An urgent message arrives. The Apostle Peter is in a neighboring town, and Tabitha, another disciple, has died. Peter is needed right away. He departs immediately and is taken to a home filled with those lauding Tabitha’s good works and mourning her loss (see Acts 9:36–41). We have no biblical record of Peter joining in the mourning. Peter had seen Jesus alive after his crucifixion. So while the others in that room believed that Tabitha was dead, Peter understood the situation differently. He accepted, to some degree, that God’s view, which Jesus had shown him, was the reality, and a lifeless body was not.
At this point, Peter had a choice. Was he going to go along with the picture before his eyes? Or was he going to gain the spiritual view of the scene? He was probably already seeing or accepting Tabitha as God saw her—as an expression of divine Life, who had never been at the mercy of mortality. Peter asked the mourners to leave. He knelt beside the body to pray and said: “Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes: and when she saw Peter, she sat up” (Acts 9:40).
Peter did not let an earthly spectacle dictate what was true. He went higher, to the spiritual perspective. He accepted the spiritual view as being the reality at that moment, and the result was healing—Tabitha was brought back to life! Peter helped her up and called to the friends and presented her alive.
Peter was a disciple of Jesus. He learned from him. Jesus fully expressed the Christ, the activity of God evidenced in the transformation of individuals’ thought and the renewal of their experiences. He had taught Peter and the other disciples not to judge by what the physical senses reported. He said: “You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone that judge, but I and he who sent me” (John 8:15, 16, Revised Standard Version).
As Jesus raised the thought of those around him through a deep, consecrated understanding of God’s omnipotent Love, their experiences were transformed to health, usefulness, wholeness.
What Jesus saw is explained in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. She states: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (pp. 476–477).
Isn’t this the crux of it all? If we want to learn to heal as Jesus healed, then we need to follow his lead in this way. He is the Way-shower. He saw what God saw—perfection. He did not accept a material viewpoint, but replaced it through spiritual perception and understanding. And this matters to us today, if we are experiencing lack, restriction, sickness. Abundance, freedom, harmony, well-being, are universal desires met by divine Love. As we apprehend divine reality and dismiss what our material senses are testifying, the mists of fear, doubt, pain, and material thinking clear. Then, we see the presence of the spiritual idea, the presence of divine Love and Life.
Even when we encounter tragic or devastating problems, we can meekly, receptively claim the presence of what is spiritually true. We can refuse to allow the blindness of material thinking to determine what we discern as actual or real. The lack, disease, contention, before us are mistaken portrayals, or the counterfeit, of the real, the true.
Seeing from a spiritual outlook allows us to affirm the presence of eternal Life, the permanence of Spirit, the guidance of divine Mind, the wholeness and completeness of the radiance of Soul.
It is similar to the perspective, for instance, of looking up from the bottom of a lake. The view through the water appears fuzzy and cloudy.
A spiritual view is more like looking down from a mountaintop at the lake glistening and clear in bright sunshine. Allowing pain, sickness, fear, or discouragement into thought only shows how things look through the distortion of matter-based thinking.
A “mountaintop” observation is seeing from a spiritual outlook—seeing what divine Love is seeing. That allows us to affirm the presence of eternal Life, the permanence of Spirit, the guidance of divine Mind, the wholeness and completeness of the radiance of Soul.
Many years ago, I developed a debilitating migraine. The extreme discomfort made me very restless, and I desperately needed a sense of peace. I called my husband at work, and he came home to help me through prayer. He sat down in the bedroom chair to read aloud citations from the Bible and Science and Health in that week’s Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson.
About halfway through the Lesson I felt a peace come over my thought and body. I was able to lie still and listen. The pain lifted from me as if a suffocating blanket had been removed. By the time he finished reading the Bible Lesson, I was able to rest calmly, and later I was able to fix dinner.
My husband was not focused on the picture in front of him of a distraught woman. He was focused on the truth in each of those passages from the Bible and from Science and Health. The spiritual truth in those passages left no room for thoughts of pain or discomfort, an erroneous picture. Truth filled the room, bringing a sweet sense of calm, serenity, and wellness. I often turn to this healing to remind myself not to focus on tumultuousness, agitated testimony from the physical senses, or a difficult scene, but to close my mental eyes to discord and calmly acknowledge the goodness that God is seeing right there, right then.
As we humbly accept what God has created, we are surrendering to the power and presence of divine Love. We are lifted up to Christ’s view. We are refusing to accept material opinions and difficulties as having authority. We are claiming the spiritual, the real, the Godlike, as fact, and surrendering to this biblical truth: “I am the Lord, and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:5). It is in that position of humility, when we turn to divine Love, that we recognize Love’s present expression. The temptation to buy into a disquieting scene fades, and we tangibly cognize what God sees as present reality.
Peter took that position of humility as he knelt down next to Tabitha. He perceived what God had made and not what the other mourners were apparently seeing. His mountaintop thinking, his clear vision of Tabitha as an expression of Life, lifted her up spiritually and literally.
When Peter knelt down next to Tabitha, he was surrendering to the onliness of Love, of Truth, of Spirit, of God. Peter’s viewpoint in Tabitha’s room can become our viewpoint whenever we face sickness or other trouble. On his knees, as he allowed Spirit, Life, to be in charge, the situation changed from death to life, from tragedy to joy, from loss to health and right activity.
We can humbly lift thought to a spiritual perspective and acknowledge what divine Love is seeing and knowing. We can express gratitude for God’s ever-present perfection and God’s creation, right where a disturbing circumstance seems to be. We can kneel down, at least mentally, before infinite Love to behold eternal Life, the substance of Spirit, the infinitude of Mind, the presence of God. Then, we will see the spiritual reality that brings healing.
“The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice.”
No evidence before the material senses
can close my eyes to the scientific proof
that God, good, is supreme.
—Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 277
