After playing tennis one day last year, I woke up that night with a painful knee. In the morning, I couldn’t walk and needed crutches to hobble around. I was unhappy and worried about a possibly long recovery time.
That same morning, I’d received an e-mail about a video of a Christian Science lecture given by Betty O’Neal on christianscience.com. The topic was “The Healing Power of Gratitude.” Gratitude was the farthest thing from my mind at that moment, but I watched the lecture anyway because I knew that lifting my thought from worry and fear was the first step toward healing.
As I watched, it was as if the lecturer were speaking directly to me. Every point made perfect sense and was relevant to my struggle. Her statements of truth were direct, powerful, and matter-of-fact. The spiritual truths shared said to me: There’s no need to feel sorry for yourself. Instead, open your heart, be genuinely grateful for the good already present, and you’ll be healed.
The lecturer read a citation by Mary Baker Eddy from The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany: “What is gratitude but a powerful camera obscura, a thing focusing light where love, memory, and all within the human heart is present to manifest light” (p. 164).
Not knowing what a camera obscura was, I looked up its definition: “a darkened box with a convex lens or aperture for projecting the image of an external object onto a screen inside. It is important historically in the development of photography” (New Oxford American Dictionary). In visualizing this mechanism, I could similarly see how gratitude operated within the very core of my being. What also stood out to me in Mrs. Eddy’s statement on gratitude from Miscellany was the word “memory.” Her sentence said to me that, like a camera, gratitude focuses light where memory is present.
I then recalled a conversation with my tennis partner about a knee injury he’d had in the past. I realized that I had failed to watch my thinking and deny this injury as real for my tennis partner and for myself. I saw that these were false memories. God knows nothing of human history, only man’s present perfection as His image and likeness (see Genesis 1:26, 27).
I needed to align my thought with what divine Mind, God, knows to be true about me. To help remove the false memories from my thinking, I began to fill my heart with gratitude in order to bring into focus the light of God, divine Truth and Love, on my experience.
Later in that video, the lecturer explained that divine Love, God, is infinite and fills all space and every place—even where matter claims to be. I saw that gratitude is an expression of divine Love. I asked myself, Can there be pain and inflexibility in gratitude, in divine Love? No, of course not. Divine Love’s attributes are joy and freedom, not pain and inflexibility. This concept was deeply inspiring to me.
The lecturer also spoke of keeping a gratitude list. I wrote down many things for which I was grateful (it was a long list). Soon I was filled with gratitude.
Two days after the injury, a friend shared this Bible passage with me: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling ” (Jude 1:24). This meant to me that God keeps us from falling, not just physically, but mentally. Therefore, a false memory could never cause me to fall from my spiritual, harmonious being. I was grateful for this loving thought.
My knee rapidly improved, and, two days later, I was able to accomplish my regular 3.5-mile running loop freely and painlessly. I continue to run regularly today with no knee problems. I am most thankful for this healing lesson in the power of gratitude and for the video lectures and healing outreach of The Mother Church Web activities.
Sherborn, Massachusetts, US
