In this Sentinel Watch podcast, adapted for print, David Brown talks with Nate Frederick, a Christian Science practitioner and lecturer from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. To hear the podcast visit jsh.christianscience.com/nature-of-life.
David: Nate, when we talk about healing and we talk about God in the same thought, I think for a lot of people that’s a somewhat new topic. And it certainly does run counter to what we hear in the press about situations that need healing—from sicknesses to relationships. So when you say healing, and you’re relying on God to do the healing, what are you talking about?
Nate: Well, I think that blanket term healing is just about harmony, whether it’s in a relationship or a body or a career. Whenever we’re experiencing discord or conflict, I think there’s a way to understand more about God’s nature and who we are as God’s expressions that helps us get a spiritual sense of ourself, a sense of ourself as existing here to express God, divine Love. And as we do that, we can begin to find harmony in our life in a way that’s consistent, in a way that’s just wonderful.
I bet there are some people listening to this program who are genuinely seeking something new, something that can provide answers and direction for them as they search out harmony in their own lives. But they come across this concept of God, and sometimes it’s a little hard to know what to make of that idea. When you use the term God, what are you referring to?
For me, God is such a logical thing to not only have faith and believe in, but understand. I think God is what created everything, what’s maintaining everything. And if you just take a step back, we seem to assume that we’re self-made. We go through the day thinking that we need to make something of ourselves and we’re making our own decisions. But we’re all in life together and there’s Life that’s created us and is sustaining us. It’s making this moment. We’re not doing it by human will, and Life is one word I use for God. It’s what we all belong to, what we’re all in. It’s something bigger and beyond ourselves. And it’s not a human psyche or will or just an individual entity separate from every other entity. There’s one thing behind it all and we could call it Life.
When you feel really at one with Life—if you’re, for instance, walking out in nature and you don’t feel separate from the trees and the sky—you feel unified, you feel Life. And we also call God Love. Love gives that sense of the unity of being. For me, Life and Love are really the same thing from different angles, and Christian Science uses a lot of other words to help explain what we mean by God. [Editor’s note: You can find other synonyms for God in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, on page 587.]
What are some other words for God?
Well, Mind is one. Mind is behind everything, and it’s more than the human mind. I think we’re all united in universal Mind. If you talk to great musicians or people who spend a lot of time praying in their lives, they’ll have many experiences they could share with you about inspiration that just comes from something larger than their own individual minds. I would call that God.
You’re suggesting that there’s a better way of going about healing, not by beginning with, say, yourself or what the senses are telling you.
That’s absolutely right. Just a couple of days ago a friend who knew that I am a Christian Scientist—they knew that I spent a lot of my time praying for others and helping others find healing in their lives—said something to me. They said, “You know, I really admire you because you think so positively about things.” And they were giving me a little praise, and then they pivoted and said, “But you know, that’s so impractical because the world is full of evil.” And they were kind of arguing with themselves like, I want to believe that, but it’s just not practical, it’s not really true. I had to laugh because I think Christian Science and thinking out from God is the most logical, practical thing in the world. It really has helped me find solutions to problems that I face every day.
I’ll give you a recent example. I’m thinking about a marathon I ran in the spring of 2021, and this was a marathon that occurred right when things started to open up after Covid started to mitigate a bit and events started to open up here in the Northeast of the United States. Frankly, I was thinking a bit negatively about this event because I kept thinking that the people organizing the race probably are just trying to take my money. They’re not going to really have this event this year, are they? They’ll probably postpone it to next year or it’ll be a virtual event somehow. So I wasn’t really training very much, and there were just some other limitations I felt that were in my thought.
It turned out that as I started halfheartedly training for this, I started to develop a problem in my hip or the top of one of my legs and my leg would seize up after about six, seven, eight miles.
So I started to think, Well, at least I could go there, do my best, cheer others on, and I could just accept the limitation that I was dealing with. But I started to think to myself, Well, this is not what I’ve experienced through Christian Science. Christian Science isn’t just thinking positively while accepting a limitation. It’s really helping us look out from God and seeing the unlimited nature of our own lives.
For something to be eternal, it doesn’t just go on forever, but it’s unaffected by time.
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, once said this, referring to God as I am as the Bible does: “Just where mortal mind says, ‘I can’t,’ you must know, ‘I can’—for ‘I can’ is the Son of ‘I am’ ” (We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Vol. 2, p. 285). And the more we can begin to think out from God, we can really sense this infinite ability that we all have to express good at any time.
I felt like I was so stuck in my own little problem, on this hamster wheel, thinking about my own physical issue. And so in my prayers I started to really expand my love and to pray for everyone who was running this event. This would be an experience of freedom for everyone.
