Prayer about cancer

Michelle Nanouche | from the Christian Science Sentinel

Cancer doesn’t have more power than God’s love for His creation.

Is there any difference between the answers you give for healing cancer, and the answers I need for healing another disease? These two diseases, when in advanced stages, seem incurable. What can I do to be healed?

You’ll find that behind most conditions there’s an underlying similarity, in that we’re dealing with the idea that either we have a built-in flaw or vulnerability, by nature of believing that we are material instead of spiritual—or that we’re some kind of Spirit-matter mix as God’s creation. So I would have to say, no. When we’re talking about healing in Christian Science, what we’re really talking about are the laws of God that are in operation, keeping us safe. It’s not about figuring out how to unwind the particular snarls or beliefs or fears of a particular aspect of mortality, naming itself one disease or another.

My daughter-in-law seems to be vulnerable to the belief of heredity and the inevitable appearance of cancer. How can I best pray to support her spiritual identity and that of my grandchildren?

I’ve had to deal with a lump in my breast. My mother lost a breast to breast cancer; my aunt lost a breast and then her life to breast cancer. So heredity was definitely a fear that was weighing heavily in my thought. It’s actually saying that we’re not so much related to those we love, but to the diseases of those we love. That was a subject that, for me, required some really deep thinking about who I truly believe I am. My prayer and study involved understanding my spiritual link as not coming through anyone or anything, not seeing myself as on a mortal timeline with a beginning and an ending.

Spiritual understanding can take anyone off the mortal timeline.

In praying on that subject, you may want to give some thought to immortality, to what it means to be immortal—what eternity and eternal being really mean. I found in my own experience that a better understanding of my own immortality as a spiritual reflection of divine Life, God, ultimately erased my sense of vulnerability or a dangerous connection to my family through material molecules, through DNA, and through diagnoses. And this spiritual understanding can take anyone off the mortal timeline—the sense of eternity meaning time without end—and makes eternity more a depth of experience, instead of a lateral line from one end of being to another end of being.

We’re all always living right now, at one with all of God’s creation, and that spirituality allows us to find our roots, which take us to the eternal depths of who we really are, and at the same time allows the inspiration of this moment to free us to be ourselves. And that’s what immortality is. Immortality isn’t a future thing that’s coming, or an extension of now; it’s a deeper sense of now that includes complete freedom.

If the case concerns a person who has had cancer before, and there is a return of cancer, what then?

I think what we’re talking about in that instance is a weak spot, a sense or belief of vulnerability. There’s a passage in Science and Health that immediately comes to thought: “The divine Science of man is woven into one web of consistency without seam or rent” (Science and Health, p. 242).

The reason I love that particular passage is that it refers to “consistency” or the condition of being completely held together and retaining our perfect form, but without a weak spot. If you think about it, in a pair of pants, a seam is like a built-in weak spot. And a rent is the idea of a weak spot or a vulnerability that’s the result of some past shock, or some past event.

There’s no moment when our spiritual being can give out.

So what healing really consists of is getting back to the understanding that there is no moment when we’ve ever had a weak spot. There’s no moment when our spiritual being can give out, can wear out, have a wound under threat of being opened again.

The whole idea of DNA, of being preprogrammed to have a dangerous condition, and the idea that a predestined problem is waiting latent in the background, can be immediately replaced with the fact that we are preprogrammed, and it’s what God says and knows about His creation right now that governs us. And it’s not old news, not something that was known a long time ago, but what is being known about each one of us right now. Our divine nature keeps us completely safe. We’re programmed to be whole and healthy.

Conventional wisdom usually says that the best way to prevent or survive cancer is by early detection. How does Christian Science address this thought?

When I think of early detection, I think of what it means to be a spiritual detective. Preventative care, from any angle, involves knowing what you’re looking at and what you’re looking for.

In the Bible we read about God naming us and knowing our name (see Isa. 40:26). And when I think of early detection, it really does help to know what is spiritually true about God’s creation. It’s like, how do you recognize the child who comes to your door on Halloween, even though he may be in costume? You know him because you know him as he really is. And so, even when there’s some kind of a horror mask being presented to you, there’s an ability to recognize who that child really is. When I think of detection, I think of understanding our spiritual identity.

