These are excerpts from a talk given in December 1997 by Virginia S. Harris, then Chairman of The Christian Science Board of Directors, at the fourth “Spirituality & Healing in Medicine” conference held by the department of continuing education at Harvard Medical School and the Mind/Body Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The conference included talks on African, Buddhist, Jewish, Roman Catholic, Islamic, Hispanic-Pentecostal, Christian Science, and several other healing practices as well as plenary sessions on the efficacy of spiritual healing and its place in current medical practice.

I’VE BEEN INVITED, AS A PRACTITIONER AND TEACHER OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, to give a brief insight into the healing practice of Christian Science, which was discovered about 130 years ago in New England by Mary Baker Eddy. It is based on the Bible and particularly on Jesus’ healing and teachings.

The first half of her life, Mrs. Eddy was on a deep and committed search. For years she had sought a remedy for her own poor health, and took a path familiar to many today. She explored homeopathy and found that unmedicated pills could cure even difficult cases. She investigated allopathic medicine, as then practiced, and looked into other contemporary methods such as spiritualism, hydropathy, and mesmerism, but none of these brought permanent cure. Although these practices took her closer to a purely mental medicine, she ultimately left them because she realized they left God out.

‘IF THOSE HEALINGS OCCURRED THEN, WHY CAN’T THEY BE HAPPENING TODAY?’

God was always an important part of Mary Baker Eddy’s life. The Bible was her constant companion. The accounts of healing were alive and real to her—an epileptic boy healed, a dying girl brought back to life, a woman who’d hemorrhaged for twelve years healed, an army commander’s leprosy healed, and many others. And she asked, “If those healings occurred then, why can’t they be happening today?”

At one point Eddy was seriously injured. But that injury brought a breakthrough. Near death, a few days after the injury, she asked for her Bible. She opened it to one of the accounts of Jesus’ healings. She had a profound spiritual insight and was healed right then.

That event didn’t leave her where it found her. She was committed to discovering an explanation of the Principle of healing. She researched the Bible even more deeply. She wrote, taught, and gave lectures. Then she tested what she was learning by healing others.

What happened? What changed?

Before her healing, she had accepted the conventional view that the human mind is a derivative of the physical world. She came, however, through prayer and searching, to see the physical world as a product of the human mind. So instead of accepting thought as a phenomenon of matter, she saw that matter is a phenomenon of thought.

THOUGHT IS THE ARENA WHERE CHANGE MUST TAKE PLACE IN ORDER FOR HEALING TO OCCUR.

Prior to her discovery, the mental state of a patient was just one of the factors in the case. After her discovery, she saw that thought itself is the patient. Thought is the arena where change must take place in order for healing to occur. In Christian Science this change of thought proceeds from the basis of understanding there is one God, one Mind. Here Mind is synonymous with God. The use of Mind in this way is not referring to the human mind, but to the divine Mind—divine consciousness.

In her journey of exploration and discovery, Mrs. Eddy received encouragement and discouragement. One source of encouragement came from a practicing physician, Dr. E. H. Davis of Manchester, New Hampshire. After witnessing her heal, through prayer, one of his patients who was dying of pneumonia, Dr. Davis asked, “How did you do it, what did you do?” Then he urged her to write a book explaining her discovery.

Six years later, in 1875, she published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which contains the explanation of how Christian Science heals. By reading it, hundreds of thousands of people have been healed. There’s a chapter at the end with accounts of people healed just by reading the book.

Since Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery, students of Christian Science have been practicing healing for themselves as “self care,” and treating others. During the last one hundred years, there has been a continuous record of healings reported in monthly and weekly magazines—The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel.

Many more accounts of healing are given during weekly testimonial meetings held in churches of Christ, Scientist. These meetings include informal, spontaneous sharings of healings, insights, and inspiration in people’s lives.

There are Christian Scientists in 120 countries, and churches in 70 countries. Christian Science Reading Rooms are in many communities. These bookstores for the spiritual seeker sell all of Eddy’s writings, the Bible, Bible reference books, children’s books,The Christian Science Monitor, and other Christian Science literature. And they provide a place for prayer and meditation.

Some questions answered

Here, I might add two questions I’m often asked about the scope of Christian Science healing. “Is Christian Science treatment available to anyone? Can anyone telephone a Christian Science practitioner or go to his or her office for a visit?” Yes! Practitioners treat people from any religious background, and those with no religious affiliation.

