We all have experienced times of poor health, financial worries, or disruptions in our ability to think and act normally, at one time or another. Responding to these challenges with prayer as practiced in Christian Science begins with identifying what is really going on. It’s knowing that God is the all-good creator of man and the universe, expressing goodness throughout His creation. Then, we have a standpoint from which to move forward in our thought and actions: God is, and nothing unlike God is.
The physical senses present an alternative reality about us—a supposed reality of hurt, mistakes, hate, and so on—and so we’re faced with a choice: What will we accept as fact?
Accepting the reports of the senses with the limitations and incapacities they assert is counterproductive. It’s vitally important to understand the unreality of what those senses report to us, given what we know spiritually about God’s fathering and mothering of us. But it’s also critical that we don’t get involved in any type of “battle” with those reports. Focusing our attention on what is not true never heals. And it keeps us from reveling in what is true, which does heal.
As Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, puts it in a book called Rudimental Divine Science, “Health is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else” (p. 11). She also gave this advice: “Think only on the right side; let not the unreal decoy you into combat” (Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, p. 246).
Experience in Christian healing shows that as we understand and trust that God is good and governs His creation, and act from that standpoint, we are in fact denying the material presentation and accepting the “right side,” or spiritual reality. Then our lives are transformed. Healing happens.
One time, my husband suddenly became incapacitated in a public place. We called a Christian Science practitioner to pray for him and got him home. When I checked back with the friend who was praying for my husband, I reported that he was lying on the bathroom floor. She very quickly and firmly said, “Tell him to get up,” and he did.
What has stayed with me about that event (other than gratitude for the healing) is that clear command telling him to get up. I saw that my husband was being asked to “stand” on what he knew was true about himself and his relation to God. He knew he had a spiritual, God-fashioned identity as stated in the Bible: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (Genesis 1:27). And the Bible records this powerful assurance from God: “I am the Lord, and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:5). So despite what the senses were promoting, God was telling my husband at that very moment that God was All—and always All. It was as though God was saying to my husband: “My love for you is, and nothing else is. You are safe in My love.” The practitioner was asking my husband to consent to that, and then to act on it—and he did. He consented and got up. That was the beginning of his healing.
There’s strong evidence from Jesus’ healing work that it was important for those healed to act on the God-established truth about themselves. Jesus acknowledged God as our Father, a loving Father. His certainty of this fact enabled others to accept it as well. Jesus commended believing the truth he was sharing, and faith as evidence of doing so, but additionally, he often asked those he healed to show their consent by their actions.
That was the case in an account recorded in the Bible of a man with a withered hand. Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand. He did so and “his hand was restored whole as the other” (Mark 3:5). At another point, Jesus told a man who was paralyzed, “I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.” And that’s what happened: “Immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before them all” (Mark 2:11, 12). Another time he told ten lepers to “go shew yourselves unto the priests,” with the result that, “as they went, they were cleansed” (Luke 17:14). Notice how the lepers trusted and acted on his command even before they were healed.
Likewise, in her guidance to healers in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy asserts the importance of giving consent to spiritual facts. She gives this counsel: “Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good” (p. 393). She also writes: “Instead of blind and calm submission to the incipient or advanced stages of disease, rise in rebellion against them” (p. 391). And also: “It requires courage to utter truth; for the higher Truth lifts her voice, the louder will error scream, until its inarticulate sound is forever silenced in oblivion” (p. 97). Resistance, rebellion, uttering truth—these are all actions that affirm what is true, despite what the physical senses may be telling us.
Healing prayer always begins with clarity about God’s nature and what we are as the loved child of our Father-Mother God. A next imperative is, again, to consent to these divine facts by trusting our divine nature, and thinking and acting from the standpoint of our spiritual origin.
“Standing” on our prayers is never an activity of human willpower; rather, it’s a humble yielding to God. Willfulness assumes that we’re in charge—that we are the healer and responsible for finding the right thoughts to bring about healing (and this can lead to feeling the need to frantically hunt for those right thoughts). A statement in Science and Health makes clear that the human mind is not a healer; God, through Christ, is the healer: “. . . the sick are never really healed except by means of the divine power. Only the action of Truth, Life, and Love can give harmony” (p. 169). Nor is standing on our prayers just waiting and doing nothing. It requires a response. It requires faith, trust, accepting, consenting, and participating. This may of course include growing spiritually in our understanding of God.
In summary, standing for our healing involves:
Knowing God and Her supremacy over all. Knowing our relation to that Love divine.
Trusting those spiritual facts.
Acting on the basis of these spiritual facts.
Doing so might enable us to walk two steps when we thought we could take only one. (By knowing, for example, that because God is my Life, and I am God’s reflection, then I can move.) We might do something to help someone else even when we don’t appear to have what seems needed. (By knowing that God is abundant Love, we always have what we need.) We might treat someone kindly despite their malice toward us. (Knowing that Love is expressed in all of us, and that we can’t be tricked into believing something else.)
As it is written in the book of Nehemiah: “Stand up and bless the Lord your God for ever and ever” (9:5). To stand on the God-created reality of what we truly are is to challenge the story of the senses with Christ-inspired thinking and actions. That’s worshiping and praising God. That heals.
