Q. When it comes to the practice, what are your thoughts about what Mary Baker Eddy says, “. . . we must first learn to bind up the broken-hearted” (Science and Health, p. 366)?
A. As a Christian Science practitioner—that is, anyone who wants to practice Christian Science—how would you respond to a person who had just explained to you that her husband had been killed in a car accident? Would you (1) try to find that metaphysically correct thought to explain? Or (2) take her in your arms and tenderly dry her tears?
Of course Mary Baker Eddy valued the truth that we pour in, but the flood tides of divine Love are essential. The truth without the flood tides of Love is sterile and largely ineffective. For Jesus, too, the active expression of compassion was essential. When asked how we can love our neighbor, he answered with a story—a story of love leading to action. A man of a Jewish sect, not well liked by other Jews, seeing a wounded stranger by the side of the road, stopped and dressed his wounds—he bound up the stranger’s broken body—and carried him away to be further cared for (see Luke 10:30–37).
For Mrs. Eddy, as for Jesus, loving has to be expressed by thought and action. Love is compassion expressed. As Eddy explains, learning to bind up the brokenhearted is the means by which we are enabled to open the prison doors for all those in need—this is the first and primary requisite to be able to heal. And what is this first, most essential requirement? Yes. It’s love. Simple, selfless, compassionate love.
But it’s a love that is not hidden “under the napkin of its form” (Science and Health, pp. 366–67). It’s a love set free to be poured forth in acts and, as she says, in tender words, in “pitiful patience” with fears and “the removal of them.” It’s as though our eagerness to express this love were a means of opening our heart so that we can see and feel the best way to think and pray.
The compassionate love, which Eddy is identifying here as essential in healing—this love is not one of looking out from the patient’s perspective. On the contrary. Shortly before she speaks of binding up the brokenhearted, she sets the standard for us when we come face to face with sin and disease: “. . . knowing . . . that Life is God and God is All” (p. 366). This means seeing through the façade of whatever the sin or disease appears to be—to the expression of God, Life, living its beloved creation. Thus we stay, mentally, in a strong, clear consciousness of God’s permanent, powerful presence, while giving free rein to our compassion in our words and acts.
Unshaken by the physical sight of a broken body, a broken home, a broken heart, we maintain the spiritual vision of the wholeness of the man that God created. But this spiritual seeing must not prevent us from active loving, feeding, and nursing the individual needing care.
By insisting that we learn to bind up the brokenhearted, Eddy is breaking down a wall of partition we sometimes create between prayer and action. For her, clearly, the two go hand-in-hand. More: The two must go hand-in-hand! “Without this,” Eddy says, “the letter is but the dead body of Science,—pulseless, cold, inanimate” (Science and Health, p. 113). She is calling for something vitally alive and burning brightly.
Coming as it does from divine Love, God, it is whole and natural. Its very essence is that which enables us to say of ourselves, “Yes, I really care, and I’m willing to act on that caring.” It is that which calls forth a natural sacrifice of self—a genuine sense of unselfed love.
Combined with this expression of compassion, the talent of spiritual healing—which each and every one of us possesses fully—works wonders.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US
