In this Sentinel Watch podcast, adapted for print, David Brown talks with Russ Gerber, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher from Mission Viejo, California. To hear the podcast, visit sentinel.christianscience.com/who-are-you.
David Brown: Who are you, really? How do you see yourself? How do you think about yourself? And why should that matter? We’re talking with someone who’s given a lot of thought to this subject, and it’s a treat to welcome him to Sentinel Watch. Russ, good to talk with you.
Russ Gerber: Well, thank you for the invitation.
When you think about this issue of how we perceive ourselves, how do you think about it? Who are you, Russ?
That’s the $64,000 question. And I would have to say that, as I’ve thought through what goes into how you view yourself, how you think of yourself, I’ve come to the conclusion that it has just about everything to do with what you’re paying attention to. Let me give you a little experience that I had many years ago that really helped me zero in on this. I was working in media relations and I was on a business trip to Africa.
On the plane I was thumbing through the airline magazine, and I came across an article called “No more negative images please” (Anver Versi, Msafiri, March–April 2012). Being in media relations, I thought, “This sounds like it’s right up my alley.” And, boy, one quote in it just grabbed me. It said: “Only a single story of Africa is told by the media—a story of failure, famine and conflict. Thousands of other stories, of success, of heroism, of love, of courage, of life, are filtered out.”
And at that moment, I just kind of stopped and sat upright in my seat. Filtering out essential facts from a story is not an inconsequential action. If you do that, you’re presenting a distorted story. If it’s done over and over, it eventually becomes the dominant narrative.
Another part of the article quoted a CEO as saying: “The false image of Africa as a continent of abject poverty and failure . . . has been the dominant theme . . . for as far back as you can remember.” Then the author of the article says this: “Repeat an image again and again and it becomes the reality.” And later, the CEO mentioned earlier is quoted as saying, “We have come to believe that indeed we are as powerless and backward as we are portrayed.” And that really got me thinking on the rest of that flight—thinking about how we see ourselves. I mean, there were just so many lessons in that.
A lot of damage has been done by the constant repetition of negative stereotypes about Africa. And this is analogous to the way we repeatedly think negatively about ourselves or others—such as others are not good enough, helpless, we’re not needed or wanted, or we’re never healthy enough. Should we care about what viewpoint we hold and do we have a choice? That’s what I kept thinking about on that flight. I wanted an answer to that.
We hear what other people say about us, or we think about our own stories, write our own personal histories, and we do come up with a way that we see ourselves. What you seem to be suggesting is that the article got you thinking, “How can I see myself in a different way and perhaps improve my life?”
Yes. And in fact, not just improve an attitude or an outlook, being a little cheerier and a little more positive. But having a view so deep that you are actually able to not only undergo a character change but live a healthier life.
Just two, maybe three days ago, I was listening to the radio and heard yet another story related to the global pandemic. But this time, I paused for a moment and I suddenly had an insight. The underlying message in the stories about the pandemic is that people’s health is at risk. In other words, being healthy these days is not a given.
Now, a thought like that hits you and you pay attention to it. It’s like driving down the road and suddenly realizing, Hey, we’re going in the wrong direction. And while there are certainly valid news reports about people who are suffering, they aren’t the only story. And shouldn’t be the dominant one. There shouldn’t be this message that we just keep ruminating over that makes us feel powerless. That we’re at a standstill or maybe going backward. That got me thinking in a broader way about just how I think of myself or how I think of others.
I want to stop you for just a moment, though, Russ, because as I hear you speak, I think that maybe a listener hearing all this might be thinking, “Well, what’s the alternative—that we’re going to come up with some kind of other narrative? And how real is that? I mean, are we just coming up with some prettier story or prettier version or layering on a new set of beliefs about ourselves? And by the way, it sounds a little bit like hypnosis. Like we’re trying to talk ourselves into something else.” What would you say to that?
Well, positive thinking is certainly better than negative thinking. But if the positive thinking is something you’re imagining or conjuring up, it’s not going to go the full distance. It’s not going to be permanent. When I was going through that exercise of re-examining my thinking, I wondered, “Gee, is that all I need to do—just kind of be a little happier and cheerier?” It took me back many years to some real basic lessons I learned in Sunday School—some of the classic Bible stories of character redemption. They were of people who found a whole new life with Christianity and some who were healed of pretty bad illnesses.
And I thought, “Those were such inspiring stories, and they don’t strike me as rooted in just a better opinion of yourself.” Sure enough, as I’ve thought more about those stories, what I have since learned is that behind them, there is an enormous amount of valuable and good information and positive images that are getting filtered out day in and day out.
We need to be alert if we don’t want negative and self-destructive thoughts to define us. Like that article in the airline magazine said, we become who we believe ourselves to be. And when we turn negative thoughts around and really pay more attention to what we accept as providing health, that’s going to make a big change. In fact, it did make a seriously big change for me just some years ago in a healing I had.
What happened?
I woke up one morning and I couldn’t move. And when I say that, I mean I couldn’t move my legs and lower back. I was so surprised. I hadn’t exerted myself in any unusual way. I hadn’t been ill. And, you know, I admittedly just lay there thinking, “Well, this is certainly not normal. This is probably just a momentary thing and it’ll go away.” Bottom line is, I went through the entire day and still couldn’t move. I stayed in bed until late that night and I realized that, boy, this is quite serious and I’ve got to do something about it.
