Healing rules: a conversation with Ron Ballard

Jeffrey Hildner | from The Christian Science Journal

Christian Science works because it’s based on verifiable principles we can learn and live.

Ron, we worked together on an article for the Journal about the environment last year [April 2007], but I don’t think I know how you became a Christian Scientist.

Christian Science was seen in my family not so much as one’s religion, but as a way of life.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that practiced Christian Science. My grandmother was an early worker in the Christian Science movement. I also had some great spiritual mentoring from a close family friend, Emma Easton Newman, who was one of Mary Baker Eddy’s pupils, and from a wonderful family of Christian Scientists who lived next door. Christian Science was seen in my family not so much as one’s religion, but as a way of life. My grandmother was fond of emphasizing that Christian Science is the Science of being and that this Science has to filter into the minutiae of everyday experience. We lived as an extended family, and there was not much of my development that escaped my grandmother’s eye. I can remember her frequent response to some problem or crisis I was facing: “That’s one way of looking at it.” She was then quick to present other options, inevitably from a spiritual perspective. That perspective always amounted to encouraging the question, How does God see this? “Good questions are just as important as answers,” she would counsel, and she encouraged me to always develop good questions as a means of digging deeper and finding the meaning of some experience. I believe her encouragement that I ask good questions set me on a firm spiritual foundation and helped me appreciate how Christian Science thoughtfully questions—and clearly reveals—the true nature of life and being.

What else do you remember about growing up in a Christian Science family?

Freedom. Freedom from fear of trying new things, freedom to follow my dreams, freedom to accomplish whatever was necessary without anyone limiting my potential. Christian Science gave me and my family a way of interacting with life with a constant expectancy of good. Not everything that happened to our family was easy, but there was always an expectancy that whatever we faced could be worked out. And for the most part it really did.

How and why did you decide to become a Christian Science practitioner and teacher?

Well, that close family friend I mentioned, Emma Easton Newman, served as an important role model for me. She became a teacher at a very early age. She was only seventeen when she went through Mrs. Eddy’s Primary class in 1889 and only nineteen when she first advertised her professional practice of Christian Science in the Journal. She took Mrs. Eddy’s Normal class in 1898, at the age of twenty-seven, to become a teacher of Christian Science, though she didn’t teach her own Primary class until 1919, when she was in her late forties.

So Emma Easton Newman stood as an example to me of the possibility of devoting one’s life to the public practice of Christian Science. I think I always considered the prospect of becoming a practitioner at the earliest possible opportunity.

As it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait. When I attended college, I studied political science and became very interested in politics. I landed a job as a sophomore with one of the premier campaign firms in Southern California and spent my college years working in various political campaigns professionally. Toward the end of my junior year, the firm was hired by one of the major political parties to help form their party platform, which would be presented at the convention the following year. The plank in the platform that I was to develop was titled “urban insurrection,” which was a fancy name for rioting in the cities. I traveled to the American cities that had experienced riots and interviewed hundreds of people who were involved. I remember coming home from that trip thinking I had no clue how to craft the plank that was to suggest policy for resolution of this issue. I struggled for most of the summer under a deadline to complete the assignment.

Much to the consternation of my employers, I took time off that summer to take Christian Science class instruction. During the two weeks of the class, the Detroit riots broke out, and toward the end of the class the teacher assigned to me the task of giving a Christian Science treatment to the issue—in other words, my teacher asked me to pray for the situation from the spiritual basis that I had been learning in the class. I don’t think he had any idea what a life-changing experience that would be (or maybe he did).

I began to think of social unrest from a spiritual outlook.

For the first time, I began to think of social unrest from a spiritual outlook and spent a whole night considering the deeper spiritual issues at stake, such as equality, respect, integrity, fairness. It became so clear to me that only a radical shift in thought and perspective would really address those needs and that only prayer as a dynamic of thought could accomplish that task. I gave my treatment the next day but could not wait to return home to Los Angeles to write my report, this time from an entirely different vantage point.

The report had little to do with “nuts and bolts” sorts of suggestions, but proposed a more profound need to search consciousness and change attitudes. And, of course, you can imagine how grateful I was that both my employers and the political party enthusiastically embraced the report.

