The role of integrity in healing
It was a sterling example of integrity – his and hers. On his way to the home of a synagogue official named Jairus, Christ Jesus stopped to identify and attend to someone in the crowd surrounding him. A woman had touched the hem of his clothes in her desperate search for healing. She was considered unclean because of her long-standing illness, and religious law prohibited her from coming in contact with anyone.
When she came forward to Jesus, she fearfully but honestly admitted that she had touched him and been healed. Jesus lovingly said to her, “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague” (Mark 5:34).
This Bible story shows two sides of integrity, and both are important in healing. One is the morality expressed by the woman’s faith, honesty, and resolve. The other, and higher, meaning of integrity is what Jesus gave to the woman – an understanding of herself as whole, free from sin and disease.
The message “Be whole” speaks to us, too. Much around us – relationships, government, health, and so on – can feel broken. We yearn to repair what’s troubling us. And, like the woman, we can trust our pure desire for good to guide us to Christ, God’s healing message to human consciousness assuring us that we and all are already whole.
If we want to follow Jesus in healing ourselves and others (and we can), strong moral qualities such as honesty and humility are essential. It’s important, however, to let morality lead us beyond human goodness to spirituality, or a closer walk with God, divine Spirit.
The human sense of virtue tends to accept evil as existing alongside good, whereas Jesus healed by acknowledging that good alone is God-derived and powerful. He proved that only good constitutes reality.
As Mary Baker Eddy healed others following her discovery of Christian Science, she saw that humanity needed to be educated out of the belief that evil is real. She explains in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “If goodness and spirituality are real, evil and materiality are unreal and cannot be the outcome of an infinite God, good” (p. 277).
How do we arrive at a place in our prayers where evil – whether sin or disease – no longer appears powerful and real to us? We might start by acknowledging and deeply yielding to God’s abundant goodness. God makes Himself apparent to us as the Principle of all good, which does not create disease or know it.
The belief that we are material would keep us from accepting that we are whole. But knowing that health is a condition of Mind, God, and not matter shows us that our lives do not rely upon matter.
We are able to see that all is well with us because a completely good God, divine Mind, is the source of what we truly are as Mind’s likeness. Our unity with God is our integrity and gives us all the qualities of Mind – including purity, understanding, and strength – that make us forever whole.
Grasping this spiritual truth begins right away to remove the fears and false beliefs that produce sickness.
My husband and I were in North Africa when I unexpectedly experienced many days of an abnormal menstrual flow. As a Christian Science practitioner prayed for me, I continued traveling. One day, about a week later, I felt I’d reached out and touched the hem of Christ, Truth, and received fresh inspiration. I called the practitioner to say that these words from a hymn seemed so true to me: “Rejoice, for thou art whole” (John Randall Dunn, “Christian Science Hymnal,” No. 374, © CSBD).
This assured me that God cares for me the way a parent cares for a child. I didn’t have to believe that any abnormal action of the body had reality or staying power. I could stop worrying about bodily overaction and confidently know that God had made me, and all creation, purely spiritual and that this recognition would correct the abnormality.
That day marked the end of the problem.
No discordant condition can take away our recognition that we express all the qualities of Mind, including health. Healing comes with the understanding of our spiritual integrity that Christ reveals to our receptive heart. Daily we can come to know our indivisible oneness with God. Harmony and health, not discord and disease, belong to what we all really are – God’s whole man, Spirit’s likeness.
Adapted from an editorial published in the Jan. 29, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
