One of my daughters experienced a significant hearing loss when she was a young child. Because of her poor hearing, she couldn't speak clearly, and her preschool teacher recommended that if things didn't improve by the time she started kindergarten, that she be put in a class for hearing-impaired children. When my daughter entered kindergarten, she failed the hearing screening and was referred to the health clinic for further evaluation.
Although we had been praying all along, in the period of time before her appointment, I prayed even more diligently for my daughter. I also listened to a record from the local Christian Science Reading Room about the five physical senses. The record featured articles and testimonies from the Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel about people who'd been healed through prayer of hearing and sight impairments. The most insightful part for me was based on a question in the chapter "Recapitulation" in Science and Health: "Do the five corporeal senses constitute man?" (p. 488). The answer to this question was extremely helpful to me.
At one point the passage says of God, or divine Mind: "Mind alone possesses all faculties, perception, and comprehension." I knew that as God's child, my daughter was a reflection of Mind, which meant that she possessed all the faculties of Mind—faculties that could never be anything less than whole and complete. I also thought deeply about another part of the answer to that question. It says, "Outside the material sense of things, all is harmony" (p. 489). I knew that as the expression of God, or Spirit, my daughter was wholly spiritual, and therefore not subject to a material theory about her ears, or any kind of material malfunction. Instead, she expressed harmony—the harmony created by God.
