Many years ago, a woman who had been recently widowed was experiencing increasing soreness in her pelvic bone, making it painful for her to walk or sit easily. One morning as she prayed about this condition, she saw the need to reject every argument of the material senses that she originated and lived in matter; and to adhere with uncompromising fidelity to the truth of her immortal spiritual identity originating in, and inseparable from, the divine Mind, God.
Several times during that day she returned to these powerful spiritual facts. And then, suddenly, the words no borrowed bones came to thought. As she pondered the unusual message, she began to realize that it referred to a passage in the second chapter of Genesis: "And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman" (verse 22). The connection was clear: the allegorical first woman, Eve, had been formed from a bone borrowed from the first man, Adam, implying that womanhood had been removed from the man to make a woman, leaving both the man and the woman incomplete.
The woman then concluded that the physical condition she suffered from could well be rooted in the age-old mental concept that a woman simply isn't whole without a man. And that, logically, the only antidote for this erroneous concept was to stick to the truth that she was not modeled after Eve at all, but after the pattern of spiritual womanhood stated in the first chapter of Genesis, in which "God created man in his own image . . . male and female created he them" (verse 27). Here, in the only real creation, man and woman spring from Mind simultaneously through the perpetual action of divine law, not through any physical process. Each reflects the completeness of the divine nature, lacking nothing, and embodying both masculine and feminine qualities, true manhood and true womanhood. And each is at one, right now, with divine Love.
