Healing the Heart

`HEARTBROKEN.'' ``Fainthearted.'' ``Heartsick.'' If the world is making us ache, we may understand the depth of the Psalmist's call to God for help: "The troubles of my heart are enlarged: O bring thou me out of my distresses.'' Yet sometimes people suppose that God, Spirit, is vague and faraway and hasn't a whole lot to do with what we're facing. When we write God off, our view of ourselves tends to become dim and limited. Matter seems to make up everything, claiming our very life is dependent on it in various forms.

When we forget about God, we wonder if what we need is worn-out or will be taken away or just never was there to begin with. How chancy and frail goodness can seem then! Life should be secure. Yet a material sense of "self'' and material things just can't express or sustain the genuine love we're looking for.

But what if our true being is the perfect likeness of God, Spirit, as the Bible tells us? Christian Science helps us to see that we are the image, or reflection, of God, who is Love. And what divine Love has created us to be is eternal, spiritual, and good. Christ Jesus taught his followers to heal on this basis. We, too, can learn of the healing that comes through Christ--the saving Truth which Jesus embodied--when we live on this basis.

A woman who had been through a series of personal difficulties felt burdened and lonely. Symptoms of a heart condition appeared. But because she'd had significant healings through prayer, she was convinced that her deepest need was actually the need to know God better.

The woman turned to God in prayer with a longing to love and obey God with all her heart. She prayed to be receptive to divine Love's promptings in her thought. She reasoned that if God has no limits, then whatever God creates--including her real identity--must be pure and spiritual and unlimited, too. She was making the effort to live as divine Love's expression. Continuing in this living prayer, she was completely and permanently healed of the heart ailment. She discovered that being loved wasn't an " event'' that might or might not "happen'' to her someday. She realized that the ever-presence of eternal Love is more than a nice-sounding idea. It is a spiritual fact of man's real existence.

When we turn to God for help, we're turning in the right direction. To find permanent stability, however, we have to accept a vital spiritual premise: divine Love isn't limited. So Love's likeness can't be, either. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, reminds us: "If we pray to God as a corporeal person, this will prevent us from relinquishing the human doubts and fears which attend such a belief, and so we cannot grasp the wo nders wrought by infinite, incorporeal Love, to whom all things are possible. Because of human ignorance of the divine Principle, Love, the Father of all is represented as a corporeal creator; hence men recognize themselves as merely physical, and are ignorant of man as God's image or reflection and of man's eternal incorporeal existence.''

God, the Principle of all, governs man through spiritual law that never stops operating. We can feel the power of what it means to be God's child, governed by Him. In the very deepest way, Love heals our heart. We feel new because we are new--"new-born of Spirit.'' Spiritual ignorance no longer hems in our capacity to love and be loved. We naturally turn to God to know what we are, and what we can do and be.

This is a condensed version of an editorial that appeared in the February 11 issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.

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