Not long after that experience, I entered the public ministry of Christian Science, convinced that the solutions to the social and political issues that concerned me could be completely solved only through prayer or a change of consciousness. Since that time, I have had some wonderful opportunities to work with individuals who were in seats of power and could make decisions that affected change. I believe that my own conviction and experience about the effectiveness of prayer to change the world scene is what led me to the opportunity to teach others this incredible Science of being.

You’ve described an “Aha!” moment when it came to the question of how to effectively address humanity’s challenges in the social sphere. I’d like to shift gears at this point and focus on healing the physical body through Christian Science treatment. Have you experienced a similar “Aha!” moment in this regard?

As I was growing up, I was constantly encouraged to “see things with fresh eyes.” This makes for lots of “Aha!” moments. Sometimes in the healing ministry you face a case where someone has grown accustomed to a problem and may feel that they’ve covered just about all the bases and are resigned to waiting it out. I had a case a while back that involved a malformation of the body. This situation had been around for some time, and the individual just didn’t know where to go in her prayer. She felt that she was just waiting on God to do something. We talked about the significance of patience not being a time issue but one of conviction. We can be patient when we’re convinced of the ultimate outcome of something.

At one point we were referring to a passage in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy that reads, “When we wait patiently on God and seek Truth righteously, He directs our path” [Science and Health, p. 254]. What occurred to me is that there is another sense of the word wait. It doesn’t just mean hanging around while something happens—it also means “to serve.” When you put that definition into the sentence, the process suddenly becomes active and not passive—“When we patiently serve God …” Serving God doesn’t require some momentous act. Serving God can be simply expressing more of our divine nature. Maybe we can find opportunities to express the divine nature in our lives by being more understanding, more honest, more grateful, more loving, and more forbearing. In this way we can actually be serving God by living God’s purpose for us. As we prayed with this inspiring idea, it wasn’t long before the malformation disappeared and she regained her normal form.

I like that Ron. A wonderful insight. Patience equals serving—serving Mind and Truth and Love, which are various names for God. Serving good! (Another name for God.) Honoring, through our thoughts and actions, our true divine nature as God’s expression. And when we serve and honor in this way, we find ourselves getting mentally in tune right away with the peace we expect our healing will more fully bring us.

The real issue is not so much about changing some material situation as it is living the process of spiritual renewal and regeneration.

That’s right. A common feeling in any healing process is that something is wrong and needs to change but that change is going to happen in the future. Buying into that feeling immediately puts us into the waiting-around mode of thought. In a sense it makes us passive observers waiting for something to happen. I’ve found that it’s very helpful to live the healing—that is, to take an active part in the process. From the standpoint of Christian healing, the real issue is not so much about changing some material situation as it is living the process of spiritual renewal and regeneration. The demand for healing in this sense is a demand for spiritual growth, so it’s helpful to listen for what is being demanded and then set about living the demand.

Over the many years that I’ve read about and observed the spiritual healing process, I’ve often seen that when a person’s focus changes and he or she forgets about the problem, the healing occurs quite quickly. Interestingly, I recall a definition of the word forget that I ran across some time ago along the lines of “to get something else in place of.” And in this context, when an individual gets his or her focus on living the divine demand, the problem is forgotten or replaced. I can remember reading many testimonies of Christian healing where the testifier remarks that he got so involved in focusing on the spiritual demand that he lost all track of the challenge and that when he remembered the circumstance, it had totally changed. Living the healing allows us to do just that—it takes us from a preoccupation with the material appearance of something and puts thought into the serving-God mode. It’s like calling the bluff of material appearance and saying, “That’s not what I need to be thinking about,” and then getting on with one’s spiritual development. Some people might think of this approach as being in denial. Quite the contrary, living the healing is exercising your divine right to direct your thought in the most productive manner for your life.

What you’re saying makes me recall that Mary Baker Eddy described Christian Science as a system that includes “sacred rules” that people can apply to their personal experience to help themselves and others cure disease and gain greater health, happiness, and fruition. [See for example, Science and Health, pp. 146–147]. In other words, Christian Science works because it’s based on principles—verifiable principles supported by the divine Principle (and, of course, Principle is another way to refer to God). Your concept of living the healing strikes me as one of these practical principles. What are some others you’ve learned are important?