As my religious training and background in Christian Science really took over, I started thinking very seriously about how I should be thinking of myself. I started thinking about God and just put God first. I began by thinking of God as all good, as loving, as spiritual.
And I thought, “Well, if I want to begin to know myself and my God-given selfhood, I need to embrace more goodness, more love, more spirituality. I need to put these qualities first in my heart. And that’s got to have a beneficial effect.” So I started doing that. I did that as much as I could. I read some of those classic Bible stories. I dug deep into a book that I absolutely love and couldn’t live without, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, written by the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy.
And interestingly, something came to me from Science and Health, and it felt as though I were sitting down with the author and she was firing off these questions to me: “What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering?” Mentally, I was sort of nodding up and down, “Well, yeah.” And then: “Do you not hear from all mankind of the imperfect model?” Again, I kind of nodded up and down. And finally: “The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your life-work, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models” (p. 248).
I had to pause on that one and do a little self-examination. I had to admit I’d been paying too much attention to thinking: “I’m immobile. I don’t know why I can’t move—what’s causing this?” But then I could see what was meant when Science and Health says: “To remedy this, we must first turn our gaze in the right direction, and then walk that way. We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love—the kingdom of heaven—reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear” (p. 248).
I had to come to grips with that last point. Do I honestly believe that if health is more dominant in my thinking, then disease or immobility will diminish and disappear? Well, I just lay there and pondered that over and over and over, even as I still couldn’t move. I thought more about that perfect model—about God as the source of my life, infinitely good. I recall thinking, “Does God look at me and think, ‘Boy, you’re really in kind of a miserable condition here’? No!” I knew He didn’t see me as subject to loss of mobility. Quite the contrary. The thought that I was living in a body that could be declining and immobile just didn’t add up. And that’s when something changed quite dramatically.
All of a sudden a very different message came to me: that the culprit wasn’t that I was physically unable to move. The culprit was the mistaken self-concept that I was unable to move.
Now maybe that sounds like just playing with words, but it was suddenly very clear to me that the narrative I was accepting was taking me in the wrong direction. I just stood strong and said, “No, that’s not the story about me. That is not how God sees me.” And that inspiration at that moment was dramatic. Within about thirty seconds, I just thought, “I need to sit up.” But this time, nothing stopped me from doing that. I sat up in bed. I stood on my feet. I walked into the other room. My wife was there. She was kind of startled to see me. And I would say that there was hardly any discomfort for maybe ten minutes. And then there was none.
Nothing has convinced me more than this healing that when our self-concept is based on the true, spiritual concept of how God made you, this becomes the narrative, and it does bear fruit. It’s not just about a happy image or positive thinking. It’s life-transforming. It’s healing. And boy, I’ll tell you, that’s backed up when I remember this teaching from Jesus, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). I felt set free by Truth from the misconception that I was living in a material body that would decline and eventually become immobile.
Russ, that’s an incredible story. I want to go back to a point where something clicked and you started thinking about God. I thought, “Why did you start thinking about God? Why weren’t you thinking, ‘Who am I really? Who is Russ Gerber really?’ ” Why did you decide to think about God?
It really came out of my heart. I’ve found that knowing God is the fastest and best way to really get to know who I am as something beyond just the human view of myself with ups and downs. Over the years, I have put God first, the idea of God as Spirit, as infinite, as everywhere, as permanent—not something that fluctuates, but is constant—my source, the creator.
Because God, Spirit, made us, we are completely spiritual. And we are like the painting that comes from the painter. The music that comes from the musician. You can’t separate the two. Now, the painting is not the painter, but the painting is derived from the painter. The music is derived from the musician. The architecture comes from the architect. And so there is a closeness. There’s a relationship there, and that’s what determines the outcome.
You know, it’s interesting, as you were just talking about the painting and the painter, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a well-known musician several years ago. He said, “It’s a funny thing when I write a song and it gets a lot of attention or gets a lot of credit as being something special.” And when someone says, “Well, where did that idea come from?” he said, “I always say the same thing. I feel like for some reason it’s like [when I make music] I pull up my ‘antenna’ and I just get to work. It’s like I’m working off of a bigger pattern, a pattern that’s not just me, it’s something else.” And it sounds like in a way what you were doing in thinking about God—you were sort of pulling up that “antenna,” in a sense, and thinking about this bigger answer to the question, Who am I?
Yes, that’s a great illustration. And it definitely fits. I mean, it’s like asking for a revelation. You want it to be revealed to you—how you were made, how you are maintained, what you are capable of doing, what your purpose is for existing. And while you may not get that answer in one fell swoop, you get it a little here and a little there. Even when you’re really struggling to get it, it’s there, it’s something that’s revealed, it’s already established. You’re aligning your life to Truth. You find out, “Gosh, I really am a lot more patient than impatient. I can be a lot more loving than unloving.” And all of these things are transformative, including how you think of your health. Is it frail? Does it come and go? Or is health part of this divine revelation of who and what I am and how I’m made and how this whole universe operates—a universe where health is normal?
Hmm. You know, it’s got me thinking that it would be wonderful for everyone to think for just a moment, “Well, who am I? What does it mean to be me?” I think from the sound of it, it could be really transformational.
I’m sure it would be. You really want to know more about how you were made and what you were made to be and do, and that we each have a normal, happy, healthy, permanent selfhood that comes from God. God’s not going to change, nor is anything that comes from God. That’s a wonderful thing to learn.
