Good afternoon. It is a joy and privilege to meet and exchange ideas with so many healers! Thank you again, Herb Benson, for calling us back for a second time. I'm heartened by the number of calls I've received from those who attended last year's conference. I've loved the visits I've had with several of the faculty since then. It's wonderful to see a growing acceptance of spirituality in healing.
Something important is going on today. We see it in the number of magazine and newspaper stories, books, TV shows, and news coverage—all pointing to the growing interest in spirituality. Just last week I saw the results of a survey of bookstore customers. I was especially struck by the increasing commitment of time people are giving to spiritual self-discovery and self-care. For example, here in Massachusetts, of women who read books on spirituality, nearly half of them spend more than twenty minutes a day "thinking spiritual thoughts," and one in eight invests at least two hours a day in spiritual thinking.Massachusetts Science and Health Spirituality Survey (Summus Ltd. Research). Three quarters of all adults want to have a "close relationship with God."See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 226. Ninety percent pray with some regularity,LIFE Survey on Prayer (Gallup Organization), December 1993. and more than seven in ten adults (73 percent) believe that praying for someone can help cure illness.Time/CNN Survey. See Christian Science Sentinel, December 16, 1996, p. 5. So people are getting very serious about prayer. They are relying on it more and more in every aspect of their lives.
I often think of one of the most vivid and historical examples to me of the power of prayer. It occurred seven years ago while I was in Leipzig, then still East Germany. I'd been there before, but this time it was different. This particular visit was just a few days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was a quietness in that city, yet one could feel an urgency in the human spirit.
Late that November afternoon I visited with the pastor of the ancient St. Nicholas Church, the church where the famous peace marches began. We sat together in the pews. We talked and prayed about what was occurring. The last and largest Monday evening prayer march was about to take place. As he walked me to the vestibule to say goodbye, the people had begun gathering there. They were simple, unsophisticated, earnest. They came in quietly. There were many fathers walking hand in hand with their children, carrying candles through the dark streets.
Prayer, quiet and strong, was gradually enveloping the city, moving thought, overcoming deep-rooted oppression. You could see it in the faces and you could feel it in the air. There was no orchestration. No grand strategy. Just prayer vigils and candles. Candles lighted because of a growing conviction that freedom existed for everyone. I believe that they knew it existed for them, too. Because it's inherent, God-given, unquenchable.
Thoughts changed—as the people found the courage to march, to claim openly this birthright of freedom. As we know, the change came in East Germany without violence—very quickly.
A film depicting these events in Leipzig was released in Germany this year. In it, the city's security chief looks out over a throng of more than seventy thousand and says, "We were prepared for everything—except for candles and prayers."
I've seen elements of the Leipzig marches this past year. I see it here today. All of us, whatever our calling, are united in the opportunity to overcome sickness and disease. In a sense, each one of us here has lighted a candle. We're on a quiet freedom march to continue to break the oppression of fear, of pain, and of sorrow. There are millions of others who, in spirit, are here with us today. They're our patients, students, colleagues, and our patients-to-be. They too are carrying candles with us. They're turning to spirituality and prayer. They're asking their family and friends and clergy, their nurses and doctors, hospice workers and chaplains—to pray with them and for them.
Why? Because prayer makes a difference.
I can attest to that as a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science. I regularly receive requests from people asking me to pray for them, and healings follow.
There was one particular incident in my own life that touched me deeply. It is actually what impelled me into the healing practice as my life's work. But most important, it compelled me to understand better what God is.
Twenty years ago, I was in a serious car accident. I was trapped alone in a mangled car. I needed help right then, so prayer was everything. My first thought was prayer to God for help to know that God was right there with me, being God—loving and caring for me and for everyone involved, including all those in the other cars. Even in those first startling minutes, I felt actually cared for; I felt God's love. It was a power sustaining me. It was keeping me conscious when the instinct was to let go or panic.
I was taken to a hospital emergency room [ER]. When my husband arrived, the doctors told him they didn't think I could survive the injuries. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I heard the doctors and my husband talking about my prospects for recovery. I thought of our three little boys at home. I wanted to see them grow up. I knew my husband and I had to make a life-impacting decision as to the form of treatment I'd have. I chose prayer.
