"Just a coincidence." In many areas of activity coincidence means little but a random concurrence of events without significance. The best efforts of philosopher-scientists have hardly got coincidence inside the fringes of parascience. But in the healing practice of Christian Science coincidence has central importance. A clear understanding of this spiritually scientific coincidence is highly practical; it contributes powerfully to restoring physical health and to resolving other human difficulties.
Christian Scientists are familiar with the experience of answered prayer. They set no limits to it. A character renewed, a damaged relationship mended, a diseased organ made whole, an injustice corrected, a spiritual awakening effected—all these can happen in response to prayer. Christian Scientists have seen them happen. Sometimes the answer to prayer differs from what was expected; but it is an answer and a good one.
The immediate disciples of Christ Jesus can have had little difficulty in seeing a causal connection between prayer and its answer. They often saw Jesus pray, and they were used to seeing his prayers answered; in fact, his not doing many mighty works in one city occasioned the gospel writer's comment. For a similar reason those around Mrs. Eddy found no difficulty in recognizing a causal connection between prayer and its answer. And so with Christian Scientists in general. Answered prayer is what they naturally expect from their experience and from their observation of reality.
People seeing a Christian Science healing for the first time react variously. Some decide to investigate further. Others, feeling what they have seen is impossible, try to explain it away. Still others, unable to explain it away, attribute it to coincidence. By this they mean it is due to some unknown physical cause or to some random chance. Christian Scientists accept the term "coincidence," but use it in a sense entirely different from that of the skeptic.
Coincidence, as understood in Christian Science, basically refers to the complete at-oneness or unity of God and His creation, spiritual man. In this at-oneness God is cause, man is effect. God is Parent, man is offspring. God is Mind, man is spiritual idea. Each pair of terms indicates the distinctness of God and man. But this distinctness doesn't imply separation; it remains within the oneness Christ Jesus claimed with his heavenly Father, within the unity all God's sons and daughters have with their divine Maker.
Some accepted definitions of coincidence appear to reach after this closeness. They describe coincidence as meaning two things occupying the same point in space and time. In the supposed material realm there can be no greater closeness. But the coincidence of God and man is not one of physical location. It is in Spirit. This wholly spiritual coincidence Mrs. Eddy refers to when, after discussing the distinction and the relationship between the human Jesus and the eternal Christ, she continues, "Into the real and ideal man the fleshly element cannot enter. Thus it is that Christ illustrates the coincidence, or spiritual agreement, between God and man in His image." Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 332–333;
Scientific prayer starts from the recognition of this spiritual agreement between God and man, of whole and perfect and satisfied creator always and inevitably expressed in whole and perfect and satisfied creation. The result appears humanly as healing.
God, the divine Principle of all true being, is all-power and all-presence. And just because He is these, if and to whatever extent human thought still believes in material space and time as its stage of action, even there the divine power and presence, in the degree they are acknowledged, make themselves felt. They heal, correct, spiritualize; and they begin to dissolve obscuring beliefs of materialism or of a power and presence other than God, good. Then more and more pure, innocent, upright human-hood, humanhood at its truest and highest, appears.
In this healing and enlightening activity the wholly spiritual coincidence of God and man having no fleshly element is perceived in the form of human and divine coincidence. It is seen as the divine lovingly encompassing the human at the point of human need and raising it toward where the human is prepared to yield wholly and finally to the divine. Of this activity Mrs. Eddy writes: "The spiritual monitor understood is coincidence of the divine with the human, the acme of Christian Science. Pure humanity, friendship, home, the interchange of love, bring to earth a foretaste of heaven. They unite terrestrial and celestial joys, and crown them with blessings infinite." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 100;
The action of spiritual causation is invisible to material sense. So material sense sees no causal connection between prayer that opens thought to spiritual facts and the human appearing of those facts as physical or other healing; it dismisses the event as coincidence, meaning it is inexplicable or random. But spiritual sense discerns the infinite causative power of divine Spirit. So the Christian Scientist accepts the word "coincidence" as scientific and explicable; he sees in answered prayer the compassionate touching and transformation of the human by the eternal fact of man's spiritual coincidence or agreement with his perfect Maker.
There is one true coincidence, that of God and man. In daily life it is seen as coincidence of the divine with the human. A supreme example of this was the experience of John the Revelator. While he was still in the flesh, exiled to a small rocky island, his spiritual sense enabled him to perceive the boundless universe of Spirit. He describes seeing a new heaven and earth and the city of God descending out of heaven. "And I heard." John continues, "a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them." Rev. 21:3.
Every healing in Christian Science is a foretaste of God with men, of what John saw on Patmos.