I started to think about myself spiritually instead of as a physical entity with some physical problems. I started to think about God as Spirit itself and that I was the image and likeness of Spirit, God, as it says in the first chapter of Genesis. And you know, even though Jesus isn’t with us anymore physically, what he expressed is. And that’s the Christ, the Truth which animated him. The inspiration of the Christ really is throughout the Bible and throughout the writings of Mrs. Eddy.
I was reading a lot of things in the Bible and Science and Health and just getting really inspired. I started to feel like it talks about in First Corinthians 13 in the Bible, this beautiful letter about love, where it says that in the end faith, hope, and love remain, and the greatest of these is love. I started to feel the sense of hope bubbling up that maybe, just maybe, I can run this marathon. Maybe it’s not based upon my physical training, but maybe it’s based upon God. Jesus said, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63). I really felt that this inspiration from God could animate me, could propel me forward.
I have to say, David, it really seemed nothing less than a miracle when marathon day came. I didn’t feel any pain in my leg at all. I mean, I couldn’t run a mile the day before without pain, and I was able to run the whole marathon faster than I had run a marathon before. I was able to feel an incredible sense of love throughout the whole thing, this love motivating me and propelling me, and I felt it for everyone doing that marathon. It was a remarkable experience. But it wasn’t something that was supernatural or unusual. It felt real, right, natural, beautiful.
You were referring to God at one point as I am. Could you explain that?
Well, in every philosophy or science or theory of life, you have to have what’s called a first principle, something that can’t be explained in terms of anything else. You know, if you think that life is material, then you would say, “Well, what’s a human body? It’s made up of organ systems. What are organ systems made up of? Of organs. What are organs made up of?” As you go down the line you get to cells. And eventually the atoms. And materialists have never been able to find a base constituent of life.
You could think, for example, that life is made of atoms. Then you look inside the atom and it’s 99.999% empty space. So it seems like there’s really nothing there. It’s a vacuous concept. But in Christian Science, we start from the idea that God is fundamental. Another way to think about God is as Principle. And you start to find that term I am. It just means that which is fundamental. It can’t be explained in terms of anything else. It just is. And so another way to think about it is the word eternal. For something to be eternal, it doesn’t just go on forever, but it’s unaffected by time and space. So when I think of God, I think of that which doesn’t change. It’s the basis of everything that’s right and real.
So what you’re describing is taking a different standpoint when you’re thinking about a situation; you’re not beginning with the atomized version, which is what the senses may communicate to you about the world. You’re beginning with a concept about the nature of being. The Truth is where you’re beginning.
Yes. When you read the Bible, Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). And he really felt that what he was teaching was eternal, it was true for all time.
Jesus’ teachings, I think, could be summed up in that beautiful word Love. I think Love is behind everything, the unity of being, harmony.
As humanity progresses and they find more intelligent solutions to things, those solutions that we discover have always existed, right? And so I think anything is possible. We just haven’t been able to discover and utilize everything about life yet. But through the practice of Christian Science, we begin to understand how to utilize the kind of logic that Jesus used to bring healing, to heal sickness and limitation and discord. It’s not a mystery, it’s something that can be studied and applied.
When you talk about healing, you’re beginning with a vision of reality as fundamentally spiritual.
Absolutely. I think, for me, that word spiritual means mental and good. It means that consciousness is behind everything, but that everything also has that nature of good or Love. The world is kind of hypnotized in this belief that things are material. But they miss out on what life fundamentally is when they look at things through that paradigm. To say something is material, it’s saying that it is captured in a body of limited descriptions.
So if you are to describe me, for example, and you start to list out every little parameter—how tall I am, what color eyes I have, how I speak English, every little parameter—and you are able to make a simulation in a computer of me based upon those descriptions, that still wouldn’t be me.
It’s missing Mind, it’s missing Spirit. It’s missing real Life. It’s missing Soul. It’s missing all that in Christian Science we call God’s expression.
I was thinking about your work as a Christian Science practitioner, and about how when you take yourself—a false sense of yourself—out of things, that can really be key to healing. And that opens up answers.
If you read the Old Testament, there was this sense of an eye for an eye, a kind of human justice vision of the world. And that’s where a lot of people are today. They want to be right. They want to find situations that are just. They want people to act just and right towards them. But Jesus really uplifted thought to show our reason for existing is to love. It is to express divine Love, God, and real love doesn’t look for something in return. It’s not a quid pro quo deal, “I love you as long as I’m getting the love back.” That’s where a lot of us stop. We try to love. And then if we’re not getting it back, we think, OK, well, it’s not fair for me to keep loving. It’s a waste of my time.
It is an unselfish love that heals, this love that comes right from God.
But it is an unselfish love that heals, this love that comes right from God. And I found that takes a lot of humility. And it’s not positive thinking that gets us there. It’s an abandonment of our belief that our thinking is going to get us there, and it’s a reliance on God, divine Mind.