With all the technology and medical skills at hand—why wouldn't I want to use them? I have great respect for doctors and their work, and yet I knew prayer was right for me. In my heart, and from my lifelong experience, I had a deep trust in God. It wasn't just faith in God who is somewhere "out there." It was what I'd learned and understood of God as divine Love, as the only power. It was also what I knew about myself, as God's loved creation. And finally, it was because I knew that man has an unbreakable relation to God—and that relation was also mine.
It really wasn't a question of choosing between faith or medical science. It wasn't blind faith, but the conviction that comes with experience. I knew I was choosing a method of healing that combines a reasoned faith and a body of spiritual laws that predictably result in healing.
While I was still in the ER, my husband called a Christian Science practitioner to treat me through prayer. Then he signed the release forms, and I was taken home by ambulance. Although I was in pain for about three days, I can honestly say it was a special time, a time filled with earnest prayer by me and my whole family, and with a dear sense of God's love for me. During the second day, however, there was a crisis—a time when I thought I was dying. The mental pull to let go of life was very strong. But I tangibly felt God's love and presence holding on to me, supporting me. I knew this Love was the greatest strength there was—it was the greater attraction—and, in fact, it was the only power that existed. The Bible's message assures us that God is Life. I knew God was my Life! And the pull to let go—to die—diminished. Then it ceased. For me, that was the turning point! I found myself on safe ground. I began to progress. I knew I could be healed.
Throughout the next several days I spent hours reading the Bible and the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. There were three important points I prayed with every day:
• first, to know what God is—that He is omnipotent, one all-powerful and loving Father-Mother, who is ever present;
• second, to know man's inherent spirituality—a healthy, whole spiritual being;
• and third, to know the connectedness of God and man—the relationship we each have with God. To know this relationship is permanent, unbreakable by injury or pain. I was related to God as a ray of sunlight is related to the sun.
These three points—to know what God is, to know man's inherent spirituality, to know the connectedness of God and man—are basic to all Christian Science healing. When understood and applied through prayer, they have the natural force of divine law.
In two weeks I was fully healed. I was able to be up, caring for my family, and driving the boys to school. I had definitely learned more about God and His immediate and abiding care for me and others.
Not long after this, I entered the public practice of Christian Science healing. I wanted to help others find the health and freedom that I knew were inherently theirs.
Christian Science healing practice—what I relied on that day, and what I'm talking to you about today—all started about 125 years ago, right here in the Boston area. Mrs. Eddy, a New England woman, discovered that there is a Science of Spirit, a body of spiritual law, which, when put into practice, heals disease.
What was it that impelled a nineteenth-century woman to write a book about spirituality and healing? A book that has sold over nine million copies, that has been a teacher and healer to hundreds of thousands of people, not just here in New England, but all over the world. What was it about her experience, her search, her life journey? One source of encouragement came from a practicing physician, Dr. Davis of Manchester, New Hampshire.See The Christian Science Journal, May 1995, p. 18. See also page 15 of this issue. After witnessing Mrs. Eddy's healing through prayer of one of his patients who had been dying of pneumonia, Dr. Davis asked, "How did you do it, what did you do?" Then he urged her to write a book explaining her discovery.
And what was the discovery? In its essence, it was a totally new view of the relationship of God to the health of the human mind and body. For years Mrs. Eddy had sought a remedy for her own poor health, and she took a path not unfamiliar to many of you attending this conference. She was searching for the mind-body relationship. She explored homeopathy and found that unmedicated pills could cure even difficult cases. She investigated allopathic medicine, as then practiced, and looked into other current methods such as spiritualism, hydropathy, and mesmerism. But none of these brought her a permanent cure. Although these practices took her closer to a purely mental medicine, she ultimately left them because they left God out.
God was always an essential part of Mrs. Eddy's life. The Bible was her constant companion, a vital record and living reminder of God's healing and saving presence. Biblical accounts of healing were alive and real to her—healings of an epileptic boy, a dying girl, a woman who'd hemorrhaged for twelve years, an army commander's leprosy, and many, many others. It was after she fell and was critically injured that a breakthrough in her healing work occurred. Near death a few days after the fall, she asked for her Bible. While reading accounts of Jesus' healing work in the New Testament, she had a profound spiritual insight. She was healed right then. And that event didn't leave her where it found her. It changed her view of the world. It gave specific direction to her explorations. Seeking for an explanation of the Principle of healing, she researched even more deeply into the Bible. She tested what she was learning by healing others.
