In browsing through some earlier decades of Christian Science testimonies online recently, I was struck by the startling contrast between so much of today’s social media and those snapshots of life that arrive weekly and monthly as testimonies of healing. Instead of being “selfies,” as it were—in pictures or in words—relaying the usual “latest” family accomplishments and opinions, testimonies are apt to tell of sacred life-changing moments. In fact, they often share someone’s first in-depth experiences of the real nature of life. Even three quarters of a century later you can still feel the wonder of what it was like to be the one saved several times from death in mid-ocean when a convoy was attacked during World War II or how it felt to be suddenly lifted out of years of chronic disease.
Powerful healings like these were so obviously valid and real and frequent, they were enough in themselves to develop a new momentum—new spiritual experiences shared throughout a family, news of healing traveling from neighbor to neighbor. Wednesday evening testimony meetings with people waiting to be next to speak of current healings. Naturally, all this produced joy, growth, and a stirring sense of fresh possibilities.
Yet the woman who discovered and founded Christian Science explained that something more would be needed if these substantial demonstrations of divine Love were to continue. That something would require not being drawn back constantly after healing to an imagined home base of material existence, with its self or personhood in matter. Joseph Mann, who had been healed by a Christian Scientist as he was dying of a gunshot wound, recalled Mary Baker Eddy saying years afterward to him: “You have had a wonderful experience. You were thrown violently out of the house [the mind-set that thinks it’s living in matter] and picked yourself up outside; go not back into the house” (We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, Volume II, p. 161).