I’ve found that one of the first principles of successful healing practice is getting your motive clear—asking yourself, “What am I really trying to do here?” Let me back up a moment, and you’ll see why I say that.

One of the first rules of successful practice is getting your motive clear.

Mary Baker Eddy noted that Christian Science is a term that specifically refers to the divine laws of being, what she calls Divine Science or the laws of God, which can be applied to meet human needs. And since her discovery, the practice of these divine laws has met peoples’ need for health, employment, companionship, economic supply, academic accomplishment—virtually every demand of human experience. Interestingly, the successful healing practice has in some theologians’ minds relegated Christian Science to what is called a “success theology,” or a theology that puts the emphasis on gaining things rather than promoting the more traditional theological goals of repentance, redemption, and regeneration. Anyone who has practiced this divine Science will tell you, however, that gaining things is not the focus. Quite naturally, people turn to God most often when they are in need of something. What the practice of Christian Science does is help folks sort out what the real need is. It might start out to be something quite material or physical, but the real human need is much deeper than that. That need inevitably reveals a demand for living more of the spiritual or divine qualities—wisdom, love, holiness, purity, spiritual understanding, spiritual power. That’s why I say that one of the first rules of successful practice is getting your motive clear. Mary Baker Eddy put it this way, “Working and praying with true motives, your Father will open the way” [Science and Health, p. 326].

Another principle, or rule, in the practice of Christian Science that I’ve found helpful is being honest. Honesty involves some interesting connotations. It can mean being virtuous, open, and sincere as well as having integrity and being trustworthy. I’ve found that being honest in healing is being open to change. The human tendency of thought often tries to justify itself at every turn, to give good reasons why it should hold onto something as valid. Honesty in the spiritual context means a willingness to let go of this human tendency and adopt one’s actual spiritual selfhood. I witnessed a healing of blindness in my family when the individual let go of her feelings of revenge and forgave. Now, she had a perfectly good reason to feel the way she did, but the fact was that feeling that way was not promoting healing. As she strove to forgive, she adopted something more significant about her life and selfhood—the capacity to see in others God’s likeness. And as she lived her healing by seeing another the way God sees them, her sight was restored. She had to be honest or open enough not to continue to justify her human emotions, but rather to let them yield to the feelings of Soul. You simply don’t want to be caught in the “yes, but” mentality that tries to justify what’s not productive. You want to be open or honest enough to cherish most your spiritual integrity, your oneness with God.

“To begin rightly is to end rightly,” said Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health [p. 262]. Sounds like that’s what we’re talking about here: When you begin with solid, functional healing laws, like the ones you’re describing, you’ll end up experiencing the good you’re seeking.

Always begin with God.

Yes, and here’s another rule I’ve found effective that goes hand in hand with that concept: Always begin with God. It’s easy in human experience to begin with the problem and then try to solve it. Beginning with God requires that we reason from a different point of view. Beginning with God means considering the spiritual perspective—how God sees something. That inevitably is quite different from mere human reasoning. For instance, in the realm of economics, human reasoning often starts from the assumption that resources are scarce and must be allocated proportionally. Reasoning from God’s point of view, what is called a priori reasoning, we find resources to be infinite rather than finite because you’re dealing with an infinite Source.

So what does that mean for the human scene? Take for instance the experience of one businessman I knew. He faced some tough economic decisions when his company had a sudden and precipitous drop in revenue. The human tendency was to start thinking where he could cut expenses to better coincide with his decreased revenue. As he thought about it, he realized that trying to solve the challenge from the hypothesis that resources were limited was actually arguing against the divine facts. As he embraced the idea that an infinite Source had infinite resources, he began to discover new product lines that he had never considered. These new lines expanded his business rather than downsized it, brought in new sources of revenue, and saved his business, not to mention the employees who depended on their jobs. Beginning with God does not make a reality out of a problem and then try to solve it. Beginning with God sees the false nature of the problem by substituting for it a clearer sense of the divine dimensions of thought. A natural corollary to beginning with God is staying with God: Don’t be talked out of your position simply because there is contrary evidence. If we hold to the spiritual perspective and let it be the basis of our reasoning, we will ultimately experience evidence of this perspective in our lives, often in new forms that before were unseen or not considered. God-based thinking is expansive thinking, thinking that sees more not less of creation.

