In November 2019, aggressive flu-like symptoms such as I’d never before experienced came upon me suddenly. It was a struggle not to become overwhelmed by the severity of the problem. Intuitively, I reached out to God, my Father-Mother. Over the years, I’ve felt a wonderful relationship to God of love and trust, which has resulted in healings of all kinds. So that’s where I turn for help at any time and under all circumstances.
In this instance, as I turned to God for direction on what specific erroneous belief to refute in prayer, the word occultism came to mind. The belief in evil as subtle, dark, and hidden, occultism includes all magic, secret so-called knowledge, supernatural powers, and the like. I knew that divine Science authoritatively reveals all evil influence (the meaning of the Italian word influenza, from which flu is derived) to be mental in origin and that it must and can be destroyed mentally through divine law—through spiritually scientific prayer.
Mary Baker Eddy writes, “Christian Science goes to the bottom of mental action, and reveals the theodicy which indicates the rightness of all divine action, as the emanation of divine Mind, and the consequent wrongness of the opposite so-called action,—evil, occultism, necromancy, mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 104).