She had previously accepted the conventional view that the human mind is a derivative of the physical world. She came, however, to see the matter-world as a product of the human mind. Instead of accepting thought as a phenomenon of matter, she saw that matter is a phenomenon of thought.
Prior to her discovery she'd considered the mental state of a patient to be just one of the factors in the case. After her discovery, she saw that thought itself is the only patient. Let me repeat that. Prior to her discovery, she'd considered the mental state of a patient to be just one of the factors in the case. After her discovery, she saw that thought itself is the only patient.
Thought, then, is the arena where change must take place so that healing can occur. This change proceeds from the basis of understanding that there is one God, one Mind. Mind is a word Christian Scientists often use as synonymous with God. Our use of Mind in this way is not a reference to a human mind, but to divine Mind. The Bible indicates that God is the source of all true wisdom and intelligence.
If today's conference had occurred in Mary Baker Eddy's time, I feel she would surely have been here, explaining her own experiments and findings, observations and discoveries. She envisioned a world embracing the connection between spirituality and healing.
Science and Health contains the explanation of the Science Mrs. Eddy discovered. By reading this book, thousands have been healed. By reading it, anyone can learn how to heal others through prayer. In seeking and finding her own freedom, Mrs. Eddy found a way of freedom for others. In Science and Health she voices a cry of the heart—a battle cry for our own next century. She says: "'... Escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death!' Jesus marked out the way. Citizens of the world, accept the 'glorious liberty of the children of God,' and be free! This is your divine right."Science and Health, p. 227.
In my role as Chair of The Christian Science Board of Directors, I have a wide perspective on spiritual self-care and the public healing practice that's going on all over the globe. There are Christian Scientists in about 120 countries, and churches in about 70 countries. Christian Scientists have been healing themselves and others for over one hundred years.
Since the 1880s a continuous record of healings has been reported in the monthly and weekly magazines, The Christian Science Journal, the Christian Science Sentinel, and The Herald of Christian Science. There is no shortage of statistical data. Over a recent twenty-year period, for example, more than 10,000 healings were published, covering just about the whole range of medical pathology. Nearly a fourth of them were healings in which the condition had been medically diagnosed.
Many more accounts of healing are given informally and spontaneously every Wednesday during testimonial meetings held in Christian Science churches. Anyone can drop in. In a way they're like the small group meetings that George Gallup discussed yesterday. People openly explain how they've been inspired and healed. They tell what God means in their lives. You'll find hymn singing, people praying silently—for themselves and for those who've come. A lay Reader begins the meetings with readings from the Bible and Science and Health on, for example, some aspect of healing or prayer, or on a current issue such as racial harmony or peace. It's a real community support system for spirituality and healing.
These healings aren't viewed as phenomenal or miraculous events. They're attributed to the effect of the Principle of healing operating in the lives of ordinary people everywhere, every day. It's really the power of divine Love, God, awakening and releasing individuals to experience man's God-given heritage and freedom.
I might add here a couple of important points about the scope of Christian Science healing. I referred earlier to the "public practice." Christian Science treatment is available to anyone—you don't have to be a member of the Church. Anyone can telephone a Christian Science practitioner or go to one's office for a visit. Practitioners treat people from a wide variety of religious backgrounds and those with no religious affiliation at all.
It is also natural for a Christian Science practitioner to confer with—but not treat—someone who's currently under medical care. There's a natural, ethical respect for, and desire not to interfere with, a medical practitioner's course of treatment. Christian Science practitioners are available, though, to talk with and encourage someone who's receiving medical care, to bring them some additional spiritual insight, and to enable them to feel the benefit of God's love. I had a case just like that.
When I first met Linda she was fourteen years old. She suffered from what her doctors had diagnosed as arterial venous malformation. She'd had piercing head pains since childhood and had missed a lot of school. She couldn't participate in physical education, and she had poor grades. She'd been receiving excellent medical attention, but the prognosis given her family was one of little hope. She was having CAT scans every three months to monitor the condition. One doctor said her entire life would be riddled with paralyzing pain, and that she would never be able to have children. Another doctor the family consulted offered the option of experimental surgery but held out only a 50 percent chance of her surviving the operation. A second operation would be required within a week of the first, and there was no assurance of a permanent solution—or freedom from the pain.
