Can a medical diagnosis of a disease help in any way when someone is relying on Christian Science treatment for healing? To answer this question, it's necessary to consider the foundation of practice in this Science and how healing comes about.
The basis of Christian Science treatment is Biblical. For example, the Scriptures tell of the supreme power of God, of His omnipresence and perfection. They speak of Him as Spirit and Love. Since He is infinite, divine Spirit, must not His creation actually be spiritual and perfect, like Him? Christian Science holds that it must be, though it appears otherwise.
So when a Christian Scientist is confronted with a troubling physical condition, how might he or she pray? There are many ways to approach God through prayer; there's no formula involved. But the prayer that constitutes Christian Science treatment would certainly embrace such spiritual facts as these:
• God is the only creator, and what He creates is good.
• Man is God's perfect child, the image and likeness of Spirit, and has never changed from this original, spiritual state of being.
• Nothing can interfere with man's harmony and wholeness as the image of divine Love, God.
• Disease can't be real because God never made it. It is unknown to perfect, all-knowing divine Mind.
• As God's image, man can know and experience only what Mind knows: unchanging perfection.
Christian Science teaches that such knowledge expresses "the mind of Christ," I Cor. 2:16 spoken of in the New Testament. With such Christly knowledge empowering us, the evidence of a particular physical challenge is seen to be false, and it disappears. Yet, actually, nothing real—that is, nothing God made—has been changed or healed. Rather, the light of divine reality has replaced the darkness of the belief that evil or disease is powerful and real. The power of God and His Christ, welcomed and acknowledged through prayer, has destroyed belief in that which previously seemed to be real but never truly was. Then comes the wonderful recognition that we are whole and complete (because man always has been), and the body conforms to that recognition. This is Christian Science healing.
Christly knowledge,
welcomed in prayer,
empowers.
A man who had been a chronic invalid for many years was healed of his diseases through glimpsing the truths in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health. He also tells of a healing of a sprained ankle that showed to him the "how" of Christ-healing. This man writes: "I took my copy of Science and Health and began reading. Very soon I became so absorbed in the book that I forgot all about my ankle; it went entirely out of my thought, for I had a glimpse of all God's creation as spiritual, and for the time being lost sight of my material selfhood.... When next I thought of my ankle, I found it was not hurting me. The swelling had gone down, the black and blue appearance had nearly vanished, and it was perfectly well. It was healed while I was 'absent from the body' and 'present with the Lord.'" Science and Health, p. 603
A thoughtful look at this healing shows that it came about not by focusing thought on the injury and pain, not by becoming immersed in the symptoms, but by turning thought entirely away from the body to the truth of being. Why did this result in healing? Because bodily ills are not solid conditions, as they appear to be; they are, in fact, like the whole of mortality, a counterfeit of actual, spiritual reality—an illusion of the five material senses. The specific illusion of illness disappears as the false sense of ourselves as imperfect mortals yields to the realization that God, Life itself, is perfect and that man, as God's child, is therefore perfect, now and always. Such an enlightened state of consciousness is objectified in health and freedom.
Freedom comes
as we turn
away from fear
to spiritual truth.
As someone who has experienced physical healings many times by understanding that sickness is actually unreal, no part of God's perfect creation, I honestly feel that if a physical diagnosis had been sought in the various challenges I've faced, healing would have been greatly hindered.
My mother began the study of Christian Science after several doctors over many years failed to come up with an explanation for her suffering. Despite their sincere efforts to help, they hadn't been able to relieve her pain. But prayer based on the understanding of perfect God and perfect, wholly spiritual man healed her quickly, completely, and permanently. Through this Science anyone can turn to and rely on God for healing.
Now, pain and suffering may, of course, seem very real and formidable at times. A particular trouble may require our wholehearted, persistent prayer. But the most wonderful sense of freedom and well-being comes when we turn away from fears about the body and gain some perception of spiritual truth, when we spiritualize and purify thought. And this does bring healing.
Our state of thought is critical to good health. These words of Christ Jesus point to the significance of what we entertain in thought: "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.... those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart." Matt. 15:11, 18 It is highly important to replace fearful, sickly thoughts with spiritual truths. These uplift, transform, purify, and keep us whole. They keep our thinking in line with the Christly standard Jesus established, and this empowers us to exercise our God-given right to be free of physical suffering.
As one comes to understand what divine healing in Christian Science is and how it occurs, the incompatibility between fixing thought even more on bodily symptoms through physical tests, and trying to hold the view of one's completely spiritual nature as the image of God, becomes clear. It just isn't conducive to metaphysical healing, one realizes, to fill thought with pictures of disease that will only at some point have to be expunged from consciousness.
Disease has a mental basis; it's a false belief in a power apart from God, not a God-bestowed reality. Therefore, freedom from it, in the truest sense, is found through spiritual means, not physical. The answer for physical ills lies in a recognition of spiritual facts about ourselves as the image of perfect Mind. This spiritually mental activity is potent. It lessens and eliminates the misconceptions and fears of the human mind that underlie disease. And this leads to an improvement of the body's condition. Again, man already, actually, is the immortal, spiritual manifestation of God. Christian Science treatment, by regenerating and spiritualizing thought, simply causes this reality to be seen and experienced in healing.
In Science and Health, next to the marginal heading "Diseases not to be classified," Mary Baker Eddy writes: "One disease is no more real than another. All disease is the result of education, and disease can carry its ill-effects no farther than mortal mind maps out the way. The human mind, not matter, is supposed to feel, suffer, enjoy. Hence decided types of acute disease are quite as ready to yield to Truth as the less distinct type and chronic form of disease." Science and Health, p. 176
These words have proved true in thousands of Christian Science healings over the years. The healing Christ, manifesting God's omnipotent power, is able to both reveal and remove whatever fears and false beliefs need to be dealt with in any case.
