I wish to express my gratitude for a healing of swollen feet and ankles, which led to a healing of anger along the way. When I experienced irritation in my feet for a few days, I didn’t think much about it or address it prayerfully. Then very quickly over the space of a couple of hours, both my feet and ankles swelled up. Alarmed, I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me.
He immediately rose mentally to refute the symptoms authoritatively as nothing more than the lying testimony of the material senses, and nothing to be afraid of. He based this assertion on Christ Jesus’ statement that the devil “is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44). He also shared a statement in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation” (p. 393). This gave me confidence that I would be healed through prayer in Christian Science, something which I have experienced many times before.
In the days following, I made sure that I looked away from the physical evidence, and I was led to study the definition of temple in the Glossary of Science and Health. Part of that definition is “body,” and this is immediately followed by “the idea of Life, substance, and intelligence; the superstructure of Truth; the shrine of Love” (p. 595).
I found the most difficult aspect of this experience was not the physical discomfort, which persisted, but the daily comments from a relative detailing diagnostic information from the internet. It said the condition was dangerous, and this information was shared with other family members. When I asked for the practitioner’s help in giving up resentment in regard to this, he pointed to a statement in Mrs. Eddy’s Message to The Mother Church for 1902 that reads, “The Christian Scientist cherishes no resentment” (p. 19), and in that same passage, “Brethren, even as Jesus forgave, forgive thou.” This helped me, as Science and Health says, to “walk over the waves” (p. 455) of unhelpful human opinion, and maintain a sense of peace and calm in my own thought.
At one point when the healing was not evident, I felt obliged to acknowledge and face down hatred that I had held for some years toward people I considered complicit in the death of my son; they had given him no hope of recovery, of life. The healing of hatred was very helpful to me, and it came about through the utter benevolence and total effectiveness of the practitioner’s loving prayerful assistance. I am sure every instance of hatred supplies its own history to validate itself, but in reality, it has none. Now, even if I try to think of the circumstances involved which gave rise to that hatred, I find I can’t feel anything except that it was all fundamentally unreal and untrue because Love, God, was there and the only power.
I worked for several weeks more with the practitioner and was grateful for each day’s progress. I began to realize that although I had been reading the Bible Lesson each day, attending Sunday services and Wednesday testimony meetings, and reading the periodicals, I would then go on with my so-called personal life, having lost the sense of discipline which ensures progress.
The practitioner helped me restore a more focused and purposeful study, which now includes praying daily with three By-Laws found in Article VIII of the Manual of The Mother Church by Mrs. Eddy, in the section called “Discipline.” These address daily duties of members of The Mother Church and are entitled “A Rule for Motives and Acts” (p. 40), “Daily Prayer” (p. 41), and “Alertness to Duty” (p. 42). Although the physical symptoms had not disappeared, all fear was gone and I felt a deep desire to read Science and Health all the way through again, noting that in it, Mrs. Eddy says “the book will become the physician” (p. 422). I thanked the practitioner for all his help and began to read.
Within a couple of days my feet and ankles returned to a normal appearance, and they have remained so. And happily, the relative who felt so distressed by the information given about the supposed condition on the internet witnessed this physical healing and was as pleased as I was about it.
Eleanor Winyard
Roade, Northampton, England