Thought is the arena where change must
take place so that healing can occur.
Linda's mother worked in the building where I had my office. She noticed on my office door the letters "C.S." after my name and asked what they meant. I told her I was a Christian Science practitioner. She remembered hearing about Christian Science years ago in college. She wondered whether Linda could be healed, and I said I'd be happy to talk with her. Linda came to my office the next day and for several weeks after that to talk with me. She'd had very little religious training, so we started with the basics—the Bible. Together we looked at the Old and New Testaments, and we explored what God is, His goodness and power and presence. Just as important was our discussion of who she was as God's child, and what it means—in the language of Genesis—to be the "image" and "likeness" of God. Linda found this very meaningful. She was inspired by it. It was something she was hearing for the first time. It was very comforting to her. I helped her to begin to realize something more of her special and permanent relation to God, who became very real to her. She learned she could trust God's power to heal her.
After three or four weeks, Linda told me she was no longer taking any medication. She said the pain was almost gone. For the first time she was free of headaches. Linda and her parents decided that she would not have the operations. She wanted to rely on Christian Science treatment. At this point, then, I began specifically treating her through prayer.
As a healer it's my role to help the patient understand and accept in thought the presence of God as divine Mind, to feel its healing law in force, and to yield to its power. This spiritual reasoning, or prayer, touches and changes the patient's thought from sickness to health, thereby restoring the body. Prayer causes the thought or beliefs governing the patient's thinking—in Linda's case, debilitating thoughts of fear and hopelessness—to yield to holier, more spiritual thoughts. It's really the divine embracing the human. The patient then feels his or her active connectedness and genuine at-one-ment with God.
I first began seeing Linda in October, and by Thanksgiving she was fully healed. No medication, no operations, and no pain. That was seventeen years ago. Today, she's married and has two children. Incidentally, when she returned to school healed, her friends wanted to know how? What had she done? Her healing deeply touched at least two of them. They began reading Science and Health. One of them was healed of using street drugs through his own study and journey, his own prayers, and treatment by a Christian Science practitioner.
I still hear from Linda, and not too long ago when I asked for her permission to tell her healing, I asked her if there was a point during her treatment when she felt a change taking place. She said it was when she realized she was safe. She said she was confident because she was now in charge of her body. She no longer felt any anxiety or fear.
All of us at this conference who deal directly with patients know all too well the adverse effects of fear and chronic anxiety on health and recovery. Science and Health deals with this subject. In one place it says, "The procuring cause and foundation of all sickness is fear, ignorance, or sin." And it goes on to instruct, "Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients."Ibid., p. 411.
Fear paralyzes thought and action. Fear needs to be lessened or eliminated so that the patient's thought can clearly be addressed. In the Bible, the Apostle John declares that "fear hath torment." But he also prescribes the remedy: "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. ... There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear."I John 4:16, 18. We might be asking, "How, then, do we stop fear from taking over in our own thought, or in our patient's?"
In Christian Science treatment, fear is overcome by gaining spirituality—by understanding that God is Spirit, the source of spirituality. By glimpsing even in the smallest degree what it means to be loved by God—to feel that connectedness to Him, and to feel that we are kept safe, whole, and at peace. A little like I felt when I was pinned in that car.
It's God's tender love filling thought that actually lessens fear and begins to replace it with hope, courage, joy, eventually leaving no room in human consciousness for thoughts of fear or pain or disease. So, as God's presence and power dawn in thought, fear and beliefs of sickness and injury yield to what God knows of each of us as His spiritual child. The patient's thought, then, is the arena in which change must take place so that healing can occur—beginning with the healing of fear, which is really the healing of dis-ease or a deep uneasiness or anxiety. Prayer brings about the necessary changes in human consciousness as the individual recognizes the wholeness and freedom that are inherently his or hers.
What about cases in which the problem is more mental or behavioral? Such as someone who's compulsive and self-destructive. Let me tell you about an experience I had with a case like this.
