‘Don’t connect the dots’

Some years ago I was struggling with a painful condition in my legs that was making it difficult to find a comfortable position either to rest or to sit and work. I phoned a fellow Christian Scientist to discuss the situation and perhaps gain some fresh, healing spiritual insights.

In the course of our conversation I mentioned a recent series of events that I found disturbing, suggesting that perhaps this was connected to the physical distress. My friend’s response redirected my thought process entirely.

He said simply, “Don’t connect the dots. They aren’t inherently connected, so don’t do it for them.”

In that moment I mentally flashed back to those coloring books many of us had as children. Dragging a pencil along from one numbered dot to the next, the outline of some farm animal or cartoon character or decorative object would become apparent.

What struck me so profoundly about the analogy was the fact that the dots are inert, mindless, incapable of connecting themselves to one another. Likewise, Christian Science makes clear that a physical symptom, having no intelligence of its own, cannot relate itself either to another symptom or to disease; nor do stress and anxiety have power to cause a physical difficulty.

I began to see more the mental nature of these seeming connections, and to understand better how it was that I could decline to participate in mentally outlining a “picture” of illness and incapacity. I felt God’s healing Christ message saying to me, “You decide. Your heavenly Father, omnipotent Spirit, gives you divine authority to honor Him as the only real cause – to declare His supremacy right now, and to deny causation to matter, to mortal mind, and to material so-called laws. You can decline to attribute power to that which has in reality no power.”

I began to feel considerably less distressed about the various factors that had been concerning me as possible causes of the condition. Even if those factors continued to be present for a time, I reasoned, they were not causative; they were not of themselves capable of producing or aggravating disease.

Throughout that day and into the next, when the suggestion presented itself that some physical or emotional factor might be causing the problem, I felt bolstered by divine inspiration to withhold my consent. Looking back now, I would say, denying that the difficulty had a legitimate cause took the ground out from under it, so to speak.

The physical discomfort and accompanying symptoms completely dissolved over the course of two days.

The utterly spiritual premise of Christian Science is that God is the one absolute, almighty, infinitely good cause. Based on the Bible’s inspired message, the discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, describes God in her writings as omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. These terms open up to us the spiritual sense of God as all-powerful good, all-present divine Life and Love, and all-knowing divine intelligence.

God – divine, infinite Spirit – does not share His power either with matter or with a so-called mortal mind. Nor do these exist as lesser powers that can somehow encroach on His creation and undermine the health and harmony of His children.

Simply put, God is the only Mind, and this Mind exists to the exclusion of any other cause, substance, power, presence, or mind. Each one of us, as the offspring of God, is the outcome of this infinitely good cause. This means that our true being is spiritual, functioning solely within the divine Mind. Everything about us as Mind’s spiritual expression is benign, useful, harmonious, responsive to the beneficent law of Life, Truth, and Love.

What is required of us when we are seeking healing isn’t complex. It’s to be childlike, as Christ Jesus commanded, and listen with an open heart for the message of the healing Christ, Truth, the true idea of God and man that Jesus wholly embraced and showed forth in his healing work. Fear, sin, and discord recede from the consciousness that is giving its allegiance to divine Truth; and they are ultimately banished, as God-given spiritual realization takes hold and grows in our thought.

“The scientific statement of being” in the Christian Science textbook is unequivocal on this point: “All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 468). Within the allness of divine Mind and its infinite manifestation, there are literally no dots of material cause and effect to connect!

Through prayer we see our way clear to stop lending validation to some problem. We are given of God the grace and conviction to honor Him as the singular cause and condition of our being. Then we find that the spiritual light we so need is actually right at hand. And we enter naturally into the sacred experience of Christian healing.

Adapted from an article published in the Feb. 18, 2019, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.