Two crucial questions about prayer

from the Christian Science Sentinel

Prayer works. It heals. It reforms human nature. And prayer restores lost and broken hearts and lives. Over many decades the Christian Science magazines have published undeniable evidence of prayer’s transforming effects. Still, we recognize that many people wrestle with and question the motives, reach, and value of prayer—in the face of personal health challenges as well as complex national troubles such as those facing post-cyclone Myanmar.

Is praying for your own health and welfare selfish?

What may seem a strange question to readers whose families have successfully relied on prayer-based healthcare for many years, even for generations, actually comes up fairly often in conversations with fellow Christians. They might ask, “Isn’t praying for healing the same as asking God for special favors? Aren’t you, in fact, testing God when you pray for healing?”

Our answers come straight from the Christian Science concept of God and the life He creates.

The God we love and rely on is one universal Father-Mother.

If God were a benign but essentially unknowable father figure—sometimes present and caring, sometimes not—then God’s aid might be suspect at best. The God we love and rely on is one universal Father-Mother. She is Love itself, omnipotent and everywhere present. He is the creative Principle of all existence, eternal Spirit, the always-caring and all-good divine Mind that actively governs and communicates with all creation.

And the nature of this creation? If men and women were nothing but reason-endowed higher organisms, vulnerable to disease, malfunction, and genetically transmitted flaws, then even God’s help wouldn’t be enough to cope. However, reasoning spiritually from the Genesis 1 account of man, male and female, made “in the image” of God, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “The likeness of Spirit cannot be so unlike Spirit…. Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God’s image and likeness; ….” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 475).

Prayer in Christian Science isn’t pleading to a remote God to change physical conditions.

Then, prayer for healing in Christian Science isn’t pleading to a remote God for a change in physical conditions. It begins with acknowledging the invariable wholeness of God and all He creates. It welcomes the Christ into thought, as God’s message of spiritual wholeness and harmony. It trusts the divine law of wholeness to govern and correct the patient’s thoughts, remove fears, and dissolve feelings of separation from God. As people awaken to life’s spiritual realities, their bodies conform with normalized health.

But the aim of Christian healing goes far beyond personal health and well-being, to the betterment of human character. It purifies desires, deepens honesty, and spawns compassionate concern for others. The Christian healer naturally wants everyone, everywhere, to enjoy the kingdom-of-God reality now, and not just in some hoped-for afterlife.

How can prayer help those suffering from natural and social disasters, such as the people of southwestern China and Myanmar?

Let’s look briefly at two ways. Prayer impels brotherly-sisterly love and humanitarian action. It also can help overturn elements in human thinking that engender oppression or exploitation.

The prophet Jeremiah heard God say: “Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? … Do not I fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:23, 24). Even in the face of awful devastation, God is there. Life everlasting is there, and yes, this includes those thousands whose human lives have been cut short. A loving “God at hand” did not cause the storm or its destruction. Divine Life causes only life, and causes those who love neighbors near and far to reach out in prayer and with helping hands.

As to what prayer can do about political oppression, consider something Jesus said: “When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils” (Luke 11:21, 22).

A literal reading of Jesus’ words might identify the “strong man” with personal rulers, with people desperately attempting to hold on to power at a country’s expense. But the higher meaning of Jesus’ teachings point in a quite different direction: “Mortal mind,” Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “is ‘the strong man,’ which must be held in subjection before its influence upon health and morals can be removed. This error conquered, we can despoil ‘the strong man’ of his goods,—namely, of sin and disease” (Science and Health, p. 400).

Prayer subjects mortal mentality to the Christ.

Mortal mind, the human belief that life and intelligence are confined in matter, fathers all oppressions and fears. It lies at the root of social dysfunction, as surely as it does bodily ailments. Prayer subjects mortal mentality to the Christ, to the divine Truth of being—and error can’t resist the truth any more than darkness can resist light. Progress can come quickly as thought changes within a body politic: Witness the former Czechoslovakia’s 1989 “velvet revolution” and the fall of apartheid in South Africa. And millions were praying for the dawn of peaceful change.

Through prayer, the light of the Christ begets more light. May our world feel, full force, its liberating presence.