Christian Science healing may seem mysterious to people who have never experienced it. Those investigating Christian Science for the first time often ask, "Why make a point of depending on God for healing, when there are such excellent doctors and medical facilities available? How can thought change a serious condition? Could a tumor be healed by Christian Science treatment?"
Such questions were put to me by a friend who was honestly inquiring about the healing method of Christian Science.
"Yes, Christian Science could heal a tumor," I told her. "As we turn to the divine consciousness, which is the real consciousness of both you and me, we touch the power of God, which can completely dissolve the sense of having a tumor."
I told her that as we are conscious of the Christ, Truth, it reveals the allness of God, Spirit, and the perfection of the real, spiritual man, who is God's offspring. Then we see more clearly that matter and its effects are unreal, are merely the dream-sense of man.
"As we continue to know that we are actually the perfect sons of God," I added, "this truth is manifested in our human experience. We need to be willing to choose the spiritual as our real sense of life."
After she had left, I asked myself, "Would you take such a case if someone asked you to heal that condition?" Looking deeply into my thinking, I could detect there an element of doubt—not doubt of the power of Christian Science to heal, but doubt of my understanding and ability to apply it to the case.
Immediately the words of a hymn came to me: "Why is thy faith in God's great love so small?" 1 Why, indeed? I thought. In my own family I had seen the healing of infantile paralysis, as well as of impetigo that covered practically the whole body, and broken bones had been set without the skill of a surgeon.
There came to me a long array of healings in my own family—all conclusive proofs of the power of Mind to heal. Many of these healings had come with the help of a practitioner, but others had come about as a result of our own understanding trust in the power of God. Whatever the difficulty that had come to us in a family of four active children, our work had always been to prove the presence and allness of God and the utter unreality of anything that did not bear testimony to His allness. Why, then, did I have any doubt?
"It is mortal mind that makes me doubt," I reasoned. Did I want to be an instrument of the carnal mind, which could tell me to doubt, to be selfish, full of false appetite, stubborn, unreasonable, impulsive? Or did I want to be an instrument of the Mind of Christ? How did I wish to choose? The Bible counsels, "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." 2
Christ Jesus so completely expressed the divine Mind, I thought, that as he journeyed, his Christly consciousness brought healing to multitudes. He showed us the way. We can choose to follow, for the Mind of Christ is our Mind too. God is not in one place and we in another. We are at one with God. God, Mind, is really our Life, for we are His ideas. What heals is our knowing that we express the radiance of Soul, its beauty, perfection, symmetry.
In truth, we cannot dislike or be annoyed with someone, for the Christly consciousness man reflects completely expresses Love. It is universal in its expression. There are not a few of "us good people" and a lot of useless or bad people. Universally and eternally man is the child of God. As we work to understand this, mankind is helped to awake from its dream of experiencing pleasure and pain, power and limitation, in materiality.
I reasoned that our true, Christlike consciousness is consciousness of the truth of perfect being, the truth Mary Baker Eddy discovered and explained and gave to the world. Christian Science enables all who will to learn to heal, to progressively change their experience from one filled with mortality to a life filled with immortality, with understanding of divine Life itself.
As I continued to think along these lines, doubt disappeared. I recognized that this doubt had secretly haunted my thinking for nearly a lifetime. I felt transformed. The emblem of the cross and crown appears on all of Mrs. Eddy's books. I realized I could choose to wear the crown, not only endure the cross. All that was necessary was to express and live the thoughts continually coming to me from divine Mind, and to deny and reject with vigor all the aggressive suggestions that mortal mind seemed to be continually pouring into my consciousness. All that day and the next I had a transforming sense of reality.
In the afternoon I was seized with a strong physical sensation, but felt neither pain nor fear. Immediately, what appeared to be a tumor, a rather large internal one, which I did not know I had, passed off.
Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health: "Christian Science acts as an alterative, neutralizing error with Truth. It changes the secretions, expels humors, dissolves tumors, relaxes rigid muscles, restores carious bones to soundness. The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind." 3
In my case, when doubt was dissolved, I not only witnessed the power of Mind to bring a better sense of health, but I felt the comfort and spiritual regeneration of divine Love. Indeed, everyone can wear the triumphant crown of healing through fidelity to the Mind of Christ.
