Good health care requires the correct treatment for each ailment. Treatment that misses its target or never even touches on the actual basis of a disease or injury clearly isn't part of effective health care.
Discovering exactly the right treatment for most diseases is easier said than done, as people in the research divisions of leading pharmaceutical companies will attest. Yet, that's not for lack of trying; it is notable that so many individuals are devoting themselves to discovering what will heal people and keep them healthy. We can only imagine how many hours these researchers have spent hypothesizing and testing and investigating!
The scope of research and treatment has been broadening lately. Most notably, both patients and health-care providers are exploring nontraditional methods of treatment and maintenance.
For anyone interested in healing—with either traditional or nontraditional methods—nothing is more frustrating than ineffective treatment. A nontraditional, yet effective, treatment that has been a part of the health-care landscape for so long now that some might think it appropriate to identify it as traditional and mainstream, is healing through the laws and power of God. Surely, people have turned to God for healing in their lives for centuries.
Although many people today may not be looking to God for healing, more are discovering that thought affects health. This certainly isn't news. Yet the degree to which thought affects the body most definitely is. In Christian Science, disease and even injury are being healed consistently with only the thoughts and beliefs of patients receiving attention. When infants or young children are healed, the need for healing has been met primarily through the parent's thought.
But healing through this Science doesn't involve any action of the human mind. Healing comes through the power of the divine Mind, the one God, the very Principle of man's being. A wonderfully insightful woman, Mary Baker Eddy, has presented this concept in the book Science and Health. Here is a pertinent excerpt from the book: "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation." Science and Health, p. xi.
"The operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness" is never inconsistent, because divine law isn't inconsistent. Healing through the power and law of God is a provable means of treatment, a totally reliable healing method. Basic to this treatment is the need to address solely the false beliefs or thoughts that underlie disease. But because this approach runs against conventional methodological grains, people sometimes slip into conventional patterns and try through prayer to change matter. They mistakenly treat physiological symptoms instead of a patient's thoughts and beliefs. While prayer does heal disease and all the symptoms associated with it, the difficulty is actually mental, a false belief about God and man; it's not really a physical condition, as it appears to be. That's why prayer is effective—because it corrects thought, which is where the adjustment needs to take place.
In the Bible we find that Christ Jesus touched on the need to address a patient's thought in prayer. He asked, "How can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man?" Matt. 12:29. Commenting on this verse, Science and Health explains: "In other words: How can I heal the body, without beginning with so-called mortal mind, which directly controls the body? When disease is once destroyed in this so-called mind, the fear of disease is gone, and therefore the disease is thoroughly cured." Science and Health, pp. 399-400.
So, how does treatment in Christian Science work? Is the action of human thought the essence of healing in this Science or even of spirituality itself? As indicated earlier, it's not. If it were, healing wouldn't be genuine. Instead of being the natural, lasting outcome of divine power, it would only be a curious, unreliable consequence of people's expectations and willpower.
From the standpoint of Christian Science, then, dependable spiritual healing—Christian healing —isn't a function of the human mind or of human willpower. Christian healing could not be fully reliable if it were subject to the whims of limited, human thought. Successful treatment is based on the unchangeable power of divine Mind, or God. Because God is always present and all-powerful, the transforming effect of the divine influence is repeatable and verifiable. This surely points to law —divine law.
Prayer is effective because it corrects
thought, which is where the adjustment
needs to take place.
So many people have found that the law of God heals morally as well as physically, and drugs simply can't do that. Again, this healing influence isn't of human origin. Rather, human thinking is itself changed when it is exposed to, and yields to, the law of divine Mind. It is really only the power of divine Mind, of perfect divine Principle, that transforms and redeems lives. And it does so in ways that cannot be compared with anything else.
To demonstrate the healing influence of divine law with the consistency inherent in that law, we not only have to acknowledge God as the healing power and recognize the mental nature of disease; we have to be willing to look at existence in a completely different way. Instead of starting with a perception of others as mortal men and women in various states of health and illness, we need to step back, so to speak, and look to God and to what He—perfect, divine Spirit—is manifesting: perfect, spiritual man. This standpoint is fundamental to Christian Science treatment.
God, who is unchangeable, intelligent Spirit, is also boundless Love, undying Life, and conscious, active Mind, as the Bible implies. The loving, eternal, always active, unflawed nature of divine Spirit determines the way existence and being truly are. Yet to human thought, disease and other forms of evil often seem as real as, or more real than, God and His spiritual man. This conflict, however, resides nowhere but in unenlightened human thinking. And this conflict is itself what often underlies the symptoms and the course of what the human mind calls sickness.
When such conflict is supplanted by an understanding of the truth of spiritual life and being, we witness the operation of the law of divine Mind, which changes one's perspective dramatically. The natural order of God's law governing creation becomes more evident to human consciousness. The conflict is resolved. The patient experiences what he or she identifies as a healing.
Drugs, which never enlighten the patient's thought (the arena where healing and health are secured), ultimately result in disappointment. In working with a patient, the practitioner of scientific, Christian healing provides specific treatment through prayer, relying on the medicine of Mind. Under this treatment, patients often take an active role, praying themselves to help forward recovery and healing. But God's truth coming to human thought is always the scientific healing power.
Prayer reveals to consciousness perfect God and perfect, ideal man as the reality of existence. To behold man in God's perfect likeness—which the law of God maintains—is essential to healing. For example, a young girl I know suddenly became very ill one day in her fifth-grade classroom. The school nurse saw that the child was incapacitated with abdominal pain, and feared that she could be suffering with appendicitis. The child's parents were called, and her mother went immediately to the school. The nurse understood that the child and her family were Christian Scientists and would want to treat this condition through prayer. She spoke to the mother about the severity of the situation and said: "I know you'll be taking care of this. Would you please call me later in the day to let me know how your daughter is doing?"
The mother took the child home and made her as comfortable as possible, and the girl's father left his place of employment and headed home to be with the family so they could pray together. At the same time a Christian Science practitioner was called to treat the case. The practitioner and the parents were praying from the standpoint of acknowledging the child's perfect, spiritual identity, held in the embrace of divine Love.
In thought, they all yielded to God's law of perpetual harmony. They yielded to the fact that the child was purely and entirely the spiritual reflection of God, and to the fact that, in accord with St. Paul's words, she lived and moved and had her being in divine Spirit. See Acts 17:28. As a result of this turning to God, divine Mind, to reveal the truth of the child's identity as His loved expression, the healing came very quickly. By the time the father returned home, the child had fallen asleep on the living room sofa, and when she woke up a short time later, she was entirely well. There was no trace of the previous condition. The school nurse was called and told that everything was fine at home, and the girl returned to school the next morning. The healing was complete and permanent.
An ideal is a perfect model, or standard. The absolute standard of excellence, a standard that cannot be improved upon. Man in God's likeness is the ideal man, and this is who we really are. Pointing to the divine demand to demonstrate this ideal, Christ Jesus said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Matt. 5:48. Jesus illustrated this timeless likeness; he understood and proved God's law of perfection by healing.
To identify man as God's own likeness, and thereby yield to the jurisdiction of divine law, is the scientific, Christian means of healing, which people anywhere, and in any circumstance, can rely upon. They can be healed by active, powerful, divine law. When one witnesses such healings, it becomes evident that the law of God brings about the moral and physical changes, for no amount of the human mind's positive thinking can truly heal sickness with regularity and also elevate character.
There is great potential and a widening scope today for scientific, Christian, healing practice. The power of divine law, both in healing the body and in spiritually transforming a person's nature, illustrates original Christianity, and it's available to all.
