Has it ever quietly dawned on you that someone you wanted very much to help through Christian Science probably needed to correct something wrong deep in his or her own thinking?
And has it ever seemed to you that this person just wouldn't let go of his errors and therefore you couldn't reach him? For example, you might have reasoned that because you couldn't manage to change the aspects of a person's character contributing to the problem, healing was blocked.
If we have got into the habit of thinking this way about cause, we're apt to have more reasons for not healing than for healing. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy makes a statement that should serve as the ultimate reference point for all our prayer and treatment: "Cause does not exist in matter, in mortal mind, or in physical forms."Science and Health, p. 262.
While it is certainly true that the cause of all disease is mental, the healing impetus comes from the great discovery that in Science all cause is divine. (See, for example, Mrs. Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany 348:1-10.) Shouldn't we therefore be letting God, Mind, be the only genuine and final cause to us? He is the only cause to husbands and wives, children and relatives, friends and patients, employers and employees—even to fellow church members. And if you think of any people we've left out, just add them to the list. God is the only cause to them too! Above all, we remember He is the only cause not just to those who are human paragons of virtue but to those who, like us, appear to be falling short in hundreds of ways.
We can see that God, being all intelligence and Love, would be supremely intelligent and loving in any process of creation or expression. This omnipotent good causes man to be excellent, not only in terms of health but also in terms of individuality. The image and likeness of God has superb individuality—such that we wouldn't change a thing.
To get to know the actual image of God, through the influence of Christ in human consciousness, is to become acquainted with the only man there is. It is to find nothing lacking in this man—nothing excessive, nothing unbalanced, nothing habitually naive, nothing aggressive, nothing fearful, ignorant, or sinful.
Since God is the only cause, and mortal mind is not genuine cause, we are left not only with no bodily causes but no cause of any kind for pain and sickness. If there is no cause, there can be no effect. If we could actually succeed in finding a powerful source or cause apart from the All-God, we would also find real pain and real sickness, which couldn't be changed. But Christian Science shows us that by learning to know man as entirely the outcome of the one and only divinely good cause, healing comes.
We may be pulled strongly in the opposite direction, to say the least. Sometimes—to be honest, you'd have to say very often—the detailed picture of a human being seems extremely compelling. We know the basis for healing is divinely caused spiritual perfection, but human thought tends to revert to going over and over the textures of the human situation, the way a tongue goes over a rough spot on a tooth.
Considering perfect God and perfect man in theory may have been comforting to us. But when we actually confront a human situation in all its complexity, spiritual reasoning may seem smooth to the point of being abstract.
Suppose we know, for example, something about a person's childhood trauma of losing a parent through divorce or about a patient's previous religious training, which still seems to produce a mystic bent, or about someone's immature attitude that Christian Science is boring. Or suppose we've discerned through our prayer a form of sensuality where we least expected it?
It's at this very point that we dig in and refuse to be moved from the scientific standpoint. We can be sure of several things. The battle does not lie in trying to get an abstract metaphysical truth to do something to a concrete human reality. That would be mortal mind's deceitful attempt to have us play by its rules and work within its illusory framework.
It is the material sense of man that is the insubstantial. In fact, wonderfully rich tangibility awaits our recognition of the spiritual truth that God is the only cause to man. When we break with the dream, we begin to feel the joy of a familiar sense about the great goodness of the man who is being expressed by God. If we need a reminder of how good this man is, we look to the example of Christ Jesus.
Science and Health states: "The spiritual man's consciousness and individuality are reflections of God. They are the emanations of Him who is Life, Truth, and Love."Ibid., p. 336. And the text-book adds, "Material personality is not realism; it is not the reflection or likeness of Spirit, the perfect God."Ibid., p. 337.
With these scientific truths penetrating and permeating our thinking and our living, we have healing. Unconscious willfulness, long-term apathy, even apparently complicated materialistic attitudes, are cast out. These things are shadowy tales told; and they become irrelevant as the real man comes to light in the presence of Christ, Truth—as concretely as Paul appeared where Saul had seemed to be.
It is a common trick of animal magnetism to make us feel that though we may have isolated the cause of a problem in a mental attitude, we simply can't get at or change the mental attitude. Yet we can.
A statement about the mortal mind, though it may be more basic, is no more true concerning the individual than a statement about the mortal body. Both are a misconception or an error in regard to man. They are not the most fundamental factor about anyone. And we correct the misconception not by attempting to straighten out the mentality of a human being but by understanding more of his already present and very real being as the image of God. With all of its potent emphasis on the necessity for uncovering and facing up to sin, Science and Health nevertheless reveals that God's man isn't a sinner, isn't deformed in character in any way, large or small. The image of God is all it should be. It's straight from God, and anything else is an imposition.
Neither you nor I nor a patient necessarily has to ascend in order to be healed. Ascension, as you may have noticed, is something different from healing! Seriously, the point is that we don't have to reach perfection in our human experience in order to deserve healing. It is the other way around. We deserve healing because imperfection is not God-caused and therefore it is not actual being—ours or anyone else's.
The living of our prayer is crucial in Christian Science. And willingness at every stage of experience to be baptized, to be submerged in Spirit, is utter necessity. But that looming sense that we will just never be good enough to be healed isn't productive of progress as a Christian Scientist. It is a lapse into scholastic theology—the sense that good is always less real than evil, a little out of reach, always postponed, until somehow, someday, a "hopeless sinner" can be saved. Frankly, it is the sort of thing Job was up against in his so-called comforters.See Job 16:1-4. It is what was causing the disciples to delay while they tried to find the cause in regard to the man who had been born blind.See John 9:1-7.
The scholastic sense of the reality of sin and guilt is not to be imported into Christian Science under any new guise or subtlety. It is true that the slightest complicity in the illusion of sin will make us feel separated from the omnipresence of good which is God. But to accept sin as other than illusion and to find it an ultimate, definitive cause would be essentially to concur in the absence of God and God's man. We can't truly find a cause for evil, because there is none. The basic fact about sin, as about sickness and death, must remain in Christian Science that it is unreal. And this is the only basis for healing according to Christian Science.