There seems to be a big media blitz on the subject now. Wouldn’t a quick prayer to protect us and our loved ones on the spot—whether it’s TV, media, or even when we are shopping—be in order?

I think you’re right. The selflessness of that kind of prayer is very powerful, because it’s not just about asking, “What do I need to know to keep me and mine safe?” It’s the opportunity to let your heart be open to embrace and lift up everyone in society who may be dealing with these images and the fears that are coming before them through the media.

How do you handle the fear of cancer?

I think the best way for me to answer this question is from experience: How have I handled the fear of cancer?

The more afraid I was, the more pain I was in.

Early on when I was dealing with the lump in my breast and a great deal of pain, I found that the pain seemed proportional to the fear—the more afraid I was, the more pain I was in. I called a Christian Science practitioner, asking her to pray with me and for me, and free me from this fear. She commented that if you were having a dream that you were being chased by a bear, your issue wouldn’t be to deal with the bear; your issue would be to wake up. And she was encouraging me, rather than fighting my way through the problem in order to handle the fear, to wake up from this belief that the most powerful fact of that moment was disease, and to understand that actually the most powerful thing at that moment was that God loved me.

What she could never have known was that I’d had recurring dreams some months before, about a bear chasing me. And in each of these dreams the bear would almost catch me before I would wake up in a cold sweat. Then one night I again had this bear dream, except that I outsmarted the bear. I managed to get myself across a river and was really making tracks to get away from the bear. I was winning, and then I wakened, and I was so mad, because I thought, “I’m beating the bear and I don’t even get to know how the story ended?” And so I lay there trying to force myself to go back to sleep so that I could get back into the dream, so that I could celebrate how smart I was because I’d defeated this bear. And after about five minutes of trying to get myself to sleep, I suddenly thought, “What are you doing? It was a dream! There was no bear!”

It was one of those amazing moments of realizing that even the desire to know how the story was going to end is all part of the same package deal. The entire thing is an illusion. That was a huge step forward for me, realizing that fear was being fed by the illusion. Once I entered my protest against this belief as a reality I needed to contend with, the fear lost its grip on me. I still had symptoms and I still had issues and things I needed and wanted to understand spiritually, but that was a huge step forward in letting go of the fear. I was mastering an illusion, not battling a disease. I was awakening to my health. I wasn’t struggling to work through a problem, after which I could let go of the fear. The fear was the first thing to go.

Let me add just one more thing on that. There’s a fabulous quote in Psalms that has just become a rock for me. It says, “There were they in great fear, where no fear was” (Ps. 53:5). I love that. To me, that speaks to “bear dreams.”

If someone has seemed to identify himself with a so-called incurable disease, how does he separate himself from the belief, break the mesmerism, and accept God’s love which heals?

What pops out to me in that question is the idea of fatalism—the idea that disease is inevitable, that everyone must die of something. And I believe that our starting point is actually to understand eternity—and what a tremendous gift of God’s love eternity is. This idea that disease is inevitable stems from the belief that we’re on a mortal timeline, a “birth and then do the best we can until we die” kind of timeline, after which, when we’ve become spiritual beings, we may live forever.

We’re all learning how to accept the love that God has for us.

Actually, we always have existed, always will exist. That is what we’re all learning to give more and more consent to in our lives. Divine Love is what we’re all learning to yield to. We’re all learning how to accept the love that God has for us, how to accept what eternal being means. But we’re not struggling each day in order to make Love love us, or to make ourselves be lovable, or to create in ourselves the capacity to become immortal or to express eternity. That’s never been a burden placed on any of us. As God’s children, we simply reflect Him.

I have supported myself through two cancers now by using Science and Health, but I have been unable to manifest total healing both times. What am I doing wrong?

Wherever that spiritual journey takes you, I’m grateful to hear that you’re hanging in there, and you’re working this out with your Father-Mother God. One thing that may be helpful to consider in taking your next step is a wonderful definition of health in Mary Baker Eddy’s Rudimental Divine Science. She wrote, “Health is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else” (Rudimental Divine Science, p. 11).