Another question I’m asked is, “Will a Christian Science practitioner pray for someone who’s having medical care?” Under most circumstances, a Christian Science practitioner wouldn’t specifically give treatment to a patient who is at that same time receiving medical treatment. In the ethics of the case, it’s important not to interfere with another form of treatment. However, a Christian Science practitioner would and should feel free to visit with, guide, or help someone with his or her own prayer and study.

I had a case that illustrates this point. When I first met a girl called Linda, she was fourteen years old. She suffered from what her doctors had diagnosed as arterial venous malformation. She’d had piercing head pains since childhood and had missed a lot of school. She’d been receiving excellent medical attention, but the prognosis given to her family was one of little hope.

One doctor said that she would be riddled with pain her entire life and that she’d never be able to have children. Another doctor offered the option of experimental surgery but held out only a 50 percent chance of her surviving the operation. A second operation, they said, would be required within a week of the first, and there was no assurance of a permanent solution. Her family was pretty desperate.

Linda’s mother worked in the building where I had my practitioner’s office. She remembered hearing about Christian Science years before college. She thought it had something to do with healing and wondered whether Linda could be healed. I said I’d be happy to talk with her. Linda came to my office the next day, and for several weeks after that, to talk with me. She’d had very little religious training, so we started with the basics—the Bible, the Old and New Testaments.

I talked with her about three important points that are integral to Christian Science treatment:

• First, to know what God is—that He/She is all-powerful and a loving Father/Mother who is ever present and caring for us.
• Second, to understand better who man is—what it means to be the child of God. What did that tell her about her genuine selfhood, her inherent spirituality—a healthy, whole, spiritual being?
• Third, as God is Father/Mother and we’re His/Her child, the relationship or connectedness of God and man—the relationship we each have with God—must be a very precious relationship. It must be permanent, unbreakable. It just can’t be touched by injury or pain.

When these three points are understood and applied specifically in prayer, they have the natural force of divine law and can affect the human condition.

During one visit, after three or four weeks, Linda told me she was no longer taking any medication. She said the pain was almost gone. For the first time she was free of headaches. Since she had given up the medications, and the family had decided to postpone the operations, the family asked me if I would give her Christian Science treatment. I agreed.

As a healer, it’s my role to help the patient:

• understand and accept in thought the presence of God as divine Love. This usually brings a mental freedom so the patient can begin to
• feel God’s healing presence, and
• yield to its power.

This spiritual reasoning, or prayer, reaches and changes the patient’s thought from sickness to health. In Linda’s case, the debilitating thoughts of fear and hopelessness were replaced with expectancy and joy. She began to feel her inseparable relation to God.

I first began seeing Linda in early autumn, and by Thanksgiving she was fully healed. No headaches, no medication, and no operations. The doctors who previously had been treating her confirmed this and called her “their miracle girl”! That was eighteen years ago. Today, she’s married and has two children.

I still hear from Linda, and not too long ago I asked her if there was a point during her treatment when she felt a change taking place. She said it was when she realized she was safe. She said she was confident because she was now in charge of her body. She no longer felt any anxiety or fear.

Overcoming fear

All of us here today know the adverse effects of fear and chronic anxiety on health and recovery. Science and Health deals with this subject. In one place it says, “The procuring cause and foundation of all sickness is fear, ignorance, or sin.” And it goes on to instruct, “Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients” (Science and Health, p. 411).

Fear paralyzes thought and action. So fear needs to be lessened or eliminated—so that the patient’s thought is receptive to the prayer. In the Bible the Apostle John declares that “fear hath torment.” But he also prescribes the remedy: “God is love …. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear” (I John 4:16, 18).

We might be asking, “How, then, do we stop fear from taking over, in our own thought or our patient’s?”

In Christian Science treatment, fear is lessened or eliminated by gaining spirituality—by understanding that God is Spirit, the source of spirituality. Glimpsing even in the smallest degree what it means to know that God is Love can keep you safe and whole.

Prayer is not a strategic offensive against some problem or illness that belongs to a person. It’s the humble recognition and exploration of what Jesus simply called “the kingdom of God … within you” (see Luke 17:21).

It’s discovering man’s inherent spiritual nature. Science and Health puts it this way: “Prayer cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it” (Science and Health, p. 2).

Health, then, isn’t something we get, something that we have or others don’t have, that we gain or lose. And it’s certainly not just a pleasant interval between diseases!

Health is a quality of what we are in our genuine and permanent nature as God’s spiritual child. When our health is realized through prayer, it becomes the norm; the standard of one’s thought and being; the evidence of higher authority.

I hope I have given you at least a glimmer of what Christian Science healing is about. As these ideas are understood, they can lead to greater and more constant health and freedom.