Q: When a Christian Science practitioner says to me as a patient, “I will be happy to support your prayer,” are they expecting me to be treating myself and they will only be prayerfully supporting what I’m doing? I’m calling them because I’m having a problem praying for myself. I’m expecting the practitioner to give me Christian Science treatment, to take the case and heal it, not just “support” me in my own prayer.
A: The question, which looks simple on the surface, is helpful because it leads to the deeper “questions behind the question”: What is Christian Science treatment? What is required on the patient’s part? What is required on the practitioner’s part? How can their prayers blend together? Do they need to blend together?
The definition of a Christian Science treatment cannot be confined to an intellectual explanation. It has many facets, all under the unfolding glory of divine Mind, the one all-knowing God. Some of its facets are: the realization of the allness and onlyness of God, ever-present divine Love; the awareness of the nothingness of discord and inharmony; the effective, orderly arguments of truth that dispel the hypnotic suggestions of error; the affirmation of the operation of divine Science, the law of God, the Holy Ghost, that brings regeneration and freedom to the body; the recognition of the Christ, Truth, in human consciousness that uncovers and dislodges sin and human suffering; the awareness of the overflowing love of divine Love that is ever conscious of its own universal care.