When Paula graduated from college she was five feet eight and weighed just 100 pounds. After her graduation she traveled in Europe for several months, returning home weighing even less. She was drinking excessive amounts of water. Her parents were very concerned. They took her to a nutritionist for advice about eating. Her water consumption continued to increase, and her food intake continued to decrease. Eventually her weight dropped to 79 pounds. At that point, her parents decided to admit her to a clinic specializing in eating disorders. They hoped that the staff might be able to encourage her and help her with her eating. In an examination at the time of entering, the physicians were amazed and grateful to find no brain damage.
Paula and her parents had asked me to pray for her. The staff at the clinic recognized the effectiveness of Christian Science treatment. They agreed that this treatment should be continued instead of drug therapy. Her parents visited whenever possible, and the clinic staff called them when things weren't going well. The physician in charge was very receptive to spiritual healing. She reported to Paula's parents the conditions that needed specific prayer.
Here was a young woman who felt desperately alone, disconnected, out of control. She wanted freedom and she was looking for direction. There were periods when Paula needed constant reinforcement through prayer. During these crucial times she would sometimes call me hourly, and I prayed continually for her. During those times I had to reassure her of God's love for her and of the relationship she had to God at that moment. She needed to have that sense of comfort and strength.
I find in my practice when treating a case like this that it is essential to understand that God is the only power. And it is necessary to understand that the patient is not vulnerable, not a victim. This conviction and assurance of one's God-given value and worth helps patients feel stronger. And it frees their thought, enabling it to yield to God's power, to begin to feel His love. And that aids in finally breaking the hold of compulsive behavior.
Again, it's important to know that there isn't a power opposed to God. The spiritual energy, or regenerating activity of God, primarily and ultimately governs action, and it can correct a life out of control.
In treatment, while always reassuring these individuals of their God-derived spiritual strength and courage, I've found that there's sometimes a need to help patients realize the direction their thought is taking them. One especially challenging day, I remember asking Paula to think of herself as being like someone on a staircase. She could either step up or let herself be pulled down.
When Paula grasped this point—that she could let God lift her up, or she could turn from Him and be pulled down—the change was significant. She saw something of her spiritual dominion. From that time on, her weight steadily increased; and she went home. One morning shortly thereafter she woke up and said, "I have to eat." She felt free of the desire to drink water constantly, and her appetite returned to normal and has remained so. The physician later told Paula's parents that her compulsion was equal in severity to a cocaine addiction, and that if she had continued on this path, it would have led to her end by self-starvation.
People who are suffering or in pain, like Linda and Paula, tend to feel separated, alone, out of control, discouraged, somehow cut off from God. Disease to them can be their whole world; it can seem all-absorbing. Many people adopt it as part of their identity. They talk about "my cancer" or "my arthritis," "my back pain" or "my depression."
Prayer is not a strategic offensive against something that belongs to the patient. It is the humble recognition and exploration of what Jesus simply called "the kingdom of God ... within."Luke 17:21. It's discovering man's inherent spiritual wellness. Science and Health puts it this way: "Prayer cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it." Science and Health, p. 2.
Health, then, isn't something we get, something that we have or that others don't have, that we can gain or lose. And it's certainly not just a pleasant interval between diseases. Health is an aspect of what we are in our genuine and permanent nature as God's spiritual child; it's the natural expression of true manhood and womanhood. When health is realized through prayer, it becomes the norm; the standard of one's thought and being; the evidence of higher authority. Once demonstrated, the consciousness of health prevents a return to old models—to models of disease as normal or natural.
I hope I have given you at least a glimmer of the freedom that prayer has brought to me and to hundreds of thousands who have relied on it for physical healing.
Prayer as practiced in Christian Science includes, as I've said, at least these basic ingredients:
• understanding what God is;
• getting to know man's inherent spirituality;
• understanding the connectedness of God and man.
I've attempted to illustrate each of these in the examples of treatment I have spoken about. These three elements are the tricolors on the standard of liberty, which—when raised in the consciousness of patients and practitioners alike—lead the way to freedom. Freedom from fear, from pain, from compulsive behavior, from disease, from sin, and, as in my own case, from the threat of death.
Since Mary Baker Eddy's time, generations have stood with this standard of liberty—this standard of wellness, of wholeness—as normal. They have known its liberating power. And having known it, they see that for them no other standard will do. As Martin Luther once said: "Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen."Speech at the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521.
Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren,
be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work
of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour
is not in vain in the Lord.
I Corinthians 15:57, 58
