Starting from the standpoint of God's allness and goodness as Christian Science reveals them, prayer is the joyous acknowledgment and appreciation of the spiritual nature and perfection of all true being. Such prayer allows for no wishful thinking, doubt, or fear. It is like Christ Jesus' calm expression of gratitude and understanding just before he raised Lazarus from the tomb (John 11:41,42); "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always." Commenting on this healing prayer of acknowledgment, Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 75), "Had Jesus believed that Lazarus had lived or died in his body, the Master would have stood on the same plane of belief as those who buried the body, and he could not have resuscitated it."
The importance of being discriminating about our standpoint, or the "plane of belief" upon which we stand, was brought home to the writer when he saw all the symptoms of polio, which a boy of five was manifesting, disappear within a week through the prayerful acknowledgment that man, God's idea, does not live in, or because of, the material body. Instead of allowing the appearance of the symptoms to instill fear, the boy's parents maintained a deep sense of gratitude for the revelation of Christian Science. This Science teaches one to look deep into spiritual reality, where man is found to be God's expression—perfect, whole, and free in spite of what the five material senses claim. This poised scientific seeing, or prayer of understanding, freed the boy and his parents from dread anxiety and effected a complete and decisive healing without a single aftereffect.
Mrs. Eddy's appreciation of prayer is evidenced by the position of importance she assigns to it in the first chapter of Science and Health. The reading and study of this chapter have resulted in healing for untold numbers. In it Mrs. Eddy warns more than once against the danger of praying to God as one would plead with a person. Such prayer is unscientific, since it sees God as humanly circumscribed, instead of "the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning," as we read in the first chapter of James.
