Principle and Healing
In my home town, you can find a "Centre for Metaphysics and Peace Studies"; a positive-living group; meditation classes; spiritual healing meetings; and bookshops displaying an abundance of literature on what's called the mind/body/spirit connection.
What do I conclude from all this evidence? That what Mary Baker Eddy wrote in 1884 - "This age is reaching out towards the perfect Principle of things ..." ("Miscellaneous Writings," Pg. 232) - is being borne out today. Manning a stand on "Christian Science Healing" at one exhibition reinforced my conclusion. Some people are not just reaching out, but crying out, for a perfect Principle that will heal them.
"I must have that book!" a woman said, pointing to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (the textbook of Christian Science), by Mrs. Eddy. "I read it a long time ago and I need it again." More questions came, such as: "Can this heal a numb finger?" "How does it heal allergies?" "I have a sight problem. Can Christian Science heal it?"
Another woman was in pain from a fall; her doctor was not able to help. "Can Christian Science help me?" she asked. I told her it could, through the power of God. Just as it had healed a young man, Eutychus, who fell from a great height while St. Paul was preaching long ago, "and was taken up dead" (see Acts 20:7-12). Paul embraced him, prayed, and restored him. I then explained how Christian Science heals: it reveals that man (all men and women) is actually spiritual, good, the image and likeness of God. We can never fall from God.
The body that appears to be who we are - the flesh, blood, and bone, prone to sickness and injury - is subject to the healing power of God. This fact enabled Paul to revive Eutychus. I suggested to the woman that she go home praying - declaring her inseparability from God, a fact that denied she could ever fall. She warmed to these concepts, and left with some Christian Science literature. I feel I offered her the best means of healing: the Science of Christ.
This reminded me of a similar experience my mother had had. Two years after a fall, she still had pain in her back. She asked me to pray for her. Listening to God - praying - I was drawn to a statement in Science and Health: "Hold perpetually this thought, - that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being" (Pg. 496). This stirred my thought. I acknowledged that God is present to heal us at all times; that He is divine Principle, perfect Love. That His law of harmony is an all-powerful law. It was embracing my mother so completely in her true identity as a perfect daughter of God that nothing contrary to her well-being could ever have touched her. While I was praying, my mother phoned to say she had been healed. She had no further back pain after that.
Mrs. Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, said, "The unerring and fixed Principle of all healing is God ..." ("Miscellaneous Writings," Pg. 232). This is the same Principle that enabled Christ Jesus to heal so effectively. Eddy proved that God's healing laws are still available, and that their practicality and permanence can be demonstrated.
Science and Health explains that you are one with God, with good, as a ray of light is one with the sun (see Pg. 361), and shows that this relationship remains intact because it is spiritual. An understanding of this can and does heal. It is "God with us." Yes, the perfect Principle of existence is with us! When we understand our oneness with God, open our thought to God's great love for us and accept it, changes take place in our thought, and healing results in daily life.
"The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation" (Science and Health, Pg. xi). If you are "reaching out towards the perfect Principle of things," be glad! You will find it. And it will heal you.
