When confronted with sickness and pain, there are two essential points found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Christian Science textbook by Mary Baker Eddy, that give very practical guidance to anyone wanting to practice and experience Christian Science healing. I’ve found that these two points give traction to prayer in Christian Science, centering it on God as infinite, all, rather than the problem, and therefore leading to healing. And they’re based on Christ Jesus’ theology and healing ministry.
One essential point is the following: “The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man’s origin. To begin rightly is to end rightly” (p. 262). So to begin rightly is to begin with an understanding of the true origin of man—of each of us—which is God. Christ Jesus spoke of man being “born of the Spirit” (John 3:6). On the other hand, a matter-oriented perspective claims that we are flawed mortals originating from other flawed mortals, all embedded in material existence. Thankfully, our innate spiritual intuition rebels—That is not who we are! That is not our origin! The false claim is the opposite of the truth presented in Genesis 1 that Spirit, God, good, is the creator of all of us and that God made us in His spiritual image and likeness. It follows that man is God-endowed with every good quality of his creator.
As we shift our thought from a matter-basis to a wholly spiritual origin, our prayer then aligns with the core teachings of the Bible and its many declarations of God’s allness and absolute goodness, and man’s eternal oneness with God as His spiritual creation—which is what we truly are now, and always have been. We understand spiritually that we are God’s children, healthy, whole, and exempt from the belief of pain and discord of every kind. The first point guides us to begin with the only genuine view: perfect God as the origin of perfect man. This foundational spiritual identification—what we are and what our origin is—shows the falsity of a material view of an imperfect and sickly mortal man, dissolves that view and anything associated with it, and opens the way to healing.
