideas, all come from this one Mind, divine Love.

Prayer from the basis of infinite Mind isn’t something we do by letting down our guard and believing there’s a real problem that we need to get God to fix, but by understanding that God is forever unfolding good only—which means we want to be doing a lot more listening when we pray. Prayer is divine Love’s way of waking us up to the actuality of infinite good.

So if I’m listening, hungering, coming from a place of “. . . not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42), then I can expect that the thoughts I find myself praying are coming from divine Mind. And if I really get to where I understand where these prayerful treatments are coming from, then I’ll have a hugely different sense of what I expect them to accomplish.

When you talk about what you expect our prayers to accomplish, doesn’t that make prayer seem “results” oriented?

Well, we certainly do expect results from prayer—just not the outlined outcome that the human mind has determined must be the answer before we even begin praying. Too often we just want a condition to improve or a pain to go away, when the message divine Mind is giving is an understanding that man’s health is spiritual and intact—now. The human mind wants “better” matter, whereas God is always giving overflowing health, love, and selflessness, which subdues matter. It’s as though we’re asking for a better parking spot when God has already given us the whole kingdom.

So when we’re listening to what God is giving us in prayer, we can expect that prayer to “do” God’s will. Just like we read of God’s word in Isaiah, “It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it” (55:11). And then we won’t finish our prayers with a feeling of “Gee, I hope that one took. I hope I got it right.” Instead, our prayers will feel like what they really are—an entering into a whole new sense of reality, where the understanding of God as Life and Truth isn’t just a religious position but is genuinely experienced as being supremely real.

So when we understand that these prayerful treatments are coming from God, it sounds like our prayer, as well as our treatment for others, is greatly enhanced.

Yes. One of the things we sometimes struggle with is that we get this idea that there is “a” way to give a Christian Science treatment. In our best moments, we tell ourselves over and over that there is no formula for treatment, and yet one of the things practitioners probably hear most often is, “I don’t know how to pray about this,” when somebody calls for help. There can be this perception that treatment is found within a narrow bandwidth of a certain type of mental argument—but treatment is so much wider than that.

The bottom line is whatever gives us a felt sense of God’s actuality and of our own identity as being only that which expresses God—and whatever empowers us to see more clearly evil’s impotence—that is effective treatment.

As a practitioner, Scott, how do you measure progress in a case?

A couple of things have really been helpful to me in keeping a clear sense of progress when we’re praying for healing, and I’ll share one. In Science and Health Mrs. Eddy says, “To ascertain our progress, we must learn where our affections are placed and whom we acknowledge and obey as God” (p. 239).

Now that may seem like, “Well, what does that have to do with anything if I’m suffering?” But it has everything to do with it. Because in the very next sentence she says, “If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit.” And what this reminds me of again and again is that at the end of the day the question is, “OK, can I really look in the mirror of thought and ask myself, Is divine Love nearer, dearer, and more real to me today than it was when I started praying about this?” If we can honestly say yes to that, then we can expect that what concludes that statement is being proved true—that “matter is then submitting to Spirit.”

So that measuring rod Mrs. Eddy gives us keeps us from the question: “How is matter doing?” Because the problem with that is it’s putting matter in the position of critiquing and evaluating our spiritual progress.

As if it was some sort of thermometer . . .

Right. And when you think about it, that’s a subtle way to buy into the medical model—which says that if matter is doing better, if the body is behaving in a certain way, a way that’s considered “normal,” then we should feel a sense of peace, and that if the body is behaving in a disruptive way, we should feel a sense of fear and dread.

But in Science we find things work exactly opposite to this. We learn that peace is a spiritual quality, and that everything is governed by thought, not by matter. When thought feels the actuality of God, good, then that thought informs the body how it must behave. And then the body stops acting like a master that we must obey, and instead takes its proper place as a servant that must fulfill its useful role of expressing strength and freedom.

That’s such a great way to see it. Because there’s a sneaky tendency when we might ask ourselves, “Is divine Love becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us?” to stay away from the power of being able to answer yes—because we’re sticking with the “no”—“No, my ankle isn’t better yet,” etc. etc.

We look at human experience, and it seems like one thing, but then we feel this touch, we hear this voice of the Christ speaking to us, we read Jesus’ words, we take in all of his healing work, and the grace with which he did it, and something within us goes, “Yes, yes, that’s what something within me has always known.” Then we go back and human experience looks different. We keep at it and we start having these healings, and we go back and our human experience looks different again. Pretty soon we start realizing that in fact the inevitable truth is that matter is not substance.

We arrive at Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery, which she crystallizes in the second sentence of “the scientific statement of being”: “All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all” (Science and Health, p. 468). Not “All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation plus all the evil and horrible and annoying things there are to deal with.” It’s that the actuality of God’s allness gives us authority, gives us dominion, with which to challenge and overturn the arguments of evil and suffering that appear in our lives, and in the world.

It makes me think of the quote from T. S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding, the last of his Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

As we close, Scott, this theme of watching that you’ve been talking about seems to tie in so beautifully with the concept of “grace” we started out with. The wise men kept watch—they had that “fervent desire for growth in grace,” which led them to the Christ-idea.

Not many people noticed this holiest of events going on when Jesus was born—but the shepherds did; the wise men did. And it’s so easy to miss that watchfulness each one of us can learn from, and instead think, “Well, these were just guys who were away from the city, out in the boonies, out in the fields, so what else was there to do but just kind of sit around?”

But these were men who had to keep guard over their sheep day and night, when storms were coming, when prey was approaching. There was a quality of developed alertness. Sure, it’s wonderful to see reenactments of Jesus’ birth in nativity plays and so forth at this time of year, but what, really, is the message? Like the wise men, we’re being led to the Christ-idea—that’s been true for eternity.

When we keep thought keenly focused on Truth—defending Truth—it leads us to a different place, out of that sense of “I can’t make progress,” or “I’ve been at this so long.” Instead, we’re able to focus on the fact that Truth is appearing, even if at first it seems like the tiniest babe of an idea. And if we can just hold to Truth with all our heart, we then see in human experience the supremacy of Truth over error, the supremacy of Spirit over circumstance.

All we have to do is watch. And follow.