I’ve realized that it’s easy to define health as what it’s like when you’re absolutely conscious that everything is great. You’re feeling good, everything’s looking good, it’s easy to claim that as a healthy state where harmony and nothing else is going on. But we can also claim health when we’re conscious that pain and disease—even if they seem to be apparent—are not our real condition as God’s creation. That it’s like that dream state of being chased by a bear. Even at the moment that it seems the most real, it’s still an illusion about who we are and what’s really going on in our being.

Can you offer some experiences of sharing the healing truths of Christian Science with people who are under conventional medical treatment for cancer?

I’ve had friends that I’ve talked to who’ve had little or no contact with the healing power of Christian Science and in some instances would consider themselves atheists, and yet the vocabulary of Love always breaks through. I find it’s less the words and more the love that’s behind those words that enables the communication to be something that’s powerful.

God’s love is able to break through and be felt.

As far as words go, I’m not really recalling any specific conversations, but I can say just as a general rule, in communicating with people who are struggling with a problem, understand that the primary things you’re dealing with are likely to be fear and regret. In responding to that, it’s just that gentleness of thought, that power of knowing that God’s love is able to break through and be felt. There really is no place or condition we can find ourselves in where that light of Love cannot be felt. And to be willing to be there and be a witness for that allows gentle words, and sometimes strong and clear and direct words, to be made apparent in the appropriate way at the appropriate time.

Does prayer to heal cancer need to address a specific type of cancer, like breast cancer versus leukemia, etc.?

Mary Baker Eddy, in talking about praying for others, indicated that it’s important to address the fears of the patient. So there’s no generic treatment for breast cancer, skin cancer, or different types of a disease. What we’re addressing in prayer is thought, eliminating the specific fear that is attacking an individual patient. So there is no formula for treating breast cancer. Our prayer is simply to understand that there is nothing bigger, nothing with more influence or power, than God’s love for His creation.

When healing is slow and nothing seems to help, what do we do?

Pray. You know, prayer is a conversation. If you’re having a conversation with your best friend and you just don’t seem to be getting anywhere, that’s not the time to stop. It may be the time to examine whether we’re doing more talking than listening, or how to approach the conversation, but it’s not a moment to say, “OK, we’re just not going to be friends anymore.” I think a lot of times—at least in my own experience, when I’m not getting somewhere—it’s the result of my doing way more talking than listening in my conversation with God.

One thing that I’ve found helpful in getting back on track is to simply take out a fresh copy of Science and Health and go right back to the preface, which lays down the underlying theme for all of the rest of the chapters. Start right at the beginning, and read it with a sense of “What do you have to tell me today?”

Sometimes with the things that are the most familiar, that we’ve read over and over and over a zillion times, we may be tempted to simply check them off our list, thinking, “Oh yeah, I know what that means. Yeah, I’ve read that before. Oh, I’ve understood that or I had an experience 20 years ago where I knew what that meant,” and we just kind of skip on. We may not feel that sense of momentum or of what we’re reading being fresh, but there’s absolutely no statement in Science and Health that isn’t completely capable of healing any condition at any time. We’re not looking for the magic statement, but are listening for what God is saying to us, how that Truth is communicating to our hearts today and what it means at this moment.

How do you pray about a family member who is suffering with a condition believed to be incurable when everyone else is dwelling on the idea of impending death?

When we’re talking about a family member, that tends to drum up a sense of vulnerability, because we love them and know them and we’re feeling particularly compassionate. But whether you’re dealing with a family member or have just read about someone in the newspaper, any time you’re confronted with this belief that there’s some law that mandates suffering, and there’s nothing to do about it, I think we want to stand up mentally, prayerfully—stand up against that just as strongly as we would take a stand for a family member who’s being abused or someone we’ve read about in the newspaper who’s being abused.

It’s more than just righteous indignation. It’s prayer that springs out of a just a recognition that groundless abuse—and that’s what a diagnosis of something as being incurable is—can get nowhere with a spiritual idea. No matter how many other voices may be speaking in a room, within the sanctuary of your own consciousness, your voice can be heard. Your prayer can be felt.