In this JSH-Online.com audio podcast, adapted for print, Christian Science practitioner and teacher Rob Gilbert spoke with Audio Producer Rita Polatin.
Rob, what lessons have you learned during those times when you had to be really persistent in your prayers to find healing?
There hasn’t been one particular standout situation in my life, but a series, and each time I learned a little more about persistence and how to overcome discouragement.
The first thing that comes to mind is a situation my wife and I had with one of our sons when he was little. Now, this may not seem like a big issue in light of the huge problems that people are facing today. I think it’s not so much how big a problem is, but how we deal with the discouragement.
Our son had the habit of sucking on his fingers, and I remember friends would tell us we’d better fix it early on, and at first I just disregarded it, thought he’d grow out of it. After a while it became obvious we needed to deal with this, and we would talk to our son, and I would pray about it, my wife would pray about it, yet nothing was working. We started to put little mittens on our son at night before he’d go to sleep, and find those on the floor in the morning and his fingers in his mouth. Then, we sewed the mittens onto his pajama tops so he couldn’t pull them off at night, but he’d cry about this.
After many months, I was just so discouraged. My wife suggested, “Why don’t we call for some outside help?” In other words, have somebody outside of the family praying about this, giving Christian Science treatment—and my initial feeling was, “What could they do that I couldn’t do?” But after calming down I did call a Christian Science practitioner to pray with us. One Christian Science treatment did it, overnight. One time—and that was the end of the problem. That really startled me.
It made me really think about what was going on, and several years later I read a poem that brought out what I needed to know. It’s called “Believe me—it wasn’t easy” by Marcella Krisel. It was a poem in the January 1977 Journal. It was also reprinted in a compilation of poetry from the Christian Science periodicals called Ideas on Wings; the author wrote:
For far too long
I played host to a problem
That I thought was up to me to solve.
I wrestled with it daily—
Denouncing, entreating, resenting it.
Unfortunately, it thrived
On all this attention
And the free room and board.
Finally, at a particularly low point
Of human discouragement
I was spurred into immediate
Action of a different sort
By a flash of insight:
“I can of mine own self do nothing.”
In what seemed then
To be a fit of recklessness
(Almost irresponsibility)
I tossed that problem out,
Out—with all its trappings—
From under my protective shadow
Into the bright sunshine.
There the light of Truth and Love,
Unimpressed, serenely
Dissolved and displaced it
In a matter of moments.
Now, to me, that’s what happened. I’d learned something about “I can of mine own self do nothing” (John 5:30). To carry that theme on, Jesus also said, “The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (John 14:10), and I needed those insights. The other thing I thought fit so well was “tossing it out from under my protective shadow.” Sometimes it seems that we are working so long on a problem that it has become such a reality to us. We need to get out of the way and let some light reach the problem and show its nothingness.
That light of Truth …
That light of Truth. And there’s this idea of tossing the problem out into the bright sunshine, into the light of divine Truth and divine Love. Truth and Love are capitalized here because they are synonyms for God. None of these difficulties we’re facing are from God—none of them. In fact, they’re unreal to God, just like darkness is unreal to light.
The other thing that I’ve been learning over the years relates to this statement from the poem here, “In what seemed then to be a fit of recklessness (almost irresponsibility) I tossed that problem out.” I’ve been learning that there’s a feeling of exaggerated personal responsibility that often gets in the way of healing.
I’d learned something about “I can of mine own self do nothing.”
Over the years I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue of personal responsibility, and it helped me in another experience I wanted to mention. I was working with the state legislature in California, trying to get an amendment attached to a particular bill.
The bill was OK, but there was an element of it that could inadvertently be devastating to the people we represented. I was working on the bill with a friend, and we really worked hard to get that amendment into the bill. But everything was turning out wrong. We’d tried so hard and there was absolutely no responsiveness. I was feeling terribly discouraged!
