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).
