ALMOST EVERYTHING WE ENDEAVOR IN LIFE, if it’s to be accomplished successfully, depends on fundamentals. The artist, whether a painter or a potter, has to have mastered the basics of her medium well before the first masterpiece is created. The musician has to know so thoroughly the fundamentals of his music and his instrument that those essential rules and rudiments have become a part of his thinking and his expression long before he ever plays the first concerto. The same is true for the dancer, the poet, the tailor, the lawyer, the homemaker, the auto mechanic, the wilderness guide, the school teacher, the farmer, the computer programmer, the airplane pilot, or the Alpine climber.

Understanding and mastering the fundamentals is just as vital for the Christian healer as well. Students of Christian Science should come to feel so at one with the basic elements of the Science of healing that the foundational principles are ready in thought—naturally and spontaneously, whenever the need arises.

So much of our success, whether in the day-to-day affairs of life or in the healing work itself, is a matter of preparation. It’s in mastering the fundamentals that we become prepared—whether to paint a canvas, to play the concerto, or even to heal the lame in body and spirit who are coming daily to the gate of the temple, “expecting to receive something,” as recorded in the Bible’s book of Acts (see Acts 3:1–8). All kinds of calls for help come each day to the gate of the Christian Science healer’s consciousness, expecting to receive God’s grace and healing. Are we prepared? Is our thinking clear, focused, alert and sharp—inspired?

I read somewhere that Abraham Lincoln once said that if he were given the task of chopping down a tree and was told it would be an eight-hour job, he’d be sure to spend the first six hours sharpening his axe!

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, certainly realized how vital the preparation of thought is, how important it is to have our thinking well-honed and well-tuned by knowing and practicing the fundamentals. On one occasion, a young practitioner, Lady Victoria Murray, had come from England to see Mrs. Eddy. During their talk about how she healed, Eddy said: “Keep your violin in tune.” Then with emphasis she repeated, “Keep your violin in tune” (see Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, amplified edition, pp. 264–265).

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Eddy has much to say about preparation, fundamentals, and demonstration. “Whoever would demonstrate the healing of Christian Science,” she writes, “must abide strictly by its rules, heed every statement, and advance from the rudiments laid down. There is nothing difficult nor toilsome in this task, when the way is pointed out; but self-denial, sincerity, Christianity, and persistence alone win the prize, as they usually do in every department of life” (Science and Health, p. 462 ).

Those who would practice scientific Christian healing today have their highest example in the original ministry of Christ Jesus. So, when we begin our healing prayers today, some 2,000 years after Jesus was healing the multitudes—when we begin the prayer that is specifically Christian Science treatment—we might ask ourselves what the Master’s starting point must have been in his own prayers.

It seems apparent to me that Jesus would have started with God. As healers in the 21st century, that is surely still our own starting point for Christian Science treatment. To start with God is a primary fundamental, not only of all metaphysical practice but of all spiritual progress as well.

In prayer, we are turning to the divine Principle and cause of all that is real. We approach God with the deepest humility and love, understanding His wholly spiritual nature, knowing the omnipotence and omnipresence of divinity to the exclusion of any belief that would claim to oppose His perfect goodness in any way or to any degree.

In reference to establishing “the health, holiness, and immortality of man,” Eddy observes in Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896: “To gain this scientific result, the first and fundamental rule of Science must be understood and adhered to; namely, the oft-repeated declaration in Scripture that God is good; hence, good is omnipotent and omnipresent” (p. 172). And in Science and Health, we read: “The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,—that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.” Eddy continues, “To grasp the reality and order of being in its Science, you must begin by reckoning God as the divine Principle of all that really is” (Science and Health, p. 275). The starting point for Christian Science treatment, then, would include the realization of God’s allness—the almightiness of infinite Mind, Principle, Spirit, Soul, Life, Truth, and Love.

