WHEN I WAS 11 YEARS OLD, my grandfather molested me. As a naive kid, I didn't even know what the word sex meant, and I tended to be obedient to and respectful of my elders. So when this happened, I had no human skills with which to protect myself—to fight back, or run away, or even tell my parents. I locked myself in a bathroom, cried, and asked God what to do. I could not make sense of what had happened. I just knew it was terribly wrong and that God, who I knew to be all good, had no part in it.
The answer I got from my prayer was a heightened awareness that God would always love me—no matter what. I reasoned with all the basic truths about God's love and care for me that I had learned from my parents and in Sunday School until I calmed down.
Then, with all the wit and wisdom of an 11-year-old, I decided to forget about it. If I couldn't figure it out, and God was no part of it, I didn't need to carry it around. I steered clear of my grandfather, making sure never to be left alone with him again. He passed on two years later, and I proceeded into my teenage years.
But it didn't take too many more years before I became aware that what my innocent consciousness had quietly discarded had a name, sexual abuse, which gave me a new title—victim. So for the next 20 years I carried that memory and title around in my thought as a part of my tarnished identity. Right up until the phone rang one day.
Because we had a business phone in our home, the residential line was listed in the phone book under my first name. Because of this (or so I thought), I received obscene phone calls periodically. Each one of these calls upset me. Basically I would say "Hello" —a friendly male voice would say my first name and I would cheerfully say "Yes," because I thought I must know this person if he called me by name. And then he would let loose with nothing that belongs in a testimony. It so reminded me of my grandfather—the natural trust I had had in someone I knew and loved, and who knew and loved me, only to be followed by something ugly and evil. These phone calls always brought my childhood experience back in living color.
Then one day, while reading the Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly at the kitchen table, the phone rang—another obscene caller. I slammed the phone down and went back to the Lesson, still steaming. And right there on the Bible page in front of me, was the verse where the disciples asked Jesus, "Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:2, 3).
Wow! The disciples were looking for someone to blame for this man's blindness. They identified the blind man as a victim, and were now looking for the perpetrator. (That sounded familiar—I was the victim of abuse; my grandfather the victimizer.) But Jesus' answer removed all traces of guilt, blame, or cause from the blind man and his parents. No victim. No perpetrator.
What looked like sin and disease, what had a history of sin and disease, and what suffered from sin and disease, was nothing more than the arena for "the works of God [to] be made manifest." Right where these mortal conditions or circumstances appeared to be, the Christ, the divine idea of God, was glorifying God by destroying the belief that sin and disease have any fundamental reality, history, or power. Right where we think evil is, Christ shows us that only God and His perfect creation exist untouched by any mortal condition, history, or circumstance.
Mary Baker Eddy pointed out in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "The greatest wrong is but a supposititious opposite of the highest right" (p. 368). So, instead of the greatest wrong (the blindness the disciples had been looking at and the abuse I had been mulling over), the Christ was showing us the highest right—the reality—no blindness and no sexually tarnished identity! The Bible tells us that the blind man suddenly could see. And me? The second I grasped this inspiring concept, I felt washed clean, as though I had been through a metaphysical car wash, inside and out. I can't even describe what that purity felt like. All I could do was sit there with tears of joy.
As an added bonus, I remembered my grandfather. I became distinctly conscious of him being washed clean also—and that this was even more important than the great blessing I was experiencing. After all those years of resenting him, I suddenly felt concerned for his welfare. After all, every wrong needs to be totally set right, and that includes the reformation of the wrongdoer. I knew in my heart that the purity I was bathed in at that moment wasn't anything I earned or personally possessed. The source of that purity was divine Love—impartial, all-inclusive, unconditional Love—that is "redolent with unselfishness, [and] bathes all in beauty and light" (Science and Health, p. 516).
I realized that purity is our original condition, that that's how we are created—in the likeness of God, Spirit, who is always pure—and that's how we remain eternally. I felt that in some way both my grandfather and I were liberated from that miserable, mortal history of abused and abuser, and set free. For the first time in many years, I felt love for him. Clearly, in our spiritual history the only real connection we have ever had is our pure, spiritual relationship, as innocent children loved by our Father-Mother God.
Then the phone rang. I was so caught up in this state of grace and purity, that I was barely aware of answering it. I said "Hello," and after a pause a timid voice said "Ummmm ... I just called you a few minutes ago ... please don't hang up. I don't know why I did that, but I'm sorry, and I promise I won't do it again." I told him he needed to find something better to do with his time. He apologized again, and we hung up. That's the last I ever heard from him, or ever received any other obscene calls. We were all washed clean that day, and it came from the healing words of Jesus, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him."
