The Christian Science Sunday School is a place of healing. Students study the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. And they learn how to apply what they are learning to daily experiences. This is a lasting instruction, the lessons of which are applicable throughout life.
One of my Sunday School teachers was a practitioner, a Christian Scientist who is available at any time to pray for others for healing. One Sunday, as a young teen, I began not feeling well in class. My head hurt, my stomach felt upset, and I just wanted to go home. Not really, though. What I truly wanted was to be healed. Then suddenly, I felt mentally nudged. I raised my head and saw my teacher looking at me with such a loving expression on her face, and I realized that I no longer felt bad. I was in awe. One moment I couldn’t wait to go home, but the next I was free of all symptoms of illness. In the 45 years since that day in Sunday School, I have never again experienced those symptoms.
In thinking about this experience over the years, I realized that my teacher had seen me as I really was: God’s child, a spiritual idea, the healthy expression of Life. She had perceived a need and corrected her thought about it, and I felt that correction. As Mrs. Eddy explains: “Beloved Christian Scientists, keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them. . . . Good thoughts are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort. And not only yourselves are safe, but all whom your thoughts rest upon are thereby benefited” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 210). That’s what happened to me.
One moment I couldn’t wait to go home, but the next I was free of all symptoms of illness.
This teacher shared many healing experiences with her classes to illustrate that the truths we were learning were practical. One time she told us about how her younger son, as a baby, had been crawling toward the top of the basement stairs. She didn’t have time to stop him, and he fell down the stairs. But she did have time to pray, and she understood her son’s existence, as a child of God, to be intact. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, it was as if he landed in a pile of feathers. He was unhurt.
A few years later, I was night skiing with people from my school. I wasn’t very experienced, and I was on what some call the “bunny slope.” Other skiers had built up a mound of snow at the bottom of the hill and made it into a jump. Skiing off the jump made the skier airborne for a short time. I was enjoying using this jump, and on one run I started from the very top of the slope to get as much speed as possible. But a curl had formed at the end of the jump, so when I hit it with the increased speed, I went very high into the air and found myself spinning backward and looking up at the sky.
More than theory, that spiritual Sunday instruction was practical.
At that moment, I remembered my Sunday School teacher’s account. I felt at peace. I hit the ground on my back and bounced up to a standing position, unhurt. A bystander who witnessed the unintended acrobatics commented that when I hit the ground, it was as though I landed in a pile of feathers. I had no injury, and decades later, there have been no adverse effects.
How grateful I’ve been over my lifetime for the lessons I learned in Sunday School. More than theory, that spiritual Sunday instruction was practical. The truths taught and learned were applicable to real-life experiences, and I dearly cherish the ones I’ve had—and I’m sure I’m not alone. I am very grateful that Mrs. Eddy established a provision for Sunday School instruction in the Church Manual.
