Looking for Alternatives?

Bringing a spiritual perspective to daily life

My circumstances led me to look for alternatives to conventional medicine. As a young adult I'd had a long illness and had taken so many antibiotics that my doctor said I was immune to them.

After I had a baby, an infection hospitalized me for three weeks. In the midst of this, my grandmother gave me a copy of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, which discusses the healing power of prayer. But at that time I was not looking outside of medical solutions.

Then a few years later, feeling somewhat insecure, I started looking beyond conventional medicine. I wanted a firmer foundation on which to build my life. I picked up Science and Health again, remembering that Christian Science claimed to be able to heal spiritually. The author herself went through a long series of events before she found the healing power of prayer. She experimented and researched various healing methods, but did not find permanent healing in any of them. She recognized they all excluded God. Finally she discovered that physical healing as Jesus Christ practiced it was based on a spiritual understanding of God and on total reliance on Him. Science and Health asks, referring to God as Mind, "Which was first, Mind or medicine? If Mind was first and self-existent, then Mind, not matter, must have been the first medicine" (p. 142). A little later it says, "The victory will be on the patient's side only as immortal Mind through Christ, Truth, subdues the human belief in disease" (p. 145).

Foundational to the practice of scientific spiritual healing is an acceptance of the absolute supremacy of God. In the Bible the book of Genesis explains how He made us in His image and likeness, spiritual and perfect (see chap. 1). Our relationship to God is permanent and unbreakable. Neither sickness nor pain can alter the inseparability from God that Jesus described when he said, "I and my Father are one" (John 10:30). Matter and mortality have no power or control over God's creation. Healing of human problems occurs when we turn from believing that we are merely mortal to acknowledging our spiritual identity as the children of God, the one all-powerful, ever-present intelligence.

To begin understanding the outpouring of love that comes from God is also to receive that love-and to find healing. Sickness is dismissed from human experience through the comprehension that it has no real foundation because it does not come from God.

There are many advantages to this "medicine of Mind." It does away with the need for conventional medicine. It proves that the cause of sin and sickness is mental, and that the remedy for them lies in God. There are no undesirable side effects from prayer. There is no such thing as an incurable disease or a hopeless situation, because God is not the creator of evil; one problem is no more real or powerful than another. The power of God improves one morally because it impels human thoughts to conform to the good of God. Divine power is always available, wherever and whenever we need it. And God helps anyone who relies on Him.

A willingness to change one's thinking is essential to following Christian Science. For example, I felt severe pain from hemorrhoids one day. I had been feeling very sad about a situation in which some people had united against me over a triviality. Praying and listening for God's messages, I recalled another statement in Science and Health: "To be immortal, we must forsake the mortal sense of things, turn from the lie of false belief to Truth, and gather the facts of being from the divine Mind" (p. 370). I awoke to the important fact that "the mortal sense of things" was what was troubling me. I turned to what I was learning of God, contemplating spiritual truths until I felt His presence. This uplifted my thought to a more spiritual basis. I came to the realization that I was a child of God, under His government. My sadness vanished. And soon after, the entire condition of hemorrhoids disappeared.

God, the divine Mind, is infinite and omnipotent. Therefore the medicine of Mind is unfailing.

*You can read more articles about Christian Science in a monthly magazine, The Christian Science Journal.

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