Ruling out fear is another key rule, isn’t it?

Fear is an element in virtually every human problem. It’s not always about one’s individual fear. Sometimes it’s about the collective fear, meaning the fears of humanity about the prospects for healing. And when it came to handling fear, Mary Baker Eddy couldn’t have been clearer about how important it is to do so: “Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients. Silently reassure them as to their exemption from disease and danger. Watch the result of this simple rule of Christian Science, and you will find that it alleviates the symptoms of every disease” [Science and Health, p. 411].

Allaying the fear ‘alleviates the symptoms of every disease.’

That’s quite a bold statement: allaying the fear “alleviates the symptoms of every disease”—not most, not some, but every disease. Why would that be the case? One way of explaining it might be to realize that fear argues against the very nature of God as Love. Fear argues that Love is not present or not sufficient to meet the need. In several places in her writings, Mrs. Eddy spoke about the effectiveness of Love as the healing agent. She observed that divine Love never loses a case and that if the healer reaches the patient through divine Love, the healing is immediate. Divine Love is something vastly more than just a happy face. Divine Love gives the clearest sense of God and God’s relationship to all of us. Divine Love gives its all, its very being, to its creation and expression. Because of its constancy, divine Love is unconditional: Divine Love doesn’t require you to earn love. Divine Love expresses love and loves you and me and everyone because that’s Love’s nature—to love, without interruption and without condition. Can you imagine what a powerful healing agent this would be to one struggling with the fear that God cannot or would not hear their cry? I’ve seen people struggling with what is considered incurable disease, sometimes brought on by their own misdeeds, buoyed and healed of both the disease and the sin by realizing God’s unconditional love for them.

Some people think that God punishes us for mistakes, especially moral ones. Comment?

I’ve sat through more than one sermon where the assumption has been that people who suffer deserved that suffering as punishment from God for their sins. Jesus encountered that attitude in his healing of the man who was born blind. When the question was posed to Jesus, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus immediately deflected that reasoning and pointed to the relevant issue, which was the man’s right to experience the “works of God” in his life [John 9:2, 3]. And Jesus healed him.

While moral issues may indeed tend to stand in the way of recognizing God’s love for us, they never compromise that Love. Jesus’ model of healing that involved moral issues was to both forgive the individual and destroy the sin. There is no example I know of where he said to another, “You have sinned and until you get yourself straight, God will not heal you.” He may have caused the sin to be self-seen and therefore rebuked, but it was always the “perfect love” of God that the Apostle John speaks of [I John 4:18] that met the fears of individuals and brought renewal and regeneration.

Let’s stay with this concept of Christian Science as a rule-based, or Principle-based, system a little longer because this is what makes Christian Science a science—the Science, with a capital S—and therefore reliable and demonstrable. Which in turn makes the religion that Mary Baker Eddy founded unique among Christian denominations and all other religions of the world. Any other insights into these rules that can help someone better understand and apply this Life-Science effectively?

There is more to rules than just obeying them. There is also the need of living their spirit.

In one passage in Science and Health Mrs. Eddy made an arresting statement to the would-be healer: “The rule and its perfection of operation never vary in Science. If you fail to succeed in any case, it is because you have not demonstrated the life of Christ, Truth, more in your own life,—because you have not obeyed the rule and proved the Principle of divine Science” [Science and Health, p. 149]. It seems that there is more to rules than just obeying them. There is also the need of living their spirit. I can recall the first instance where I felt I failed to succeed in a case, and I came face to face with this passage. Up to that moment, I was entertaining all kinds of rationales as to why the healing had not taken place. But there it was staring me in the face: The healing hasn’t taken place because you have not demonstrated the life of Christ, Truth, more in your own life. That gets back to that rule of honesty I spoke of earlier. There was no need for justification, no rationales to be sought, no excuses to be made. The answer was direct: You need to demonstrate the life of Christ, Truth, more in your own experience.

