A recent documentary on Public Television left a deep impression on me—and brought many healing ideas to thought. The film Solar Mamas profiled a group from India that chose a handful of poor, uneducated, and illiterate women from around the world to take part in a six-month class to learn how to create sustainable energy. The reason and hope for the class were twofold: one, enabling the women to bring solar light to their villages (which had no electricity); and two, allowing them to teach the technology to other women—creating income and raising the standard of living for everyone.
The film mostly focused on one Jordanian woman’s journey. Once chosen for the class, she had to gain permission from her husband who, along with other men from the village, was against her leaving. I learned from the film that so many in Jordan still hold to the belief that it’s a disgrace for a woman to get an education.
The husband also threatened to divorce her and take the children if she left the country to take the class. But with boldness and courage—despite the consequences it might have—the woman went forward with her plans.
After watching the film, I yearned to help the women of that village. In my prayers I asked God what I could do. I started out by declaring the truth about God creating man in His image and likeness, creating us both male and female, as it states in Genesis 1:26, 27. I also studied and prayed to better understand Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritual interpretation of those same verses from Genesis. I found this particularly helpful: “To emphasize this momentous thought, it is repeated that God made man in His own image, to reflect the divine Spirit. It follows that man is a generic term. Masculine, feminine, and neuter genders are human concepts” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 516). While working with the ideas from the Bible and Science and Health, I better understood that each of us is a full expression of God—that we include all that God is, and since there is only one God, He is both male and female, and each one of us expresses both masculine and feminine qualities.
I knew if I was going to help lift the thought of that village—and the world—toward women, I had to start with my thought.
It was easy to pray for the women of the village. I felt they were oppressed by centuries of old beliefs that held them back from expressing all of the qualities God created them to express. I felt a deep love for them—and a connection—since I’m also a woman. But in the middle of praying, I felt God was telling me that I also had to pray for the men of that village.
At first I resisted. I didn’t want to pray for them because I knew from the documentary that they were cherishing beliefs that held back women from moving forward in a positive and progressive way. I was angry, to the point of hatred. I was judging these men from my point of view—that of a woman living in the United States who was not only able to become educated, but also as a woman who has a contractor’s license. That means doing a lot of work that’s mainly thought of as “man’s work”—painting, electrical, drywall repair, etc. And doing that with no opposition from my own husband—in fact, encouraged by him to be anything I want to be.
But no matter how much I resisted praying for the men, I knew if I was going to help lift the thought of that village—and the world—toward women, I had to start with my thought. I had to pray for those men.
I thought a lot about Jesus’ ministry—how he treated and healed women with as much respect, care, and love as he did men. I also thought a lot about Eddy’s explanation of man in Science and Health (see page 475). Part of that explanation is that the man of God’s creating has no separate mind from God. I felt this was important to know since the men in the film seemed to have their own minds and their own ideas—opinionated and fixed. The more I prayed with these truths, the easier it was for me to pray for these men. At one point while praying about the husband of the Jordanian woman in the film, I had an astounding message from God that has since stayed with me: That’s not his original thought.
It was like a flood of healing had washed over my thinking. From there, it was so clear to me that the thoughts men hold toward women in that country have been there for centuries. The men in the film did not create those thoughts—they were just educated to believe in a sense of history, how men had always thought about women.
I could see now that like the oppressed women, the men were oppressed, too—by their own beliefs. Since I know that the true nature of all mankind is spiritual, the men in the village are truly innocent. I also realized that since those beliefs toward women were not their original thought, it would be easier for them to wake up and question those beliefs—and that it is their divine right to do so! Then it was not only easy to pray for them, but to love them. I could have every hope that this insight had a healing effect for me, for that village—and beyond.
That simple but powerful message has brought other healing ideas. I realized that not only were those men raised and conditioned to believe those thoughts, but that humanity has been raised and conditioned to believe that sin, sickness, and death are real—and an inevitable part of man. Sin, sickness and death have been “believed” to be true for thousands of years, and so we too can wake up and stop believing them—and instead declare for ourselves spiritual facts from the Bible and Science and Health. At the end of the film, the Jordanian woman finished at the very top of the class, and her husband didn’t divorce her or take her children away. It was quite a sight to see her join others in installing a small solar power system. And for the first time, she turned on a light in her home—the first such light ever turned on in that village.
After all the uplift that took place in my thought, I am reminded of one of the first verses in Genesis (1:3): “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
