Healing and a new view of Christian Science treatment

I’m grateful for an experience I once had, which not only involved overcoming a physical challenge, but taught me some important lessons on how to more effectively give a Christian Science treatment, or earnest and specific prayer applied to a situation that needs healing.

One day I woke up with a slight pain in one of my ears, and noticed that the ear was a little red. Because it was a very busy day, I did not stop to take time to pray about it, as I normally would. I guess I felt it might just go away on its own.

On day three, however, the redness had spread, and the side of my cheek was puffed up. I knew I needed to get busy and pray. I cleared the deck of other tasks and concerns, and confined myself to a quiet room where I could really focus on prayerful study of the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, without any distractions.

At first, I looked up spiritual concepts related to ears, hearing, healing inflammation, and so on, but after some time I felt something was missing. I knew I needed to go beyond any sort of perfunctory association of spiritual ideas with a particular human malady, and to let the Christ-consciousness replace mere human reasoning with direct, divine inspiration. Certainly the Christ—God’s message of my spiritual identity—would reveal to me all that was needed for healing to take place. I saw my role was to have greater humility, childlike receptivity, and willingness to follow wherever this divine inspiration would lead.

At one point I opened Science and Health at random. My eyes landed on a familiar passage: “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; the conscious identity of being as found in Science, in which man is the reflection of God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal; that which has no separate mind from God; that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker” (Science and Health, p. 475).

Here was a gold mine of divine affirmation. I knew that I needed to dig deep into it, to consider and appreciate the value of each nugget. As I prayed to grasp something new from each idea, there was a tangible feeling of being deeply loved by God, by Love itself. And I became aware of my “conscious identity of being,” not as a material body but as an idea, “the image of Love.”

A profound sense of freedom and release stayed with me, and I went about my day with little thought of a facial problem. When I looked in the mirror later that day, the swelling and redness were almost completely gone. The pain had also vanished. The following morning there was no irritation nor any sign of a problem.

Now, years later, I remember this healing for the lessons it taught me about Christian Science treatment and what is sometimes called “affirmation” and “denial”—affirming the truth of our spiritual identity and denying the error, or material inharmony and falsehoods that claim to be the truth about us. I recognized that in my early days of practicing Christian Science, I sometimes had a tendency to get caught up in the problem. I even analyzed or speculated as to what the cause might be, as if I needed to dig up some specific source for the error and get a detailed picture of it, in order to know what to deny with spiritual truth. Perhaps I was being subtly influenced by the psychological model of probing for an explanation of a disorder in order to suggest an appropriate treatment.

Since this healing, I’ve come to see that when the goal of treatment is to get closer to God, and there is less focus on the physical or human need, healing follows as a very natural effect of a clearer, truer, more detailed conception of God and His reflection—infinite Love and its flawless image.

John Minard | Collingswood, New Jersey, US