I was so sick that even dragging myself painfully across the living room floor to the stereo took great effort. Knowing my audio CDs were there kept me moving, though. When at last I had a CD in place, I lay on the floor and just listened to the healing truths in the Christian Science textbook, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. After maybe half an hour, I felt all the acute symptoms of food poisoning lift, and I was able to move freely. Simply listening to Science and Health had healed me.
I’ve thought about this healing many times since. It’s significant to me for an unusual reason: I don’t remember which passages I listened to. No particular line from this familiar book struck me in such a way that I thought, “This is the perfect law to meet this challenge.” Instead, I simply soaked up what I was hearing, knowing the words to be true. And I was healed.
What a magnificent book! I love to think of Science and Health as “God’s book,” for, indeed, He gave it to Mary Baker Eddy, who said of her authorship: “It was not myself, but the divine power of Truth and Love, infinitely above me, which dictated Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 114). She also stated: “The works I have written on Christian Science contain absolute Truth, and my necessity was to tell it; … . I was a scribe under orders; and who can refrain from transcribing what God indites, and ought not that one to take the cup, drink all of it, and give thanks?” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 311).