I remember when it was down to the last couple of hours, we found a place to be quiet and just sat down and prayed. It was a moment for me of total self-surrender. I prayed: “All right, Father, what I want here is just to know what You want me to know, do what You want me to do; it’s Your responsibility. I’m here to learn whatever it is I need to learn.”
I needed to recognize God’s responsibility. That was my responsibility—that might sound strange—but it was my responsibility to recognize God’s responsibility.
That’s what Jesus did when he said, “Not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42).
Yes. Well, within an hour, everything turned around with the bill. I’m not quite sure how it was accomplished, in terms of the sequence of things, but it all turned around, and things turned out well.
So then, in that experience with the legislation, what you really saw was that your only responsibility was to glorify God, to do God’s will, to really respond to the power of God.
Yes, and it sounds very simple, the way you presented it just now, and I did eventually come to that conclusion. But at the time, I think, deep down inside, I felt like I had to “get this done,” get the issue solved, and had been praying for God’s help to do it. Yet we were bumping up against so many brick walls that it brought me to a point where, in my heart of hearts, I just yielded entirely to God. The other thing I was learning out of this experience was something about having what might be called a wilderness experience.
Tell us more about that.
Well, a wilderness experience, to me, is being in a situation where there are absolutely no favorable material conditions that you can work with. I might mention, though, that in the Bible, wilderness doesn’t mean trees and dense woods, and jungle; it means a landscape absolutely barren of anything. And, when you think about the wilderness in the Bible, there are all kinds of amazing things that happened there. For instance, when you think of the wilderness, Moses and the children of Israel during the Exodus were in the wilderness, and they had nothing to eat, and there was the manna, and the quail, and …
And water—they got water out of the rock.
Yes, absolutely. It was this flinty, hard, dry place, and Moses struck it with a rod, and water gushed out. Later, the Ten Commandments were revealed to Moses from God in the wilderness during a time of rebellion among the Israelites. Then there was the example of Elijah. Elijah was so discouraged that he went out into the wilderness, and he just lay down and said, essentially: “I want to die. Nothing is working out the way it should.” He goes up to the mount and has that experience with the “still small voice,” and it turns everything around for him (see I Kings 19:4–12).
Also, Jesus fed the multitude in the wilderness, and by the time we get to the book of Revelation, wilderness has come to be a symbol of a holy place in man’s extremity, the clarity of God operating to meet the human need.
I’ve been learning that there’s a feeling of exaggerated personal responsibility that often gets in the way of healing.
Mary Baker Eddy has a description, a definition, of wilderness in the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that I think fits, and certainly fits with some experiences I’ve had. She says: “Wilderness. Loneliness; doubt; darkness.” But then she says: “Spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence” (p. 597). And I think any of us that find ourselves in a wilderness situation where there are absolutely no favorable material conditions to support any hope—it doesn’t change the fact that God is there guiding us and caring for us. God is in control, and is meeting the human need. I like that word “spontaneity.” Spontaneous means something that is not dependent on anything extraneous or outside of itself, like spontaneous combustion. It doesn’t need a match, or kindling, or anything. It’s a sense of inspiration welling up from within us.
That’s what happens in a wilderness setting. Even though there is no material cause and effect to give hope that something is going to happen, it doesn’t change the fact that God’s there and is in control, and can awaken us to feel His love. So, those experiences have taught me that what appears to be a discouraging situation is more a state of thought than an actual physical reality, and that this state of thought can be addressed and corrected by Truth, resulting in healing.
It takes persistence, and in the persistence we may learn some things that perhaps are getting in the way, like this exaggerated sense of personal responsibility that was so important for me to see and remove. We need to experience those times of total self-surrender to God and God’s care.
When one appears to be in a wilderness setting, in what appears to be such a discouraging situation, it actually doesn’t interfere one little bit with the ability of God to take care of us. Just like in the Bible, those wilderness settings can become a symbol of a holy place where man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
