Consistent healing – and a deeper purpose
A Christian Science perspective: Spiritual ideas on healing and progress.
A friend recently asked what was the most impressive healing through prayer I’d ever experienced. After pausing for a moment, I explained that what has made the greatest impression on me about Christian Science healing isn’t a particular healing I’ve had, but the fact that solving such a wide range of problems through prayer has been so consistent over a lifetime.
I did give my friend two examples of physical healing that came as a result of treating the conditions with Christian Science and its unique approach to prayer. One took a long time before my body was functioning properly again. The other came instantly; there had been a severe illness, and then suddenly I felt completely healthy. I spent days in awe of how a condition could change so dramatically and instantly. And the healing that took so long was especially impressive because my life was so transformed. Nevertheless, it’s the lifelong consistency that stands out to me.
Such examples of finding solutions through prayer are, for many, concrete evidence that Christian healing, after nearly 2,000 years, is again active and alive through the discovery of Christian Science. The evidence is, of course, way beyond healings that a few individuals may have had. Christian healing for well over a century has spread to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. Sometimes this involves families of five or even six generations. It has been and is being practiced with the kind of consistency that may be surprising to many people. An empirical study that illustrates this point can be found on the Press Room section of the official website of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, at christianscience.com. This consistency of healing helps explain the adoption of hundreds of laws around the United States (even some around the rest of the world) that accommodate spiritual healing in a variety of ways.
And so, does this extraordinary record of healing simply mean that the contribution Christian Science has made to society is a group of drug-free healthy people? While there are many systems of healing in the world, the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, founded a system where healing was seen as a consistent byproduct – the outcome of understanding that perfection, instead of imperfection, is the reality of God and His universe.
Christian healing – that is, healing by experiencing the Christ, the divine manifestation of God – is actually a window into God’s reality of flawless existence. In truth, God’s creation is perfect and complete right here where existence sometimes seems so chaotic and discordant. Scientific Christian healing, rooted in divine law, reveals a glimmer of our true being – spiritual and perfect – made in God’s image and likeness (see Genesis 1). These glimpses of reality hold the deepest significance for society.
While this understanding of reality has led to better health, it has also led to more stable lives rooted in moral and lasting spiritual ideals. This can be deeply meaningful to a world that finds itself in a major state of flux – and even upheaval, at times. If there’s any one thing society needs, it’s moral and spiritual roots during times of instability. Mrs. Eddy claimed this advantage to healing by prayerful means: “A person healed by Christian Science is not only healed of his disease but he is advanced morally and spiritually” (“Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 34).
A significant range of thoughtful and intelligent people see something powerful at work here: that a spiritual method of health care – in addition to healing without harmful side effects – can help stabilize society. They claim there’s logic, as well as practical evidence, that consistently relying on a method of spiritual health care may truly be the best, if not the only, way to genuine and lasting stability.
How can a more stable moral environment be established? More Christian healing. That’s because, in a word, this kind of healing has a consistency that leads to transformed lives. That is, lives rooted in a stronger integrity, innocence, unselfed love, and spiritual goodness.