Healing prayer counters flu fears
Channing Walker | from the Christian Science Sentinel
Even in a swine flu pandemic, prayer has a contagion-countering effect and can defuse fear.
Common sense, not panic. That’s what healthcare authorities called for as concern over a swine flu outbreak in Mexico stirred around the globe. Strong cooperation and coordination among nations, not an international blame-game, were the order of the day. Experts saw these as key to a united effort to stop the spread of the contagious disease.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States identified the sickness as a new strain of influenza, and Mexico responded promptly. The CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted steps such as managing the scope and timing of some public gatherings, limiting nonessential travel to certain areas, and distributing face masks that some believe reduce the likelihood of transmitting the illness.
If the disease strain is novel, the response to it isn’t, and may sound a bit like a lecture from your grandmother: “Go wash your hands again.” At this writing, the consensus emerging among experts appears to be that while the virus is continuing to spread, it won’t necessarily be as severe as was first expected. Officials add a warning note about its possible return in the fall. But for now, the WHO has informed the public that from its perspective, the likelihood of full recovery extends even to individuals who receive no medical attention and go without any antiviral drugs.
Prayer calms panic
Prayer helps move thought from panic to common sense.
And that’s before one even considers the contagion-countering impact of prayer. Prayer, infused with an understanding of God’s presence and power, helps move thought from panic to common sense. The move from common sense to spiritual sense follows as a natural next step. Spiritual sense intuitively discerns the presence of divine power. This halts panic and arrests the spread of fear.
Why is that important? Because too often an outbreak of some contagious illness is partnered with a contagion of fear. Addressing the latter through prayer helps resolve the former, and brings a speedier end to both.
Love advances, fear retreats
As the spiritual sense of God’s—divine Love’s—presence continues to develop in a person’s consciousness, fear and panic shift into retreat. Gradually, they grow smaller in thought, as the conviction of divine Love’s presence grows larger, until Love owns the whole ground. But the counteracting of fear never occurs in a vacuum. It occurs within the overall mental environment.
That environment, to a considerable degree, gets its shape from the media. Reports intended to deliver information to a news-consuming public, wittingly or unwittingly, also deliver images that fuel the contagion of fear. That may be good for ratings, but it is not good for individual or societal health. What to do? Individually, one can defend one’s mental territory. No one has to allow the media or any other outside influence to shape their individual mental environment, or the overall mental climate they inhabit.
You have dominion over your own thought.
In other words, you have dominion over your own thought. You can as easily choose to fill your thought with the awareness of divine Love’s stupendous healing power, as with fear-inducing images. But choosing Love is in fact not only as easy; it is also more natural to turn Godward, to take in something of Love’s panic-ending power, and to help end the contagion of fear by persisting in the awareness of Love.
Choose love, not disease
Hard to do? Maybe, but not impossible. After all, in turning to Love you are not left on your own. The turn to Love is impelled by Love itself. It is in you to respond to that divine urging, that spiritual impulsion. As the offspring of your heavenly Father, it is in your spiritual DNA, so to speak, to respond to Love’s power. It’s natural for you to be fearless through Love. This is the message that comes from God to you.
This message, to sum it up in a single word, is Christ. It’s the healing message of God, the great Physician, that speaks to each of us ceaselessly. It was brilliantly at work throughout the healing ministry of Jesus—quelling fear, transforming the mental climate, and, inevitably, bringing about physical healing, including the healing of contagious conditions, through spiritual means.
Touching the untouchable
Christ Jesus was love-driven, not fear-driven.
Consider an episode from Jesus’ ministry. He encountered a man riddled with leprosy—a disease widely held to be contagious. The rule of society was to shun such an individual, to have no physical contact. But the man appears to have intuitively sensed that Christ Jesus was love-driven, not fear-driven. So, he approached Jesus, knelt before him, and said, “If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” Did the man already recognize that the Christ, Jesus’ (and everyone’s) spiritual nature, could restore him to health? Did he only question whether the Christ would?
If so, perhaps that foreshadowed an uncertainty that would plague people in later centuries—people convinced that spiritual healing can happen for others but wondering about the possibility of its ever happening for them. In any event, the question was quickly answered for the man with leprosy. Jesus’ answer wasn’t “I can,” but “I will.” At the same moment that he delivered this powerfully assuring Christ-message, he also did the unthinkable. He physically touched the man.
The Bible describes the encounter this way: “Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed from him, and he was cleansed” (see Mark 1:40–45).
Looking back on that long-ago event, one can only speculate about what went on and what it all meant. But it seems certain that Jesus’ compassionate touch—when the leprous man had perhaps not been touched by another human for years—communicated an overpowering love. A love that emanated from all-powerful, but ever tender, divine Love. Direct contact with Christly love cancelled out the negative effect from any earlier contact the man apparently had had with a contagious condition that may have imposed the illness.
Common sense versus spiritual sense
Common sense argues that a host of troubles, including contagion, trace back to exposure. People needlessly conform to that mistaken view. But uncommon spiritual sense discerns an entirely different view of exposure. What each individual is truly exposed to—all that any individual can be exposed to—is not that which is destructive or disease inducing. All any of us are truly exposed to is the overwhelming presence of divine Love, flooding the whole scene. Love leaves no avenue through which you could be exposed to anything unlike the love of God. Under divine Love’s care, there’s no place or time—not now, not this coming fall, not at some date far in the future—when you could be exposed to something never divinely authorized in the first place.
Love transforms the mental environment.
Love transforms the mental environment, nullifies panic, annihilates fear. Love touches you with the healing message of Christly compassion. Sentinel founder Mary Baker Eddy wrote in her primary work, Science and Health, “Let us reassure ourselves with the law of Love. God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion” (Science and Health, p. 384).
You have the spiritual sense to see that because you are exposed solely to the presence of divine Love, you are safe. Now and always. So is your neighbor.
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