When we start with God as Mind, for example, we are realizing the supreme intelligence that governs creation and the purely, divinely mental nature of reality. Mind’s kingdom is not matter but ideas. Matter physics doesn’t define reality; metaphysics does. Every operation, all action, each function of creation, is entirely mental and never physical. From this standpoint, a powerful basis for treatment could be the truth in Science and Health that states, “Every function of the real man is governed by the divine Mind” (Science and Health, p. 151 ).

Doesn’t disease generally argue for malfunction, overactive function, no function, or functions out of control? Physicality contends that sick functions are governed by the organisms and microbes of disease, or ruled by accident, by injury, by heredity, by poisons that we ingest or inhale. But all of this is a lie. Man’s functions are entirely mental and spiritual. Understanding the truth that every function of God’s man is governed by divine Mind acts as a law in our present experience, establishing balance, grace, freedom, control, harmony—the normal functioning of the reflection of God. And thus, dis-ease, or dysfunction, is banished. Sick functions don’t exist in the mental kingdom of all-harmonious, divine Mind.

A second fundamental element of metaphysical practice is found in the prayerful standpoint: Hold to perfect God and perfect man. Once we’ve started Christian Science treatment with the recognition and praise of God—the one omnipotent, perfect All—then we must hold thought steadfastly to that allness: perfect God. Furthermore we must realize and hold to the perfect expression, or outcome, of that perfect God who creates, sustains, continues, and maintains perfect man. In our prayer, again we can hold steadfastly to that truth. We can embrace it with everything in us. We don’t let it go.

In the New Testament, when Jesus healed the man who had leprosy, it seems to me that from the very moment Jesus first saw that man, our Savior must have been holding to perfect God and perfect man. How else could Jesus so freely have touched—embraced—this leper who was so dreaded for his uncleanness? To most people in Jesus’ day, this man was an outcast, someone to be avoided at all costs. So, how could Jesus have “held” the leper in his arms if he wasn’t already holding God’s perfect man in his thought? Science and Health puts it this way: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (Science and Health, p. 476–477).

Jesus beheld the perfect man. Wouldn’t this include holding in thought (perceiving, acknowledging, realizing, and affirming) only that which God creates—the pure, whole, clean, spiritual idea of Truth and Love? This was love at its finest. This was wholly unselfed love. Here was the power to heal and save. As Science and Health declares, “Whatever holds human thought in line with unselfed love, receives directly the divine power” (Science and Health, p. 192). Holding thought to perfect God and perfect man is surely the way to hold thought in line with unselfed love and thereby to reflect the divine power to heal.

One of the inspiring features of such love is its steadfastness. And again, this is a key element in holding to perfect God and perfect man. We must be steadfast. In Christian Science treatment, if we hold thought in any other direction than the perfect model of God’s perfect creating, instead of finding health and wholeness we may be deceived into accepting degrees of debility and fragmentation. We would then see dualism, separation, sickness—and we are tempted to believe what we see as surely as we see what we believe. In Science and Health, Eddy writes: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts” (Science and Health, p. 260–261).

When we steadfastly hold in thought only the pure realization of painless, permanent being—of man in the likeness of perfect God—sickness or debility will have no place to hold on in thought. And thus it will be seen that sickness has no place in our patient. We will heal the sick more effectively and more readily.

There is certainly much more to the basic fundamentals of Christian Science healing, and a continuing study of Science and Health will bring these into clearer and clearer focus. But there is always one final word about the practice of Christian Science healing that remains essential. Just one word: love. Everything we’ve talked about here is essentially pointless without it. We’ll never heal a case without love. John Bunyan once wrote: “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart” (quotationsbook.com). Healing comes forth from the heart of prayer. This is the great heart of Christ, the great heart of unselfed love. In Science and Health, the textbook of every fundamental element of metaphysical healing, Eddy puts it all in the clearest of terms, when she writes: “If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit, and the disease will vanish into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine” (Science and Health, p. 365 ). Be love. Live love. That is the morning sunshine. It can heal anything.