While most people in the developed world may think about communicable illness only during certain times of the year, around the globe contagious diseases—more than just seasonal inconveniences—rank as one of the biggest challenges to health and life-expectancy. Whether in regard to malaria, yellow fever, HIV/AIDS, or other illnesses, the need for healing is great.
Beyond the coming and going of particular infectious diseases, Christian Science offers the opportunity to view all contagion through the understanding of God as pure goodness, and of each of us as the continuously cared for child of God.
A passage from Robert Peel’s biography of Mary Baker Eddy sheds light: “Seen from the vantage point of Mrs. Eddy’s mature teachings, her mental probings in the summer of 1880 might be compared to some of the medical researches then taking place. That was the period in which each year saw the discovery of some new microbe—malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria—and in which Pasteur advanced the principle of immunization through vaccination. The whole world was becoming germ conscious. Those microscopic bacteria were taking on the fearsomeness of the traditional dragon and sea serpent; indeed, the electron microscope of 75 years later, capable of enlargements 300,000 times life size, might suggest that in a molecular world even a virus could qualify as a dragon.
“Mrs. Eddy, who was to write of mental molecules, molecules of faith, germs of truth, microbes of sin, the virus of hatred, and other such phenomena of inner experience, was thoroughly convinced that all outward experience is an expression of conscious and unconscious thoughts” (Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial, p. 76).
But if outward experience expresses thought, how is our prayer to be made truly powerful in terms of contagion—not just for ourselves, but for the world? Christian Science teaches that beyond what the human eye can see (even with the help of microscopes), we shine as immortal children of God. Our identity is perfect as the manifestation of the one all-harmonious Being that is God. The physical senses attest—and we often tacitly accept—that the individual is a human form, perhaps with a soul inside, and that matter is the ultimate arbiter of existence. But in truth we’re not subject to moral imperfection, illness, or death—we coexist with God as an expression of infinite, divine Mind.
This existence as a spiritual child of God doesn’t obviate the need for regeneration nor for overcoming illness. But it means that instead of treating disease and sin as clinical, theological, or psychological realities which we should properly fear, we can treat them as misconceptions—able to affect us and others only to the degree that we attribute power to them.
The Bible says that there is one omnipotent God, infinite Love. Jesus and his disciples healed by understanding God in this way, thus showing that the theological positions that would say that He doesn’t exist (and therefore He can’t be turned to in the face of disease, etc.), or that He exists as both good and evil and that He uses disease as His servant, are without foundation.
The allness of harmony and the nothingness of discord—could this comprehensive spiritual truth be the "discovery" that will eliminate contagion?
So how can a correct view of God render a microbe powerless? To answer this, we may have to ask ourselves how we’re viewing the world. As an example, during many trips to Africa I’ve learned that witchcraft is often blamed for everything there, from family discord to school children falling asleep in class to corrupt politicians, even to war itself. It’s a worldview that shapes people’s experience and, not surprisingly, that experience confirms that worldview. I was speaking in a city where the rainy season brings with it torrents of water from the surrounding hills, flooding the streets. Although trees on the hillsides, before they were cut down for firewood, had prevented such flooding, I was told that many believed that dead ancestors, disappointed in the way the people were living, were allowing the flooding. This view was causing resignation relative to the issue itself.
But if the experience of many in Africa is shaped by beliefs in witchcraft, what about the mistaken worldview in most “developed” countries, reinforced by drug companies driven by insistence on profits, and huge marketing and advertising budgets?—the worldview that says man is essentially physical, and that material methods are required to maintain the body?
Recognizing that how we think of the world shapes our experience of the world, including illness or even medical research, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “The Esquimaux [called Inuit in Canada] restore health by incantations as consciously as do civilized practitioners by their more studied methods” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 174). Material methods, including vaccines, seem effective to the degree that people believe in that efficacy, just as placebos seem effective to the degree that a person is convinced that they have potency. Further, the matter-based research that is the basis for conventional healing methods simply confirms a limited view of God and of ourselves—until that view is altered. Thus, even if one contagion is eliminated, or virtually so (e.g. smallpox), supposedly by better sanitary conditions or by drugs, other diseases spring up and are just as—or more—challenging.
So to heal contagion worldwide requires going beyond a physical solution to a mental problem. Although Mary Baker Eddy appreciated the motives of everyone working to eliminate suffering, including conventional medical practitioners, she understood that effective treatment must flow from the recognition of God’s all-harmonious supremacy. As we see that harmony alone is present, we prove that discord is a misconception—mythical, illegitimate, and unnecessary.
The allness of harmony and the nothingness of discord—could this comprehensive spiritual truth be the “discovery” that will eliminate contagion?
In her article “Contagion,” Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “A calm, Christian state of mind is a better preventive of contagion than a drug, or than any other possible sanative method; and the ‘perfect Love’ that ‘casteth out fear’ is a sure defense” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 229). In the face of media or other reports about contagion we stay calm by knowing that God is infinite good, incapable of creating anything opposite to Himself. With that fundamental point, we can vigilantly watch thought—not accepting the suggestion that we will catch a virus or that somebody else has caught one—since God’s idea, man, is intact, invulnerable, and exempt from harm.
But if a certain percentage of people in our communities seems to have a virus, what is our immunity? Helplessness and fear, based on the notion that all discord, including illness, is natural and inescapable, can seem to play themselves out as contagion in one’s experience. But that God knows nothing of evil, gives us the only powerful basis from which to watch and work, seeing through the lie that contagion is normal or inevitable.
Since September 2007 I’ve traveled to some 30 countries, including Angola, South Africa, Nigeria, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, the two Congos, Cameroon, Rwanda, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, India, and Pakistan. Consecrated, daily prayer, based on an understanding of God as the creator of good—and good only—has protected me. Everywhere I’ve traveled I’ve felt safe and at peace.
By aligning ourselves with pure, omnipotent Mind—the only power there is—we can experience freedom from infectious diseases. In this way, too, we embrace the whole human family, and nourish the divine right for each of God’s children to thrive.
