Health each season
A Christian Science perspective: How can we catch health?
Keeping healthy all year round doesn’t need to be a questionable task. A grasp on health comes as we realize the harmony of God and man.
When changes in weather seem to throw the body out of kilter, the culprit is not actually the conditions but our thought. Mary Baker Eddy explains in 19th-century metaphor: “The snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet, and procures a summer residence with more ease than a nabob. The atmosphere of the earth, kinder than the atmosphere of mortal mind, leaves catarrh to the latter. Colds, coughs, and contagion are engendered solely by human theories” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 220).
Mortal mind, or material belief, is the foundation of sickness and material health theories. Mortal mind involves not just our own fears and beliefs about the body, but the whole of mortal belief. While we may not have been thinking about sickness before it appeared, still our general conscious or unconscious acceptance of materiality as the real substance of our identity renders us liable to sickness.
If we believe we are healthy because of material conditions, then we are susceptible to the other side of the same belief: the assumption that a change of conditions can make us sick. Spiritual light – the Christ – can remove liability to sickness. Christ Jesus healed throngs and, from all accounts, kept himself well. He represented God, infinite Spirit, and taught and proved the harmony of Spirit. The Christ instills in thought the perception that in reality man is created spiritually, in Spirit’s likeness, and therefore our harmony is maintained by God.
Jesus said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12). The Christ didn’t disappear with the ascension of Jesus. Christian Science shows that the spiritual idea of God is always here and can be understood. The power of Truth is constantly available.
Whatever the type of weather or climate we may have to walk or live in, we can also walk in the light Jesus spoke of. Paul says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1). There is no actual law to harm us. The only real law is God’s spiritual law of harmony.
Harmony becomes evident in our lives to the degree that we shift our trust from matter to Spirit. What’s needed then is a change of thought, rather than a change in the weather. This change of consciousness involves our deep convictions – love for God, heartfelt rejection of the belief that He could cause or allow sickness, and an understanding of man’s spiritual perfection. Health is actually the eternal state of man. Spiritualization of our convictions and perceptions makes this truth apparent – every season.
Reprinted from the Nov. 28, 1980, issue of The Christian Science Monitor.