Our pain healer: God

When did the term “painkilling drugs” that I grew up with morph into “pain relievers”?

Not that that’s a bad thing. It seems more accurate, according to a pain expert I heard address a conference some years ago. He was a neurologist, and although not against using pain-relieving drugs, he shared research showing that their effect is far less than the complete removal of pain.

Anyone who has experienced pain knows the heartfelt yearning to be free of it – and we yearn for others to be free of pain, too. But if drugs aren’t the answer, what can we do?

Interestingly, the same clinician said that most of the pain he saw in his practice resulted from mental rather than physical factors and that addressing thought is a treatment option well worth exploring. Some others in the medical field are looking even deeper, investigating the value of spirituality in patient care.

And for over a century and a half, the healing power of understanding God as Love and Spirit, and understanding our true being as Love’s spiritual expression, has proved practical to students of Christian Science, including me. Time and again, those embracing and practicing these teachings have gratefully found freedom from both physical and emotional suffering “when trustingly we turn to God aright,” as a hymn in the “Christian Science Hymnal” puts it (Susan F. Campbell, No. 149).

We are turning trustingly to God as our healer whenever we look to understand Him as the Bible reveals Him: as divine Love, infinitely good and harmonious and therefore excluding all that isn’t good and harmonious. Christian Science empowers us to grow in our grasp of the nature of Love as infinite and ever present.

This does more than merely manage symptoms. It strikes at the fear that underlies, is amplified by, and exacerbates pain. Consciousness of Love’s presence removes fear and its effects, reducing both fear and pain to their “native nothingness” – a term used in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. For example: “If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit, and the disease will vanish into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine” ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," p. 365).

The Bible records Jesus consistently proving that permanent release from discord of every kind is possible through Christ, the power of God that he exemplified. Spirit never experiences pain, and therefore neither does its image, or reflection – and we are each that true image of Spirit. Our existence is purely spiritual, and native to our spiritual existence is painlessness.

The practice of Christian Science teaches us not to endure pain but to challenge it. And while there’s no formula for how to think and pray in order to gain our freedom, whatever lifts our thought above fear and suffering lifts our experience. I’ve been healed of pain in many ways, including immediate freedom from its acute form by glimpsing that God is the only Mind and from its chronic form by persistently holding to the fact that my identity is completely spiritual, in the face of contrary evidence.

However spiritual healing happens, the underlying fact is what Jesus demonstrated: God – divine Truth, Mind, and Life – is what is always true and real. As we glimpse the allness of God and the perfection of His creation, we come to see the native nothingness of pain.

When all our attention seems to be consumed by a tunnel-vision focus on an aching body or broken heart, those words can sound like an abstraction. But that’s not how it feels when Christ opens our eyes to the light.

It’s not that Christ reveals that there’s light at the end of the tunnel but that Christ shows us there actually is no tunnel – only the light of Love. That light reveals the insubstantiality of any seemingly constraining walls of fear, doubt, discouragement, or disappointment, or of any acute or chronic resentments we might be harboring. And it empowers us to be free of them.

While not all healings are as immediate as those that Jesus did, all discomfort and distress are subject to the truth that his healings proved. There is no power that can lift pain above its native nothingness to become something we just have to live with. The pain-free life that can seem a miracle to many is, in fact, the divine reality that the Christ light increasingly enables us to understand and experience.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Sept. 23, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.