Finding the real cause

In everyday life we might not think much about cause-and-effect relationships until we encounter something we don’t like, such as pain or sickness. Then we try to figure out what’s making us suffer.

What if our belief that we need to find a material cause for sickness is wrong? Wouldn’t it be a great relief to know that there’s a better way to think about cause and effect?

The words and works of many people in the Bible point in a spiritual direction. They searched for a primary cause for all things and found God to be that cause, the universal divine intelligence, as proclaimed in statements such as, “Thou art great, and doest wondrous things: thou art God alone” (Psalms 86:10).

Among the wondrous things God, Spirit, has created is the real, spiritual nature of each of us as the effect, or likeness, of Spirit. Grasping this true identification of ourselves as wholly spiritual frees us to express health and harmony, what Christ Jesus called the “works of God” (John 9:3).

Jesus faced questions like those we might pose about the source of disease. His students once asked why a man had been born blind and suggested it might be because either the man or his parents had sinned (see John 9:1-7). He said, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” Then he healed the man.

In seeking both the cause and the cure of disease, Mary Baker Eddy discovered Christian Science, the Science or spiritual understanding she discerned in Jesus’ teaching and healing. She uncovered the fact that the flesh and its ills are actually mental – are, in fact, illusions.

Much of her book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” is devoted to disproving the reasoning that starts with matter as a cause, including accepting that it has produced some bad effect. Instead, Christian Science shows the belief that another power besides God, good, exists to be a mistake.

Only Spirit, God, has the power to cause anything real because God is All. Science and Health describes how to heal with this higher understanding: “It breaks the dream of disease to understand that sickness is formed by the human mind, not by matter nor by the divine Mind” (p. 396).

Once when I had an upset stomach, I saw how the belief that matter is a cause can be replaced with the knowledge that the power of God alone is causative. Although I thought briefly about what might be the physical root of the trouble, there’s an insight in Science and Health that is helpful in this kind of situation: “You say that indigestion, fatigue, sleeplessness, cause distressed stomachs and aching heads. Then you consult your brain in order to remember what has hurt you, when your remedy lies in forgetting the whole thing; for matter has no sensation of its own, and the human mind is all that can produce pain” (pp. 165-166).

I put aside the reasoning that a physical cause was producing the stomach trouble. In prayer, I turned from the pain to God, the First Cause, who produces only good, and the upset stopped.

We experience this “forgetting” that heals through listening for Christ, God’s message of Truth and Love, coming to our receptive hearts to take away our fears and break the mistaken association between material cause and effect. Christ spiritually guides our reasoning from “Why is this bad thing happening?” to faith in God as the creator of good, not evil. Loving God and accepting the divine Mind as our real Mind brings to light health as normal and disease as abnormal.

Long-term illnesses are healed in the same way. For example, Science and Health tells of a woman being healed of consumption – a leading cause of death in the United States in the early 20th century. The woman thought that wind from the east made it difficult for her to breathe. After Mrs. Eddy prayed for her, the woman’s breath came easily.

Mrs. Eddy describes what happened to bring about the healing: “My metaphysical treatment changed the action of her belief on the lungs, and she never suffered again from east winds, but was restored to health” (p. 185).

We don’t have to keep asking “What’s causing this sickness?” The belief that we have to suffer from material causes can increasingly fade from our lives. This happens as we gain in our understanding of Mind, God, as the supreme cause that originates all true action and effects only good.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Aug. 19, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.