Isn’t that interesting, because you’re really delineating a break from positive thinking. A lot of folks feel like, “Well, my motives are good; I want to be fair and I want to do right and all.” But what you’re describing is that if we’re stuck in this place where our sense of good isn’t expansive, that we’re missing out on what actually does resolve situations.
That’s absolutely right, and often people make decisions in life based upon what the physical senses say to them. Of course, you know, we have all sorts of optical illusions that show us that often what we see is not true and the physical senses are limited. The human eye can only see just a little bit of the spectrum of light. Also, you could see two plus two equals four on a chalkboard next to two plus two equals five. We know that only one of those things you’re seeing is real because it expresses an invisible principle, right? It’s an invisible principle that brings harmony, and it’s the same thing in our life.
We often feel hatred or jealousy or inadequacy or impatience. We say, “Well, I feel it. Of course it’s real because I feel it.” But again, if it’s not expressing God, then just because you feel it doesn’t make it real, just like you could see something that is not real because there’s not a principle behind it. And this is really helpful because with the study of Christian Science, it gives us what’s true, and it also allows us to logically begin to reason out from what’s true.
I want to pick up on something that you just said. You’re describing the appeal to spiritual sense, the appeal to a higher sense of who we are, as absolutely crucial and this being scientific in terms of the ways that the law of God operates. But what makes it Christian Science?
Well, it’s just simply that it’s following the way of Jesus.
I’ve got a little four-year-old at home and, on a good day, she worships me. She thinks that I can meet all of her needs and she thinks that I can supply her with everything she wants and more. And I’m happy to do that at this stage of her life, but I hope one day that she grows up and does the things that I’ve done in my own life and even greater. And I think that’s how it was with Jesus and his disciples, who were essentially adolescents or toddlers in their spiritual understanding. They were learning how to heal like he did, learning how to do good like he did.
Worship is a wonderful thing—to feel God’s presence, to be grateful for good just to get outside of our own concerns and think about God. The worship of God is wonderful. But Christian Science brings us beyond just a mere sense of Christian worship to beginning to see how Jesus perceived Life and how to replicate the good works that he did. And I think that’s a higher practice of Christianity, not just to worship God, but to actually think as Jesus thought and do as he did. He said go and do likewise (see Luke 10:37) to his followers. And so I think that’s where you get the Christian aspect of Christian Science.
When you think about how Jesus approached healing, people referred to him as the Christ. How did Jesus approach healing as you read it, in the Bible? Was he basically turning first to God and not to what was in front of him? I guess that’s the starting point.
Absolutely. There are a lot of things that Jesus said in the Bible that give us some insight into how he thought about God. I think the way that Christ Jesus, as the Son of God, perceived God is so vastly beyond my own demonstration. I can’t say exactly how he understood God. But there are some things which I’ve learned over the years that I’ve found point me in the right direction. The way that Jesus saw himself, I think, is key to understanding how he approached life and how he healed.
He started off Jesus of Nazareth and people asked, “What good can come out of Nazareth?” because he was defined by the limitations of that place. Just like we often define ourselves by: I’m from this town or have this social status or this color skin or I have this job. But Christ Jesus knew himself as the Son of God. And he called God his Father. He didn’t see himself as the image of another human or following in a human’s footsteps. He really saw himself as the image of God.
But the Bible doesn’t say that just Jesus was the image of God. It says in the first chapter that man is the image and likeness of God, which includes all of us, male and female. And so Jesus said that God is greater than he was. But he also said that he was at one with God. So, you know, an analogy I like to think about is, it’s like the sun and its rays, that if God is the sun and each ray of light is the expression of the sun, you can’t have the sun without the rays. I think Jesus saw himself really as the expression of God and not the product of any material process or material history.
Well, that was Jesus. Can we see ourselves as the expression of God too?
Yeah, that’s exactly what Christian Science teaches. That’s what it’s about. In the book of Philippians it says that we can have the Mind that was also in Christ Jesus (2:5). And so I take that as a beautiful promise. And Christian Science shows us the Science or that knowledge that Jesus had and how to begin to humbly, thought by thought, think as Jesus thought and begin to see ourselves as the image, or product, of God, being animated by God and not influenced by a material past or defined exclusively by a material body or the work we’ve done or anything like that.
I can’t help but think of the word radical; this is a radically different way of thinking about how we approach a lot of issues. What you’re describing seems like a new way of thinking about prayer. What you’re doing is you’re actively seeing yourself as part of that singularity of being.
Yeah, that’s a beautiful phrase. I think sometimes it’s a good starting point in prayer just to ask God to enable us to express more love, or even that prayer of petition that often orients ourself to be thinking about God, to position our thought and lives in the direction of God. But we want to go beyond that. We don’t have an existence outside the Life that’s creating and sustaining us. Life, Love, is the source of all true and good ideas. And as we pray this way, I find that that’s where you really find profound and lasting meaning in life—when you really seek to experience God instead of just talk about God or think about God. You can actually have a true experience of God.
