True womanhood is blessed

CHRISTIANS everywhere have always found great inspiration in this Scriptural promise: ''As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.'' This is the gospel or ''good news'' of universal salvation that has transformed many a life and healed many a body. Through the spiritual sonship and atonement taught and illustrated by Jesus, the Adam curse ''Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return'' is annulled.

n1 I Corinthians 15:22.

n2 Genisis 3:19.

But what about Eve? Does the Christ, the living Truth, take away only the curse on Adam? What about the curse on woman which said, ''I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee''?

n3 Genisis 3:16.

Surely if Christ annuls the curse pronounced on Adam, it also annuls the curse pronounced on Eve. The power of God, of divine Principle, is no respecter of persons, for ''there is neither Jew nor Greek, . . . bond nor free, . . . male nor female,'' but all are one in Christ.

n4 See Acts 10:34.

n5 Galatians 3:28.

If a woman would be free of the liabilities of biological womanhood, God's Word shows the way. We can trust and have faith that God's salvation is a whole salvation. This means freedom from the bodily ills associated with women as well as freedom from mental error and false belief.

Indeed, Christian Science teaches that mental error, false belief, and physical ills are interlinked. Mental error-whatever is not like the Mind of Christ-is the fundamental source of bodily affliction. Therefore through spiritual enlighten-ment-the influx of Christlike understanding-the body can be healed, even as Jesus proved and as many Christians today are proving.

One such bodily ill from which a woman may claim her God-given freedom is menstruation discomfort and sickness. Interestingly enough, menstruation itself is sometimes called ''the curse'' or ''Eve's curse.'' But in Christ, woman is under no curse, for Christ, Truth, reveals true womanhood as spiritual, incorporeal, not biological. And this freeing truth, governing thought, normalizes the bodily functions.

A woman who for years suffered agonizing menstrual cramps proved this. Supported by the prayers of a Christian Science practitioner, she began to realize that she was not under Eve's curse or Adam's curse. She saw that in Christ the only womanhood she could have was as God's beloved daughter, created in the image of Love and having painless being.

Another effect of the prayers was the uncovering of mental darkness and fear that were hiding her true womanhood from her sight. She realized that she had always felt inferior to men, physically, mentally, socially, and secretly wished she had been born one. She saw that she actually hated and feared her womanhood. But through spiritual reasoning, as taught in Christian Science, she realized that what she hated was not true womanhood at all, but the material, physical sense of womanhood, which may claim that woman is inferior, subject to man, and ''cursed'' by physical functions.

As she rejected the biological sense of woman and embraced her spiritual womanhood in Christ, she gained her freedom from the debilitating cramps. The pain that used to keep her in bed for days simply left her experience, and normalcy has been the rule. After almost fifteen years of monthly suffering, she is grateful for this evidence of progress.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who discovered and founded Christian Science, 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.''

n6 Science and Health, pp. 384-385.

You and I can claim ''the divine rights of intelligence,'' the liberating intelligence that comes through study of the Science of Christ and communion with the divine Mind, God. This Mind annuls the curse of Adam, the curse of Eve-whatever would hold people in bondage to material selfhood. True womanhood and manhood are under no curse, and it's the God-given right of women and men to prove it. DAILY BIBLE VERSE As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come. Proverbs 26:2