I have pondered that passage many times since. What does the life of Christ entail? What adjustments can I make in my daily practice to evidence that demand more fully? There’s no formula for that one. Each of us has to ask the question over and over again. However, a couple of things stand out to me. The life of Jesus and his expression of the Christ was based on his sense of oneness with God. There is, perhaps, no greater issue in Christianity than the meaning of Jesus’ statement, “I and my Father are one” [John 10:30]. What did Jesus mean? I think that every single Christian must come to grips with what Jesus meant every day of their lives if they are to live more fully the life of Christ. To me, Jesus’ statement of oneness with his Father means that God expresses in each of us the divine nature and character, the divine attributes. It means that we are not of ourselves, so to speak. We are of God. This divine Life that we know as God expresses in or as us its very being. From a spiritual perspective, there is not a single thing we can do or be that is not the very evidence of God expressing Himself/Herself. Another thing about Jesus’ life was his commitment to love one another from the standpoint of spiritual recognition. In this sense, loving another was not simply being loving but seeing that person in God’s likeness—loving and contending for the spiritual integrity or oneness of others as God’s expression. This kind of loving rises above the belief that love needs to be deserved or returned. That kind of loving is not in the demands of a Christian. Loving another as Jesus loved means seeing the spiritual reality of another’s being, often in spite of what might be all too apparent on the surface. This kind of love heals and is what “reinstates primitive Christianity.”

Let’s circle back to that central theme in your life that you first talked about: the importance and effectiveness of prayer-based solutions not only for individuals but also for society. You tapped early on into how the good Samaritan model that Jesus gave us impels us to think not only about what we can do for ourselves, but what we can also do for others. And you’ve given lectures on the topic “You can make a difference through prayer—in the environment, politics, and quelling violence.” How? How can people make a difference? How can we apply the prayer-rules we’ve been talking about and change the world?

Prayer is the ultimate dynamic of thought.

As I mentioned before, prayer is the ultimate dynamic of thought because it relates to the Science or laws we’ve been talking about put into action. So often the common perception of prayer is one of a waiting process—waiting for God, who often is considered a bit mystical, to come down and change our circumstances in a manner that is described as miraculous. Mary Baker Eddy saw prayer as a dynamic process—understanding the nature of God and then living that nature in our thought and action. She noted: “Such prayer is answered, in so far as we put our desires into practice” [Science and Health, p. 15]. So if we’re interested in seeing change on a world scale, we have to put our prayers into action in whatever ways we can. Maybe that’s through simple means, maybe through more comprehensive ones. It’s the process that counts. That process, when lived, changes consciousness.

In my lectures on prayer and societal change, I use an example of the dynamic of thought that occurred during the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. When thought coalesced around the higher principles of self-government, self-determination, and conscience—principles often described as endowed to us by our Creator—the force of this thought overrode the lesser concerns of societal differences, historical background, cultural makeup, and religious contention that often keep people apart. Thus people found the basis of unity.

Prayer gets us to think bigger.

What allows us to come together on higher principles? I would submit that’s where prayer takes over. Prayer finds the common spiritual integrity of individuals and holds that uppermost in thought. Prayer gets us to think bigger, to let go of lesser concerns (as important as we might think them to be) and look for the larger concept that is at the heart of the matter. When you look at some of the debates in society today that are considered part of what is called the cultural war (issues like abortion, stem cell research, immigration policy, fighting terrorism), you won’t really find satisfying solutions through the mere human reasoning that often characterizes the debate. But when this different, prayer-fueled dynamic I’m talking about is brought to human consciousness, thinking moves to a higher level, a more spiritual level, a level that enables us to find solutions and resolutions.

When we start thinking about core issues—what really constitutes life, where true entitlement resides, how safety and security is sustained—we naturally and inevitably look to a higher source, God, the divine Principle. And from there we see that, as Principle’s expression, we can find principled, workable ways to meet the challenges that face humanity.

I love this line by Mary Baker Eddy: “Science reveals the glorious possibilities of immortal man, forever unlimited by the mortal senses” [Science and Health, p. 288]. That’s our job as spiritual thinkers—to find and then live the infinite possibilities of being.