Healing the body: transplant or transform?

ORGAN transplanting--transfering organs from one body to another--is in some cases already quite common. A healthy kidney or heart is being substituted for its injured or diseased counterpart with greater frequency and success. Thus the question ``Can the transplantation of vital organs be done?'' has obviously been answered. Yet there remain other questions--questions of deep significance to our quest for greater understanding of what man really is. For instance, Should identity be treated as nothing more than a fleshly organism? Should mere physical rearrangement be allowed to determine the prospects for one's life, a life that, in itself, attests to more than physicality? Can a change in body organs actually bring regeneration or satisfy one's longings for a more moral and spiritual existence? Is life at the mercy of the material conditions of the body? Must intelligence be made the servant of nonintelligence? At the very least, rational observation and experience lead us to admit that man is much more than a material body to be preserved or repaired. This admission should prompt further inquiry. Are not our mental, moral, and spiritual capacities superior to unthinking matter and its diseased conditions? And could not those higher capacities be called upon to control, correct, and heal those lower conditions? Christ Jesus' life indicates that the answer is yes. He demonstrated the divine method of healing, showing man's relationship to God, Spirit, divine Mind. With his understanding of God's absolute supremacy and of man's perfect, spiritual identity as God's likeness, came the restoration of the body. This radical, effective curative system, purely spiritual in nature, is part of Jesus' legacy to all mankind. It rests on the basis of God's all-goodness and omnipotence, which need no human means to support them. It requires submitting both body and mind to God's standard of perfection, whereby our perfectibility in His image and likeness becomes provable to human perception. St. Paul said: ``I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.'' 1 This spiritual transformation of thought that heals even organic disease is being successfully practiced today. Through Christian Science one can demonstrate for himself the healing power of God. Disease points, fundamentally, to an ignorance of God's infinite presence and harmony, and disease is destroyed through a correct understanding of Him, acknowledged and deeply felt in prayer. The need is to understand Him as perfect Spirit, as universal good, and our true being as the reflection of infinite Spirit. Then we gain a measure of dominion over matter, Spirit's opposite, and disease appears less formidable and real to us. This divinely scientific means of healing makes possible the removal of disease from the body without removing the body's organs. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, was confident of people's ability to assert the supremacy of God, of Spirit, over the debilitating claims of matter. She writes, ``Sickness, sin, and death must at length quail before the divine rights of intelligence, and then the power of Mind over the entire functions and organs of the human system will be acknowledged.'' 2 1 Romans 12:1, 2. 2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 384.