I was at a small museum when I became nauseated and short of breath and felt pain in my chest area. I might have had a sense of urgency if I had accepted my condition as life-threatening, but I knew I could quietly consider what the ever-presence of a loving Father-Mother God meant for me and that this would bring healing. As my husband drove me home, we were responding in the way I most wanted: immersing ourselves in what we had been learning about Life, God, and what we are as God’s image and likeness.
Once home, I felt the situation seemed serious enough to call a Christian Science practitioner for treatment. I found it helpful for the practitioner to tell me that the condition was not physical—because we live in God, who is Spirit, and that means we ourselves are spiritual, not physical. I also found it very helpful to be told that the condition had no name; God, who is all good, cannot know anything apart from goodness, and so in spiritual reality, it had no name. I was tempted at times to give a name to what I was experiencing, but I understood that giving credence to the symptoms would be wholly counterproductive, opening the door to all sorts of suggestions that something was wrong with me and that some kind of medical treatment would be needed to manage the problem. I wanted to have a complete healing through communion with God. I wanted to know what was right with me—the spiritual truth about me.
During that phone call, the practitioner also recommended I pray with “the scientific statement of being” from page 468 of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and with the weekly Lesson-Sermon from the Christian Science Quarterly, a study guide made up of passages from the Bible and Science and Health. The practitioner’s confident instructions served to shift my attention from merely seeking relief to a deep curiosity about, and appreciation for, what these references could teach me—powerful ideas to refute mistaken assumptions about life.
