Learning about healing in Christian Science was an important part of my Sunday School years. With the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, as study guides, we students were taught how to pray, and that we would find the answer to every problem by turning to God.
A healing that continues to mean much to me happened when I was in college and attending a three-day meeting for Christian Science college organizations at The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. Students from all over the world were there. It was an impressive gathering that awakened in me a deeper love for God and man, and a resolve to be more God-centered.
The first day of this meeting, I woke up with a severe headache. I had had such headaches in the past. “Oh no!” I thought. I’d so looked forward to this event, and now I was feeling so ill I didn’t know if I would be able to attend. But knowing that God’s love was ever present to care for and sustain me, I determined I would and could go.
When I entered a downstairs corridor of the Church, I noticed there were passages from the Bible and Mrs. Eddy’s writings on the walls. One caught my attention, and I stopped and read the message, which appears on page 496 of Science and Health this way: “Hold perpetually this thought,—that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being.”
I felt those words were directed at me, assuring me I could do something about this painful condition, and telling me to do it now. I read them again, slowly, understandingly, and then a third time, feeling their power. The word “Christ” stood out to me. I remembered that we had discussed the Christ in our Sunday School classes, and I’d memorized the definition of it from the textbook at that time. The words came back to me now: “Christ. The divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (Science and Health, p. 583).
Christ comes to the flesh. What a wonderful promise! In a flash of inspiration I understood that Christ heals us as we welcome God’s presence into our hearts and minds. And I felt ready to! At that moment, I realized the headache was completely gone. And I never had a recurrence of these headaches.
Christ-healing is a blessing that all who turn to God’s love and welcome it can experience. My life has continued to be blessed by it, and I am so grateful.
Camille MacKusick
Southport, Maine, US
